Google Ads Best Practices for Mobile Apps with a Limited Budget

[Music] can my creative be denied because it's like too ugly like I don't know about too ugly no I don't think so but you know it's funny I did run into something recently hey everyone welcome to another edition of Roi 101 it's me Roman from tangent and today we're going to talk about Google ads and not just Google ads but how uh smaller businesses India developers can use it to their advantage and today I have a special guest to discuss it Ashley Blake from candid consultant Ashley please introduce yourself hi nice to see you Roman I'm Ashley um I think what makes me qualified to talk on this subject is I am a former googler of almost 10 years

and I led the um app ad sales team at Google for about six years where my team supported uh user acquisition teams primarily at mobile game companies um and about four months ago I left and started candid Consulting where I'm advising a lot of developers small developers especially on how they can best execute a UA strategy on both Google ads um for IOS and Android and on other platforms as well yeah exactly so who else uh outside of X googler can tell us more about all of the ins and outs of Google compaigns um I've asked actually to prepare some slides for us uh we'll start from like very Basics like the structure of Google campaigns um and then we'll get to the more advanced stuff uh and the focus will be SMB

business IND developers and so on uh I'll start sharing my screen now boom so this is a structure right actuallyy maybe you can take us through it sure yeah so uh if you're if if you haven't advertised with Google or maybe you've tested on meta before the structure on meta and Google are actually very very similar um on Google you have a campaign which is sort of like the the highest level of things and that's really where you set your bid for the event that you want the campaign to optimize toward and one thing that I notice a lot of smaller developers doing when they initially set up their their campaigns is they sort of just use like the default that Google gives it'll be like app campaign number one and what I really really want people to to start

thinking about is like when you when you start expanding with Google or any platform how are you going to look at the reporting of those things and how do you differentiate between one campaign and another so my recommendation and I think all of the the larger uh UA teams follow a very similar naming convention where they have the app name the event that they're bidding toward right because sometimes you may have a first open campaign other times you may have a you know a retention metric or a goal that you're bidding toward or a purchase so indicating what exactly it is that that campaign is the event that it's bidding on the country that you're targeting and then also the operating system and the reason why I include a lot of these is that it Google makes it really really hard to extract these things in reporting um like you can't pull in necessarily oh what OS is this running on and how does it all line up so that's why I use this specific specific naming convention for the

campaigns um and then the next layer is AD groups and that's really where you have an opportunity to sort of like Define the themes of the types of assets that you're you're putting into the the campaign so I usually encourage people to stick to like three to five themes and it would it can be you know you can think about it as like features of your app that you've created assets for um or the style of the video or or the assets that you've um designed and then that way you really get a chance to see like what's resonating with audiences really strongly so the example I gave here was like with an exercise app maybe your first theme is at home workouts and all the text in there is like you know save money on a gym or you know exercise from your living room blah blah blah and then the the image assets and the videos correspond to that and then the same thing goes for the other two like a meal planning or the ease of use and really

what you'll start to see is that certain ad groups will pick up more like maybe at home workouts will start getting a lot more spend and so then you can kind of understand okay this is what the algorithm likes it sees that it's resonating with audiences and then you can expand on that and and sort of optimize accordingly I'll pause there before I get to ads in case there's any questions you think the audience might be yeah yeah yeah about the campaigns um are there cases where my name can be too long for campaign or if it's too long then I'm doing something wrong because I can you know mix it up I can say like um campaign I can put the home workout in the campaign name or um you know yeah I mean you can but that's really what the ad groups are designed for so um you know if you had one campaign I mean you could but I think having something

that's repeatable so like I think about everything in Excel sheets so like I think about okay how can when I export this how can I very easily you know cut up the data so that I can basically create a pivot table that's how my mind thinks and so that's why I use like the underscore because I I can trim the fields that way um and I like to have them be really really consistent so everything literally lines up in the right cells yeah yeah yeah that's what I noticed we've done the same inlo room so just not only on in Google anywhere where you want to have extra dimensions for your data just include it into the campaign name and then just pivot it yeah exactly um and and Google's reporting isn't great um in a lot of instances so that's why I'm saying like do yourself a favor

do it right from the beginning so that you don't you don't have to go back and like rebuild things later on um does it ever make sense to like restart the same same campaign right so I it's not performance performing as I thought and then I'm starting the same one I don't know just to tweak the algorithms or um to expect something from me I think you're if you asked a Google rep and if you had asked me you know four months ago when I was still there I would say no that that's not what you do but in more like practical experience I have seen that work sometimes where I think the algorithm gets fatigued at a certain point where it's like um this is stale whatever and so actually if you do relaunch it sometimes you may see it like pick up again and then maybe it starts testing and and trying new pockets of inventory so I wouldn't say it's necessarily like a best practice

but if you're in a jam I have seen it actually work awesome got it so this is super insightful uh I have more but they about the creatives and I know the creatives are coming up so I I would like to continue yeah so I think the um as I mentioned there's sort of layers so you have your campaigns and then under that you have ad groups which we talked about and then within your ad groups you have the actual ads the assets that you upload um and then the text assets that you have to write and one thing that uh I encourage people to do again like I've sort of had an eye opening in the past several months of like things that I thought worked and you know from what I had seen for many years versus you know the Practical hands-on experience where things actually do work and so um one thing that I encourage people to do is like play around with some of the stock images and as well as your fully designed IM image assets the sometimes

stock assets work better and hey they're free they're just sitting there for you to select the the tools really really handy um and so that's that's one thing that I encourage people to do when they're uploading new ads and then quick quick question can you clarify what is a stock asset yeah actually within Google ads it's an option where you can just go through and like you know it says select from stock assets they're just the basic you know um yeah I'm trying to think of the the service that they use but ah okay okay okay got it um and so I say play around with those do combination that's another way that you could structure your ad groups is like you could have one ad group just for stock images if you wanted to um the other thing that I see people not doing often is really putting in a lot of different video lengths or duration so within Google you can run anything from

a sixse second ad to a you know whatever 10 minute ad if you wanted to I don't recommend a 10-minute ad but um there's and then like really anything in between and we'll talk about it on the next slide of like what type of inventory you're um you're accessing and so you know I think a lot of times people are like oh just I'll upload a 15 and a 30 and those are definitely the most common but you can play around with a lot of different lengths of videos and then the same with the orientation portrait I think a lot of people again if you've run on meta the majority of their ad units are in portrait mode right in that horizontal horizontal um uh orientation but on Google actually landscape as we'll see on the next slide is like a pretty uh prominent orientation for a lot of the assets that they serve so that's why I say just make sure that you've got ample coverage right um before we go into the

cool creatives I would like to talk about the text ads like is it a thing on mobile at all where I just have the text it's always paired with an image in most cases you might see it's usually paired with your app icon pulled from the the app okay so so it's not truly text text it's just a matter of okay yeah most you might just text but I feel like in most cases you'll see at least a small icon um but the way that Google would categorize that is still considered text got it now now it makes a lot of sense because some of the developers are saying like particular small ones that oh we're doing only text ads and I'm like how is it working right so at least there reason icon so at least something yeah I think one of the other things too

with Google campaigns is that in order for you to create a campaign in an ad group in an ad you actually only have to input text like you don't have to necessarily add in images and videos and so I think for people who are just starting out the inclination is like oh okay I can just add in these texts and that's not that is not the best way to do it you should always have other mediums but Google doesn't require them got it got it got it but it's a best practice right so maybe oh yeah best practice have them all use all the different resolutions and and make sure you've got images and videos all right here's what we have is it is it all of that available ad options on Google this is probably some of them right this is just YouTube video inventory also keep in mind that admob is a huge uh component of Google's full you know um

app inventory and so I don't I don't have many examples of what it looks like on admob but I think what I wanted to call out here is that I've noticed when I'm setting up my clients campaigns in meta you have these great visualizations of like this is where your ad like this is how it will look on a you know um Instagram real or instream or something like that and or in feeds and so it gives you a lot of ideas of like oh okay this is how somebody's going to see it and I noticed with Google you don't it doesn't show you how your ad is going to be seen in a lot of these different formats and so that's why I wanted to call out here is like you have just very different inventory um so if we start at the top or the top left the YouTube instream these tend to be more what I've noticed is more like fully designed ads you can see this one it's like for wix right the website builder and that's

it's a much more like well-designed as opposed to like a ugc Style video um and that can show up you see it in that case it's in landscape mode right it's in that U horizontal position the other one is YouTube bumpers this is a very short very very short ad that runs in front of some the content somebody's about to watch and it's meant to just be like sort of out and it actually can perform really really well for apps um but I'll talk about it in a little bit it's something that you have to opt into and then you have YouTube shorts which are much more akin to like a Tik Tock or a lot of the inventory on meta and you can see here this is an example like this is an actual ugc video right somebody's being followed around using a product they're talking to the camera um and so anyway all of this is meant to show that like there's a a lot of different formats but also there's

certain design Styles work better in these different spots and you don't have the control to say I just want to serve on shorts right so you really have to create a lot of these assets and and see what the algorithm picks up right and um do I have a data breakdown per format when can I see Google reporting not to this degree you can if you have a Google rep you can ask to provide the this breakdown you know and it'll actually show you like YouTube homepage versus YouTube shorts um but it would it's something that's only you can through your Google rep got it um I'm looking at all of those like creatives and videos and I'm asking myself like if I'm an IND developer

like no way I can do all of them um is it like maybe any tips with it com that you work with what do you do to do the yeah do them right one thing that I've noticed is like don't for like some of the ugc content you don't necessarily need to hire somebody that you know is like a content creator you know what I mean like some sort of in influencer I've actually found that the people who are actually work at these companies because they know the product so well if you feel comfortable just recording yourself and having you know following yourself around using your product or whatever it is those can actually perform pretty well and that's at no at no cost right it's just you and your phone basically um and then I I will show you there are some other tools that Google has that allow you to create different videos and image assets but man there's

so many like AI tools these days I've been using one in particular for a bunch of my clients for voiceovers and I'm really impressed with the quality in some cases sometimes not but the quality of production and it's just significantly cheaper and you know more affordable for people to use got it you you mentioned voiceovers like does the audio matter so much the voiceover uh in in general in audio because like my phone is always on mute I'm biased yeah no I'm the same I'm the same which is why I think for videos like captions are really important I noticed that like I I'm one of those weird people that watches TV with the subtitles on like all the time I just and so anyway I think captions are just like a really good way to reinforce it but the voiceover is always good to have I think for those that that aren't

watching it on you got it um yeah let's see some other things that like no one else is doing but they kind of supposed to be doing if they really want to take advantage of the Google ads yeah I think there's a few sort of like hidden gems in Google ads that um unless you have somebody like me or you you figured it out on your own by you know really Di through the weeds within the system you wouldn't know so one thing that I had mentioned were those sixc ads those are non-skippable and they run before a video somebody's about to watch a video that they don't you don't have access to them unless you opt in here under your conversion like in your settings under your conversions it's very hidden you can see it says engaged View and it says you know include non-skippable video ad formats that's what that is and actually once you oped into that if you go to the next

slide uh yeah that one when you go into your ad group and you're uploading videos you'll actually see this little create bumper ads button appear and that only appears once you've opted in on that previous page and then you can actually take an existing video and Google has the um a tool right in there where it will will cut it for you and you can play around with the timing so that you can create Those 6sec ads okay so they're never available by default only if you go to some settings I'll show it again and only then right for the bumper ads specifically yeah so that's a a nice little tip you know I'd say be cautious with this seen some clients where these perform really really well um and for

others I've seen that they can eat up a good amount of budget obviously depends but it's definitely worth trying out a different ad format if you haven't got it and that's only YouTube as an inventory that's just YouTube yeah okay got it good to know that's actually one way to control your placees right yeah for sure I know um I think a lot of people refer to Google as like a big black box right you can't see what's going on you don't know what's running but you know you do have the ability to see some of these things like some of the the more granularities uh in the ad inventory if you opt into things like this yeah yeah nice and what do we have here I think this one's like very relevant for a lot of the SMB Developers again where like maybe you don't have

thousand tens of thousands of dollars to throw at ad creation or video assets and so they're actually are options to um create videos right within Google ads I caution people like these are not going to be the the most premium uh designs you've ever seen but they get the job done they're they're free and so as a tool I encourage people to play around with it if they're struggling to you know come up with enough creative to actually fill all of the inventory slots um of course like everything that I upload is uh moderated right um Can my creative be denied because it's like too ugly like I don't know about too ugly no I don't think so but you know it's funny I did run into something recently where I used a a stock image for one of

my clients right and so these are images that Google is providing in their tool and that asset got flagged by policy and so I'm like why even offer it if if you know that it's not compliant and I understand all the nuances there I know why it was flagged but um yeah so no no promises there but no I mean don't discriminate against ugly yeah yeah yeah yeah good good no but there is no excuse not to try right absolutely because that's what I'm seeing like people are not just trying as ad formats especially with ugc they're like oh ugc I need to find an agency I need to find an influencer I need to yeah so for some reasons there is an association with a great costs and you see yeah exactly and I had a another client that was like in the golf space

they had a golf app and the the founder we told them we were like hey you just need to turn out a bunch of new videos he's like okay I'll go create one right now he's like but it's raining and so he's like I'm gonna have to film it in my house like it's gonna be kind of and it was the strongest performing asset by on but on all platforms it it performed super well and so you know you don't have to be a celebrity you don't have to you know get glamorized like just put something together that's that's better than nothing yep got it yeah um that's it with the slides we'll start wrapping up actually last one uh any parting tips for small developers what else can they do take advantage of Google ads yeah I think um there's the one thing that I I sort of touched on throughout this is like there are so

many costeffective tools out there these days like in the I know AI is like I hate to even use that word but there really are some really incredible tools out there and they allow you to demo them first so that you can get a few assets if you need to um and they're just so much more reasonable I hate to say than like hiring Professionals in some cases um professionals I think are still valuable in a lot of ways but those kinds of tools are really worth exploring and playing around with um to see if they you know they help you and um yeah I think that's like my main tip for now and then just like play around even to today like I've I've spent the past 10 years basically living in Google ads right in there and Google doesn't always announce when like a new feature is launched and so even today I'm finding new you know columns that I can add into the reporting that I think you

know I'm like oh I didn't realize I could see it this way or I could run a report like this and so play around a little bit see what other offerings are there and you might be surprised super thanks a lot Ashley um if you like it give us a like we'll leave all the links to candid Consulting to Ashley LinkedIn profile into the description of this video ask questions actually we'll try to reply to all them um yeah so thanks a lot have a good one