Google Ads: CTC's Complete Playbook

**Tony Chopp** (0:00)
And just like on Meta, we split every campaign by customer time, so acquisition and retention. This is a foundation for understanding incrementality, allocating budget correctly, and reporting honestly about the actual channel performance.
Acquisition and retention matters potentially even more on Google than it does on Meta.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:22)
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**Tony Chopp** (1:11)
Okay. Hello, everyone. Tony Chopp here again with you, VP of Paid Media at Common Thread Collective. Today, we're going to be talking about CTC's canon specific to Google Ads. Google Ads, the king of demand capture. Unlike Meta, which creates demand by interrupting users with creative that generates interest in products they were not actively seeking, Google captures demand that already exists. Something has to prompt a user, an intent, a need, a desire, a problem before Google can deliver your ad. Searches post query, it exists after some sort of impetus. If Meta is the demand creation engine, Google is the demand harvesting engine. But the breakthrough opportunity is to treat Google more like Facebook and shift from pure demand capture on obvious terms to demand interception across a full spectrum of user intent.
The starting point of CTC's canon as it relates to Google Ads is a four quadrant framework that we use to think about every search term that exists. The search terms exist across two dimensions, competition and volume. In the upper end of the quadrant, we have high volume, high competition keywords, things like shoes, pants, makeup. These are commodity keywords and can be difficult to access. On the flip side of the coin, in the lower end of the quadrant, we have low volume, low competition keywords, something like a new entrant, a new key word into the space.
Every search query exists somewhere in this spectrum, and the goal of your Google Ads program should be to expand the search frontier, moving beyond simple product queries into problem and use case queries. For example, a silicone wedding band brand should not only bid on silicone rings, but also on ring evulsion injuries, metal allergies, lost wedding ring replacement, honeymoon planning, manufacturing safety gear. Each query represents a person with a problem that that product specifically solves.
A critical requirement is having dedicated landing pages for each query type. Driving non-product queries to a product detail page creates a disconnect between intent and experience. It's very important with search to match the landing page to the query.
I want to talk a little bit about how Google specifically optimizes. Google's advertising system operates fundamentally differently than Meta. Where Meta evaluates creative to find users, Google evaluates queries to match intent.
The core mechanism is the auction. For every search query, Google runs a real-time auction among eligible advertisers, scoring each on a combination of bid, ad relevance, expected click-through rate and landing page experience. The trifecta of smart bidding plus broad match keyword and responsive search ads is where our modern Google Ads approach has evolved too. Broad match keywords expand the coverage beyond exact and phrase match landing. Google's machine learning find converting queries you would never have discovered manually. For example, manufacturing safety gear for a silicone wedding band ring. Responsive search ads are one product in a series of products that Google has continued to evolve, providing multiple headlines and descriptions, and dynamically assembled based on the best combination for each auction. And automated bidding like TargetROS or CPA lets the system bid based on real-time conversion probability, not fixed manual bids.
Another important concept for CTC's Google philosophy is incrementality adjusted bidding. This is exactly what we do in our meta methodology and what we do for all of our media channels. We do not set ROAS targets or CPA targets based on platform reported performance. Instead, we set them based on incrementality adjusted targets designed to ensure the channel is driving incremental, profitable contribution margin for the business.
There's some really straightforward logic here. For example, if Google brand search has an incrementality factor of 0.3, then a platform reported a 10 to 1 ROAS actually represents a 3 to 1 in incremental return. And your bid targets must reflect this reality, not the inflated platform number. Setting a TROAS based on raw platform data means you're optimizing against fiction. Setting as incrementality adjusted figure means you're optimizing as the actual economic impact of the spend. And this approach does two things for us. Fundamentally, it forces profitability at the true incremental level, and it gives Google the opportunity to scale into or the flexibility to scale into the opportunity. So therefore, when we feel really confident about our bid on brand search, we feel really confident about the incrementality adjusted bid, we're going to scale in and capture as much of that brand search volume as possible.