Practitioner pattern · Ashley Black (Founder of Candid Consulting, an agency that runs and audits Google App Campaigns for app clients)
Give holiday or disaster-season ads their own ad group so you can pause them
Easy to switch off; new groups often get little volume
Mixedpaid-search
What they did
New themes such as holiday creatives go in a dedicated, labeled ad group so they are easy to find and pause. For apps whose traffic spikes with natural disasters, run separate ad groups for hurricanes, tornadoes or avalanche season. New ad groups often get little volume because Google favors the first ad group created, so leave them on longer before judging.
What happened
Easier management; new ad groups often don't get meaningful volume and need to run longer.
- Stage
- optimization
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · The Right (and Wrong) Way to Grow with Google App Campaigns — Ashley Black, Candid Consulting“I work with some apps where natural disasters, for example, that happen, and that's when they see spikes in their traffic, and so we run individual like natural disaster ad groups”
“a lot of times they won't get meaningful volume to really be able to say like, "Was it worth it?" So you might have to leave them on for a little bit longer.”
Related topics
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More from this episode
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- Raise or cut Google ad budgets by at most 20% every 2-3 daysBigger jumps sent the system haywire when the guest tried
- Split each Google app campaign into about 5 ad groups, one per app featureShows which themes Google favors; one ad group alone tells you little
- Upload Google ad videos at 6, 10-15, 20 and 30+ seconds, portrait and landscape
- Use plain stock photos for Google image ads, mostly landscape on AndroidPlain images got more volume than designed ads in her accounts
- Write your own Google ad text lines instead of taking Google's suggestions
- Check where each Google ad actually runs, and treat cheap CPMs as a warningAn audit traced poor traffic to ads running only on display sites
- Pull costly Google ad videos a few at a time over a week, not all at onceKept conversions flowing; all were removed after a week
- Refresh tired Google ads by changing a single wordGuest says even removing one word makes Google re-test the ad
- Copy a Google campaign that stopped growing to make Google test it againSometimes unlocks more spend; not a Google best practice
- Tell Google to find trial starts, not paid subscribers
- Try Google's return-on-ad-spend bidding for a short test, but stay skepticalWorked for about half of subscription apps
- Spend enough to get a Google rep, then ask them for specific data