PAID MEDIA MONTHLY - A Brand New Series by Exposure Ninja

[Music] Hello and welcome to Paid Media Monthly, a brand new series by Exposure Ninja where we're going to be covering the latest trends, news, and effective paid search and paid social advertising campaigns. I'm joined by Rebecca Pilton, who's our head of paid media, and I am Dale Davies, the head of marketing at Exposure Ninja as well. How you doing, Rebecca? I'm good, thanks. How are you? Pretty good. Really excited to get started with this series. So, as I said, it's a whole brand new thing. Yeah. Yeah, I'm really excited. Looking forward to talking more PPC related things and yeah, getting to grips on new topics and changes that are coming. Um, so we could look at um Christmas is a good time. Sorry. Sorry. Um, Christmas. I don't know if you can tell, but my microphone is all cutting out and stuff. Sorry about this. Yeah. Are you back? I think so. This has never happened before. My my microphone is all like messed up. Sorry about that, everyone. It's fine. we could jump straight in to talk about like the main topic um which is I wanted to talk about Christmas which is a little late in the marketing PPC world but um we were in October and we're already prepping for Christmas here at for our clients and um for our clients campaigns but it's really important to um make sure we get things right for um the Christmas period because as you all know It's the season of sales day. Also, we've got Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day, and budgets will skyrocket in PPC land. What a terrifying thought. I know. I know. So, we are like your ad spend could in theory double. Um, so what I'd like to talk about today is how we can best use AI to execute strong campaigns this holiday season and um talk about like even though we're using AI, why the human touch still matters and why it's very important in campaigns. Magic. Let's let's dive into that a bit more then please. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, it's really, so, as I've said, budgets are going to skyrocket. So, it's really, really important to plan your, um, media budget, make sure your campaigns are tight, and you've got, um, got your creatives aligned, which leads me on to like how we can use AI to like budgets are going to double. So that if you don't have a huge budget in PPC, you are going to have to think smartly about how you can get in front of your competitors and how you can win auction rankings. Um, so as you've probably heard and seen recently, um, Pmax, although Pmax is quite old now, but there's been some changes to PMAX campaigns and AIAX for search has come on the scene and we can use like longtailed keywords and targeting to be able to get in front of more people at a cheaper cost as well. So, the more we niche in, the higher our cost per pay clicks go. But with the new tech that we've got in Google Ads, it means that we can um get in front of more people but more relevant people as well, which is really important. For those who sorry uh Rebecca, for those who aren't really aware, like what do you mean by news of tech? Can you expand a little bit on that? Sorry. Yeah. So Aimax for search and pmax they work on signals and machine learning. So how they work is you will be given um you we will give the campaigns like prompts. So we'll give search terms instead of keywords that we want to target. We'll give audience signals and we'll also give um customer data as well. So, if you've got a CRM or a client list, we can um plug that in to PMAX and we can say we want to go after people that look like our ideal customer. And how that works is um it will well particularly AIAX for search. It will suggest search terms and landing pages and it will even um alter the ad copy to make the ads more relevant for your user which is how you will get a cheaper cost per click this holiday season as well. So that's quite new piece of um kit that we've got in Google ads um and it's just rolled out. I think most people have this now. this should be fully rolled out. Amazing. So you mentioned earlier about like uh how to make like a really strong campaign is so essential for this period of time. How do you go about doing so? Yeah. So again, we want to make sure we've got our targeting as tight as we can with what I've just explained about, you know, using customer lists, make sure we've got search themes, make sure we've got like really good quality landing pages as well. Um I think it can go underrated like how much um your landing page alters the customer experience and helps increase your conversion rate from ads as well. So as part of the quality score that we get um the landing page experience is very important because that feeds into your quality score which is the metric that allows us to get the cheaper cost per click in Google ads. So using the new tech and AI um within Google ads it will be reading from your landing page. So, it's really important that the keywords that are on your landing page are the same keywords or search themes that you're using in your PPC campaigns as well. So, that's what we mean by having like a really tight nick campaign. We've got the structure and the landing page and they're feeding nicely into one another. And then I've mentioned that you know the um aimax and pmats can um they can use um functionality within Google to write your ad copy as well. So this is when we can use AI to the advantage where we're matching exactly what people are searching for on Google. So say somebody's looking for a red jumper with long sleeves. that might be the keyword that they type into Google and we can dynamically add that into the ad copy as well. So making sure your ad copy is very personalized, it matches your keyword and matches what people are searching for on Google as well. So all the combination of all these things will allow you to get the most out of your budget. um especially when we know advertisers are going to be all over Google, all over paid social channels as well and it's going to be really hard to cut through that noise. So, it's really important that you have like all these um you go through all these steps to make sure you've got a really good quality score within your campaigns. You mentioned earlier also that it's really important that you've got like that human touch in there too. Can I ask you to expand on that whilst I restart and try and get my tech issue with it? No worries. So yeah, it is still very important to have the human touch within your campaigns. So what I mean by that is um just don't rely on LLM. So, LLMs, Chat, GPT, Gemini, all those kind of things just to write your ad copy because if everybody else is doing that, all your ads copy is going to look pretty generic. So, it's okay to use AI as like kind of an assistant, but we don't want it to um replace, you know, that human touch, that personalization that we get through our creative and through our ad copy. So, um, with Pmax, it's not just all about ad copy. We've got video and we've got images on there as well. So, it's good to experiment with that. But when we are specifically writing ad copy for search ads like AIAX for search, we want to make sure that yeah, we've got a human touch, a human voice. We're expanding on those USPS. Those call to actions are really strong and um like a problem solution type copy. You don't want to be reliant on AI solely. I I think it's good to test, but solely to be writing that ad copy because it's going to look like everybody else's ad copy. That makes total sense. Any final uh points you want to share on this before we move on to the latest news? Um well actually this ties quite nicely into the latest news. So, um, with making sure we've got that human touch within the ad copy, um, that leads us on to Google's new ad AI tool, which, um, is for a AI imax for search, which allows you to make sure that certain um, like phrases and buzzwords are not being included in your ad copy in the instances where AI is using, you know, your landing page. page to pull your keywords and to write your ad copy for you. So, that's really new and I'm really excited to test that and I think that will be quite revolutionary in Pmax and AIMAX as well. What I'm particularly love about the paid media team that you uh lead is just how much you dive into every kind of new development and get testing like on the go as soon as possible. So it doesn't even have to it's just like rumored that this thing is coming. You're like right test it out. I want to see how it works. Yeah. Yeah. So I've seen um it's rolling out this quarter. So it it's not something we've got access to yet and it will be rolled out like add account at a time like they have done with previous new features. Um, but what I really like about this is it still allows you to take advantage of that machine learning and to get that broader reach, but still have control over the messaging because this is a lot of feedback that we get from um clients, new clients, people that we do sales reviews for. They're like, I really don't like Pmax. I don't like AIAX for search. It just it gets me spammy leads. It it says the wrong thing. It sends people to the wrong landing page. It's got too much control over what it's where it's sending people and we don't have enough levers in the background to pull. Um so some people can be really put off by it. Now, this new feature will allow us as advertisers to have more control over what is being um put out there with your brand name. So, for example, if you have um like a luxury product, so we have a lovely brand that we work with and they have um luxury baby products. So, we want to always avoid saying discount or cheap alongside their luxury products. Number one, because they're not discounted or cheap, and number two, because it's just not that tone of voice of the brand either. So, within these settings, you can actually it's it's kind of like um instructions and you write them as though I would be writing them to you, Dale. like do not use the word cheap or discounted in relation to these products or services. And then you enter and then you can add lots of different um instructions and prompts like that using normal language to um to formulate the ad copies to so to stop it from you know mentioning certain things that you don't want to mention alongside your brand products or service. So yeah, I think that will be quite revolutionary. I'm quite excited to use that over this next quarter. I suppose it does pose a question of just how much work is a P PC specialist or pay media specialist doing if you're asking it to not do stuff or it you're putting more of like some parts of the job role into the hands of the AI. What should um in-house teams or people with agencies be asking of their paid media agency or paid media team since some of this stuff is being picked up by AI in some cases? Yeah, I think it's that's a really good question actually and this is something that we get asked um from time to time and it's like if you're using Pmax, what is it that you're doing in the background? So where we do a lot of um things behind the scenes that you don't normally see happening in the ad account. So we'll do our normal optimizations that you would expect. So we'll be doing SQRs and adding to negative lists and all those kind of things. AI is refreshing our ad copy for us. AI is reaching different audiences. What we are doing is we're setting up more tests in the account and we're interpreting data a lot more as well. So our role is becoming more of an an anal an analyst more and more as we using more of this machine learning more AI tech um and we are interpreting what that means for your ads. So AI could show us a whole new audience that we've never even thought about targeting. It's not come up on keyword research. It's not in the client's persona, but we can see from the data that a like this whole new audience are clicking on your ads and converting. So then we would devise a whole strategy around this new audience. So we might want to build a new campaign out. We might want to do a test campaign. We might want to create videos that speak to this particular audience. So that would be a big part of the role, creating videos and um we'd still want to test human ad copy alongside the AI ad copy as well. And then just pivoting and strategizing a lot from whatever it is that the data is telling us from um on a daily basis. Uh I'm not entirely sure if you're going to be able to hear me or not because it's now telling me my microphone isn't even connected. This is wild. I've been doing this live streaming podcasting for like five years and this is the first time this has really gone off the rails like this. So, sorry about that. Um, so that was the latest news, correct? Yes. Yes, that we can hear you when that's the latest news with Dale. In that case, can I ask you to move us on to the ad of the week part of the series whilst I do a complete computer reset? And if I can, I'll try and add your screen on uh share now if that's okay. I'll do that and I will try my best to come back. If not, it's all in your hands. I'll see you in a little while. No pressure. No worries. Oh dear. So, um yep, while Dale is restarting his computer, we will look at um Ber. Ber I thought would be a really good brand to have a look at from paid ads because as you can see they have quite a lot of um ads. So what I'm looking at here is this is the Google Ads transparency center and anybody can you know go to this website put a brand name in and what will happen is all the ads that are running and maybe some previous ads that I've run in the past will you know show like this screen here. So these are all booper's ads. Um Ber is a brand it's a healthare brand they do healthcare insurance. they do dentistry, you know, private health care insurance, that kind of thing. So, they've you would expect them to have quite a large ad budget, which means they'll have lots of ads that we can look at and dissect. So, as you can see from um my screen here, um we've got lots of different ad formats from Ber, which is really good to see. So, we've got search ads. This here is a video. This is a display ad. And this is another display ad. And as I'm scrolling down, we will see some map listings. So the this will be a private dentistry here. And then we've got some of the listings. Um, another one that's a dentist. But what I thought was really interesting of these ads as well is we can see that um we've got certain locations that are flagging up. Um, so this shows that BER is using um dynamic locations within their ad as well, which is really, really positive because if you're in a particular location and you're looking for private health care or a private dentist, you're going to want places to show up um in your local area. So again, by having that dynamic location within the ad copy, you're more likely to click on that ad. So, if it says, you know, um, which one have we just gone past there? Booper Dental Care Golston. If you're in Goldston, you're more likely to click on that ad than one that doesn't have your area in the ad copy. Um, what is worth noticing about this ad copy though is that it is not the most creative, which is quite surprising because if I scroll up to the top of the page, um, we can see much stronger ad copy here. So, we can see that, you know, they've got the brand name there, the product. So, it's BER Health Insurance, and a little explainer of what it is, Private Health Insurance UK. And then underneath here we can see like the um descriptions. So it's physical health, mental health, uh dental care, um 247 ber helpline, exclusive member benefits. So there's all things in there that would attract you to this ad and to click on this ad. Um this one here as well. Um choose from five health checks, physical and mental support. Um, we've got some more like um site links and descriptions here as well, which tells you, you know, what it is that they do um and what features they offer. So, um that this one here is quite an anomaly and not a very very strong piece of ad copy compared to the other ones that we can see here. Um so that's quite surprising. If I take you over to Semrush and hopefully this will work while Dale is away. Let's share this tab instead and see if this works. Yep, that is working. So yeah, if I take you to this um this window, this is Semrush and we've use Semrush to look at particularly the search ads that Boo running. So while the ads transparency tool is really good to look at, you know, different types of ads, um this um this advertising research here will show us the ads that are running, the keywords that trigger the ads and you know volume, cost per click, and um other trends and bits that we can download. That's just cut off the screen there. So looking at this ad copy compared to the ones that we can see in the transparency tool, this is much stronger ad copy. We can see that they are using USPS like fivestar rated by def facto. Um they are um pointing out what the product is is for the whole you. So I would assume that means covered from head to toe. 365 days of well-being advice. So, these are really nice um ad variations that are written with USPS. They've got call to actions. Um the only thing I would say is that a lot of these ads or a lot of booper competitors will probably use the same USPS. So, things like fivestar rated by defacto, I'm sure another brand will be using that. um and get a quote for our comprehensive health care. Again, it's very um it's very generic still and it it is kind of lacking a personalized touch. I like to see ad copy with questions in there. So tired of waiting on the phone like like those kind of things like prompting a question, tired of waiting in a queue, tired of not being seen by your doctor, more like questions to prompt an answer from the person that's searching as well. I think it's very important to see in ad copy. Dale, you're back. I'm physically here. I just don't know if the the virtual representation of me is actually working properly. I've restarted fully and everything is exactly how it was beforehand. So, I'm going to assume it's the software and not me personally. Okay. But I've been watching along on my phone and you did a cracking job of of it so far. Um I'm just curious with this particular campaign, how does the ad translate through to the actual pages themselves? Are the pages themselves in line with the kind of recommendations that you make? Yeah. Yeah. So, I'm not going to click through to them now. Um, but they are when I'm clicking through, the landing pages are what I would expect from the ads. So, when we're looking at dentistry, I get a dentistry ad. When we're looking at just generic family insurance, I get a family insurance ad as well. Um, I don't see any mention of free children in the insurance here, which would be like a key thing I would point out in these ad copies because with ber plans, family plans, the kids are free. Um, so yeah, there they are good ads and they are strong ads, but I still think there's a lot more that can be done to make them stand out a little bit more from the competitors. Because all one of the things I'm always most impressed with with the campaigns that your team put together when we put them forward for awards and just kind of celebrating like you know the campaign wins that we've earned for our clients is that how it joins up with the rest of the marketing. So for example like the landing page um has such importance because it feeds into keyword selection for stuff of performance max and so on but then it needs to hook up with you know a solid call to action which then you know turns into good marketing to sales handover or nurturing or email kind of stuff. So um I know your team is particularly good at making sure that that all joins up together. And I suppose is that part of your checklist when going through and auditing campaigns is to see is it not just the front end with the ad, is it the back end too? Yeah. Yeah. So when we're running the audits, we look at the landing page as you've just said, making sure that the keywords that so the back end, the keywords that we're targeting from the campaign are present on the landing page and what is being um pushed out in the ad copy is similar to what is on the landing page that you're clicking through to. as well. Um, you will get a landing page score within Google Ads which makes the overall quality score up as well. So, that is something that we look at whether you're hitting your expected click-through rate, your ad relevance is good, your ad score is good, and your landing page experience is good as well. Um, so they form part of our audit and it's what we use as well to um like quality QC, quality control our own accounts. So once we've set our accounts up and they start running um say it's a brand new account or a brand new service so we've we've got no previous data to go off. These are the metrics that we're looking at to make sure that the campaigns are on track and that they're doing well and that we're going to beat competitors in the market because we've had a few clients that have come to us and their competitors have a larger budget than what they do. And we've still managed to get the top position in the auction because we've pulled these levers where the landing page copy, the ad copy, and the keywords are all aligned nicely. And there's that smooth um user experience from ad to landing page as well, which kind of ties back to your earlier point of the the human touch. Absolutely. Oh, I think you've gone again, Dale. I just wanted to um point out as well while we're on this page um the keywords that you can see that are triggering for the Is this the worst podcast you've done? Oh dear. Bear with us everyone. Am I back? You are back. Amazing. Oh dear. Um anyway, back to um the ads. As you can see from this page, um you can see the keywords that are triggering the ads. So, we can see that um booper health assessment is is trigger is the keyword that's triggering this particular ad that I'm looking at now. Um and I've noticed when we go across, if I click this one as well. So, this is the health insurance one. And we can see all the keywords. Booper booper booper booper booper health insurance booper again. So these are all fairly different services. So we've got health assessment two health insuranceances and then I think this is just a generic brand ad. So I would expect to see ber on the brand campaign but we're seeing a heavy reliance on brand terms for this ad. um which you shouldn't be you shouldn't have you should have a separate campaign for brand and then your services you should not be triggering for brand terms on your services campaigns because this is just um not the best use of budget to have like health a health assessment campaign showing for ber keywords because the you're going to always come up for ber with the SEO efforts that you're doing anyway. So, um we wouldn't we wouldn't need to advertise like you know ber health assessment, ber health insurance. We should make sure we're separating those out so that we can see people who have already been aware of the brand are going to come in through the brand campaign and people that don't necessarily know about BER or they may be looking for a competitor or they're in their research phase. They're not ready to make action yet. They're just looking for somebody who does health insurance. They're looking for somebody who does health assessments and um we want to appear without the brand term. We don't we don't need to be spending money on those brand terms in this case. Um so yeah, that would be my main focus if I got my hands on this campaign. I would be segmenting out the brand terms from the service terms and that would probably look like a little bit of an account restructure um for these That looks like a really wise move uh um I'm going to take us on to the last uh section of our uh live stream podcast, whatever you want to call it, which is question of the week. So, if you'd like to send us a question, you can do you can go to exposure.ninja ninja/pm that's for paid media monthly and you'll be able to submit a audio question which will then play uh in our next live stream which will be in November. So the question I've got here isn't from a particular person that I know the name of, but it is for uh it is from a recent conference that our CEO Charlie Martin went to and they had this question come through and I want to put it to you Rebecca which is um chat GBC has just added instant checkout where people can buy products directly through chat GPT without necessarily having to leave the platform. Should we see any or should we expect anything similar to Google shopping ads within chat GPT as part of this anytime soon? Yeah, I I mean we know that there's nothing here at the moment. There's no chat GPT shopping. There's no um there's no other platform shopping within the AI sphere. But we do it does feel as though it is moving in that direction. And you know, we've got we've got checkout within chat GPT. Um, we've got agent mode. People can browse for certain products and services and get recommendations. So, it feels very natural that the next move would be to add some kind of paid platform in there, some advertiser platform that we can as advertisers take advantage of. It it is speculation at the moment. um chat GPT have have said there's nothing in the works at the minute. Um but that there's nothing available at the minute, but I would expect to see in 2026 chat GPT ads being launched. Um I don't think we're very far away. I think they're just keeping it under wraps. Yeah. And I was looking earlier um at what the status is of the team that they're building out for this. It looks like they're still hiring roles for some of this functionality that they, you know, they're going very slow about this, but maybe kind of in a slow and steady way rather than just trying to race out any, you know, anything that they can anytime soon. But it seems like an inevitability. Yeah. Yeah, it does. And it would be um it'd be silly not to do it, wouldn't it? the amount of searches that come through the AI overviews and and chat GPT and um the other AI platforms as well. It's it's we see it it it growing more and more and taking away from traditional search a little bit more. Um, so it it's inevitable and it it it works so well with how people search because people are starting to search with longer queries and giving more direction um so that you know they're not having to sift through pages on Google looking for exactly what it is that they're wanting to see um and getting recommendations. So I cannot wait for for this to launch. I think it would be really really smart move and like you say it looks like they're hiring right now. So yeah, I I don't think there's a rush to market but yeah, I'm really looking forward to seeing this and I reckon 2026 definitely see something. Yeah. Well, if you're really curious on how instant checkout works on chatbt, you can come back to our YouTube channel channel, youtube.com/exposing ninja, where we'll have a new video out with our founders in Camera Kitchen, talking all about how it works and a few of his predictions for what this means uh for the future, but also what you should be doing in the immediate uh you know, immediate future. Um, if you do want to submit a question to us, you can go to exposure.ninja/pm and we'll use that next month. And if you are looking to get your questions answered before then you can head over to exposioninja.com and you can have a look through some of our useful resources like blogs and podcasts and so on. But if you want to get us questions directly answered by Rebecca and the team, you can go to exposioninja.com/cont. Send us a message. We'll do our best to support you. Any final thoughts you want to share with everyone before we close up for our first and somewhat jittery uh first episode? Um yeah, I would just say don't be put off um this quarter with um promotions and sales and increased ad spends. Make sure you have um a tight-knit campaign, test AI, and make sure to use still human human touches within your campaigns as well. It's all about getting a good quality score and you can you can beat competitors with larger budgets than yourself. So that would be my main takeaway today. Okay, it's just spurred a question, an extra question. Is it kind of too late for companies to be setting up uh ready for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, stuff like that? Um if you're quick, you if you're quick, um you Yeah, it is a little it is a little late to be thinking of like big campaigns such as maybe video campaigns. Um, but for search and shopping, um, get planning those now. Get writing your ad copy, structure your accounts, get all your data in your accounts, do your research, and you've got plenty of time to set up search campaigns and shopping campaigns before you know the I think it's the last week of November, Black Friday, isn't it? So, you've still got a few weeks. Um, if you have a really good video editor that can turn around in no time, then maybe you've got time to write some briefs as well. Um, but yeah, we normally start planning like August, September for our clients, but it's not too late. Fair enough. Brilliant. Well, thanks everyone for joining us for this month's paid media monthly and we'll see you all back in November. Take care. Bye. Bye.