Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 138 - Cutting Edge Google Ads

If you follow this podcast every week, you are really going to enjoy what I have in store for you today. If this is your first time tuning into Inside Google Ads, I think you'll still like it, but you should know this is going to be different than most of my episodes. 

You see, over the next 30 days, I have four different conference speaking engagements coming up. Two in Europe where I'm delivering four different talks and then two in my hometown of Toronto where I'm delivering two different talks. So that is six different talks in 30 days across three different countries, and two different continents. 

And as I'm recording this episode right now, I'm putting all these talks together. And part of putting together a great conference talk is ensuring that I am bringing something new and exciting and different. Otherwise, why should you get up off your butt and come see me and all the other great speakers in person?

So today, as I'm working through these presentations and putting them together, I wanted to record a special episode where I actually share a new strategy, tactic, story, something I've never shared before online publicly that's going to be going into one of my upcoming talks so that together we can learn something new. 

And frankly get a chance to practice talking about this stuff and then maybe you'll want to come see me in person in Germany, in Italy or in Canada. 

I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working for big brands at Google and now I work for you.

This is Inside Google Ads, Episode 138: Cutting Edge Google Ads.

First up is SMX Advanced Berlin from September 29th to October 1st, 2026.

I'm going to be speaking at the conference and delivering a full day workshop the day after the conference. So, what I'm speaking about at the conference is advanced bidding in Google Ads. I'm probably going to come up with a sexier title once I finish putting this talk together.

And I will admit, when I chose this topic a year ago, I thought that my second book about bidding was going to have come out by now. And yes, I know you're asking, I am working on it. I'm working on it. I'm getting close to the end, but I'm not finished with that book yet. So, it makes it a little trickier for me to decide what to do this one about.

The thing I want to share with you now is something that's been coming up with a lot of different clients, which is for lead generation. How your conversion actions work with your bid strategy. The general advice you'll get from Google is to only have one conversion goal per campaign. Remember, conversion goal and conversion action, not the same thing. For example, you could have multiple different phone call actions all under one phone call goal. 

Check out Episode 115 of this podcast for more about setting the right conversion strategy. 

So anyway, in lead gen, usually we're tracking some kind of contact first, like a phone call, a form fill, and then some kind of marketing-qualified lead, and then some kind of sales-qualified lead, and then some kind of closed-won deal. And in those scenarios, I found myself recommending recently that clients optimize towards multiple goals at a time.

For example, including leads, qualified leads, sales-qualified leads, and closed-won deals all in the conversions column to start. Why? Well, these are generally either small-budget, or maybe not small-budget but really expensive industries. Therefore, they are low conversion volume clients. In a given month maybe they get two or three closed-won deals, which means maybe they get six or seven sales-qualified leads. So even putting both of those together, that's still only 10 conversions a month. And then if we include the step before that, maybe now we're at, I don't know, 20 qualified leads.

So when we start, usually we're starting on Maximize Conversions, and I want to include all of the different stages to feed the bidding as much as possible. Because remember, although the thing we want is obviously the deal or at least the qualified lead, if someone doesn't even contact us, they're 100% never becoming a deal. So I like to start with all of these included as primary in the campaign on Maximize Conversions. 

The first thing I want to achieve is getting the raw leads out of there because we know, especially in places like PMax, that it's susceptible to a lot of spam. So now we're at a place where you're optimizing for qualified leads and everything that comes after it, all of those included. 

Does that mean that you're double, triple, or even quadruple counting conversions? 

Yes, at this point it does. But that is by design. I think of this kind of like using value-based bidding without actually using value-based bidding. Because if someone becomes a customer they are three to four times more valuable than someone who maybe becomes a qualified lead, but then doesn't continue beyond that. So, we want that customer to count more than the person who doesn't make it that far down the funnel.

At this point, once we have enough conversions—which is usually about 30 to 50 conversions a month, but if we can't do that, I want at least 30 to 50 total conversions over two to three months—we want to get to Target CPA. That's the key because once we're on Target CPA, our directions to Google are no longer "spend my money in order to get me as many conversions as possible." Instead, it's "hit this level of efficiency and if you can do so, then spend my money." 

Now, once we're on Target CPA, optimizing for qualified, sales-qualified, closed-won, whatever happens after that, now we're working to try to get enough conversion data to keep moving further down the funnel. Meaning once we have enough of the sales-qualified leads and the closed-won deals happening—maybe we're getting to about 25 to 30 of those a month—now we make the first step, qualified lead, secondary. It doesn't count anymore. You have to increase your Target CPA to match, of course, because now we have less conversion data. And now we're only optimizing towards sales-qualified leads and closed-won deals. And now we'll feel more comfortable potentially scaling that budget, broadening keyword sets or audiences, etc., because we're really optimizing for further-in-the-funnel actions.

And by the way, this can repeat itself again. Let's say we're scaling and now we get to the point where we're getting 25 to 30 closed-won deals a month from Google Ads. That means we can now take the sales-qualified lead, demote it to secondary, only optimize for closed-won, increase the Target CPA accordingly, and keep going. 

This is something that has come up for me with a variety of lead gen clients across different industries. Definitely going to be incorporating that into my advanced bidding talk. And I hope that little sneak peek today made sense and was fun for you.

Now, the second thing I'm presenting at SMX Advanced Berlin is a full-day workshop called 'Inside Google Ads Beyond Search.' I've presented a version of this workshop three times before for SMX Masterclass. That was a six-hour online workshop. Hundreds of people have taken it and given really great reviews, so now I'm bringing it in person for the first time. I think I'm actually teaching for eight hours, which is wild! You might think the hardest part of teaching that long is, you know, having to go to the bathroom or having my voice hurt—yes, that stuff is all true—but mentally being able to be 'on' and moderating the energy of the room when it's been virtual has been the hardest part, and I'm anticipating that might get even more challenging in person. I'm also really looking forward to having that direct, live feedback because when I've presented this online, I don't get to see the faces of anyone I'm presenting to. It is like presenting to a wall. 

In this workshop, we cover literally everything in Google Ads beyond Search. We dive deep into bidding, audiences, and content targeting, and then we dive deep into Performance Max, Demand Gen, and Video, really going into setup tips, creative, optimization, and all that stuff. Plus, I'm also going to be bringing in interactive components, because this will be live in the room doing case studies, examples, and things like that.

Now, I've actually given you a preview of this before. Episode 109 of this podcast is about optimizing PMax and is actually a straight clip from one of my SMX masterclasses. So, I just want to add a few little nuances that have changed since then that you may not be aware of in PMax campaigns.

First, a lot of updates have happened to campaign settings around audiences. You can now exclude certain basic demographics from PMax campaigns by age and household income. That's pretty new. And then next, there's this "your data exclusions" thing in PMax, which lets you exclude certain retargeting segments and certain "your data" segments if you want to. It's pretty unusual because when you make any changes in a PMax campaign within the audience signal, those are just signals. 

For example, you can choose basic demographics there but that’s just a signal. So, if you uncheck 18-24 in your PMax audience signal, that means you're just giving Google the signal that you don't want to target 18-24 year-olds then you absolutely could end up showing ads to 18-24 year-olds and if PMax determines that that demographic meets your goals, it'll keep doing so. 

Whereas, in the PMax campaign settings, if you exclude 18-24-year-olds, that's true targeting, or rather, that's true exclusion. So now your campaign will not show to 18-24-year-olds at all, and same for the household targeting (which, by the way, be very cautious when you use that inferred data, limited availability, etc.). And then for the "your data" segments: if you exclude them in the campaign settings, those are genuine exclusions. So, that's a little update there to optimizing PMax. 

In this workshop, I'm especially excited to add in even more YouTube content. There have been some really interesting YouTube case studies that have come up, and I'm definitely going to share some of those in the podcast after these speaking engagements. 

So, if you'd like to join me in Berlin for SMX Advanced Berlin, the link to buy tickets is in the episode description. You can also find it on my website at jyll.ca/speaker. That's J-Y-L-L dot C-A slash speaker.

Next up is a fun one for me. I will be speaking at SEO IRL in Toronto, Canada, October 6th to 7th, 2026. This is an SEO conference I've attended the last two years, learned so much, and had a great experience. So, I pitched the organizer and said, "Hey, I do Google Ads. You know, I'd love to talk about this." And he agreed. So I'm getting to be the Google Ads speaker at an SEO conference in my hometown where I currently live, Toronto. I'm really excited about that. I'm going to be speaking about Google Ads strategies every SEO needs to steal.

Again, I'm working on this presentation right now, but the idea for this actually came when I was sitting in the audience at SEO IRL last year, taking a lot of notes from different speakers. There were a lot of things that would come up where I'd put a little star in my notes, like, "Hey, this connects to a Google Ads concept," or "Hey, I wish we were talking about how to take that and bring it into Google Ads." So, I'm going to share one example of that here with you right now. 

YouTube is actually the world's second-largest search engine. So even from an SEO perspective, SEOs should be thinking about how to optimize to increase their visibility on YouTube. What they, and perhaps you, may not be thinking about is how ads can complement that strategy. 

For example, in a Video campaign, not Demand Gen but a Video campaign, you can add custom search terms. You might think, "Custom search terms, does that mean what people are searching for on YouTube?" Yes, but it also lives under the audience section in a Video campaign. 

Think about that. We know, or maybe you don't know and are just learning, that in a Video campaign, you have audience targeting and content targeting. Audience targeting is targeting someone based on who they are. I wrote a whole book about it; it's an international bestseller! 

Content targeting is targeting someone based on the content they're currently consuming. Content targeting covers keywords, topics, and placements—putting your ads on specific YouTube videos or content related to email marketing, etc. 

Audience targeting is showing ads to people who are parents or in-market for shoes, regardless of what content they're currently watching. Under audience targeting, we have custom search terms in a Video campaign, which shows ads to people based on their search activity. That means their search activity on YouTube, Google Maps, and other Google properties.

Under content targeting, we have keywords. If you add keywords to a YouTube campaign, Google says, “Keywords can trigger your ad to show when people view related content on YouTube websites or apps.”

Funny enough, when you add keywords to a Search campaign, that tells Google the kinds of searches you want to advertise on. If you add search themes to a PMax campaign, that also tells Google the kinds of searches you want to advertise on. But if you add keywords to a YouTube campaign, that doesn't actually do anything search-related. It relates to keywords associated with the content. If you want to be advertising on certain kinds of searches on YouTube, the way to do that is through custom search terms in audience targeting.

And so how that relates to SEO is of course there are certain keywords or terms that SEOs work really hard to increase their visibility on or their clients’ visibility on. And there are a variety of different audience and content targeting ways to complement that in YouTube. 

For example, maybe you take the keywords that you want to be showing up for organically, but you're not quite doing it yet. One thing of course is to supplement that with Search ads, but supplementing that with YouTube advertising could actually be super powerful, much more affordable. And again, a variety of ways to think about how you might do that through audience targeting version versus content targeting version.

As you can probably tell, I'm still working through this in my head right now. But that's a sneak peek of what I will be talking about at SEO IRL in Toronto October 6th to 7th, 2026. You can buy your tickets now. The link to SEO IRL is in the episode description, and of course, you can also find it on my website at jyll.ca/speaker. That's J-Y-L-L dot C-A slash speaker.

Next up is AdWorld Experience. This is a conference in Bologna, Italy. I know, I'm fortunate, I've actually been to Bologna before. Yes, the food really is that delicious. And this conference is October 15th to 16th, 2026. You can join us in person, and I know that the organizer also offers online streaming tickets as well if travel to Italy is just not something that you can swing in your budget or schedule right now.

At AdWorld Experience, I will be delivering a talk, a brand new one called "Unconventional Optimization Techniques for Experienced Marketers." Woo. And then I'll also be sharing a case study on day two. My case study is called "When High CPCs Are a Good Thing." 

So let's start with these unconventional optimization techniques. I've been working with Jyllbot, my own AI chatbot that I created for my Inside Google Ads course members to work through my materials and figure out what some of the most unique things I've talked about are. And then I've also been taking the transcripts of a lot of my Google Ads coaching calls and feeding those into NotebookLM, which is another great AI tool from Google, to try to pull out some of the unique things I've been talking about.

So some of my unconventional optimization techniques are things you've heard me talk about on this podcast before. 

For example, non-linear targeting for restricted or expensive niches. I just did Episode 135 of this podcast all about that if you'd like a refresher. Or my analogy of buying the haystack in B2B so that you get all the needles you want, along with a bunch of useless hay. I dove into that in Episode 110 of this podcast, which is your B2B Google Ads master class.

Today, I want to share one of the most unconventional optimization techniques I've learned. I want to give full credit where credit is due. This is something I picked up from Andrew Lolk, who has an excellent YouTube channel. I'll put the link to it in this episode description as well. 

And here’s the optimization…are you ready? 

Remove all your negative keywords. 

I know what you're thinking: "What the heck? Why would I want to do that? I've spent years building up my negative keywords!" 

That's exactly the point. In the world of control, Exact Match keywords, and manual bidding, negatives were absolutely needed. But Andrew really helped me shift my perspective on why that's not really the case anymore. 

I'm going to give you a concrete example from one of my own Google Ads coaching clients, an e-commerce business owner. When I started working with them, they had a few Shopping campaigns live. As many people do when running Shopping campaigns, they were very liberal with their negative keywords. If a search term came in that wasn't exactly what they sold or offered it went to a negative. As a result, they built up hundreds, if not thousands, of negatives over the years. 

As we looked at performance and ways to potentially decrease CPC and increase ROAS, which is the end goal, of course, I suggested, "What if we remove your negative keywords?" 

When I looked through them, sure, some were blatantly unrelated to what they sell, but that just told me it was a feed optimization issue. Google didn't have a good enough understanding of what the products were, which is why they were showing up in those unrelated searches. 

Conversely, there were some things marked as negatives that I didn't think should be. For example, they're an independent small business in a space dominated by a big 300-pound gorilla in their space. They had a negative on anything that included the brand name of that 300-pound gorilla. I said, "Why would you exclude that? You sell the same products, and there might be situations where someone is interested in exploring your products and buying from you instead." 

We don't know what we don't know, so I said, "Let's advertise on that and let Smart Bidding and our conversion tracking let Google know when it makes sense to advertise on those competitor queries." 

Fast forward: searches that included that competitor name became some of their highest-volume, but also highest-converting queries.

Another example, and I don't want to reveal their industry so let's pretend they sell canned soft drinks. They had a ton of searches for "bottled soft drinks" - "soda," "pop,” whatever word you prefer. They had excluded anyone searching for a "bottled soft drink." While I get that you sell “canned soft drinks,” those are pretty much the same thing and people who are searching for the bottle would absolutely take a can. Maybe some would and some wouldn’t, but again let’s let Smart bidding figure it out. 

They opened that up, and those "bottled soft drink" queries didn't convert as well as the canned ones, but they absolutely did convert, and they were able to keep the campaign profitable while allowing those queries in.

So this is something that when you say to people remove your negative keywords, understandably their hackles go up and they're like absolutely no way. But it's one of the things I'm definitely going to be sharing in this talk about unconventional optimization techniques for advanced marketers because that's just one client example. I've seen similar results time and time again from others. 

The only way to know is to test. And if it's been at least two years since you've tested something—Google Ads has completely changed, it could absolutely be worth testing it again.

On day two of the conference, I will be sharing a real case study from one of my coaching clients about when high CPCs are a good thing. If you listen to this podcast regularly, that should not be a surprising message coming from me. So, while I can't spoil the details of the case study because that wouldn't be fair to the conference attendees, I can share that it is for a home services business, lead generation. 

When we started, they had super cheap CPCs and barely any conversions. In the case study, I walk through step-by-step, showing every number and every metric the whole way for what happened after a few days, a few weeks, and a few months when CPCs skyrocketed. But guess what? Conversions did as well. As a result, they actually achieved a lower CPA by allowing CPCs to go up through, you guessed it, Smart bidding.

If you'd like to join me either in person or virtually at AdWorld Experience in Bologna, October 15th to 16th, 2026, the link for tickets is in the episode description and you can find it on my website at jyll.ca/speaker. That's J-Y-L-L dot C-A slash speaker.

And last, but not least, Inside Google Ads Live: Toronto! For the very first time, I'm hosting my own conference, which is crazy because this is something I said I would never do. 

I still remember when I worked at Viacom more than a decade ago and part of the job of our group was to organize events. I said to my boss, "Look, I'll do this, I'll do that, whatever, but event planning is the one thing I hate. Please don't ask me to do it." Spoiler alert: I still had to do it for a bit. And now I've been planning this conference and actually having a great time!

So, I hope that by the time this episode comes out, there are still tickets left. Please go grab your tickets now. It's in Toronto on October 29th, 2026, and tickets are selling fast. We have an all-Canadian speaker lineup of expert practitioners. And I will be delivering the keynote at my own conference because I can! I'm going to Lin-Manuel Miranda that.

My talk is called "Google Ads is Dead. Long Live Google Ads." Eagle-eyed observers may notice that is the same title as the keynote talk I gave at the Performance MCR conference in June 2026 in Manchester. It was received really well there, so I will be doing a bit of a spin and an updated version for Inside Google Ads Live.

A recording of this talk is already available for my Inside Google Ads course members, as I record all my conference talks and make them exclusively available there since I can't post them all in full online. 

I thought what I'd do today, special for you on the podcast, is deliver the opening of this talk and give you a preview of what's to come and why I say "Google Ads is dead. Long live Google Ads." 

So, here we go.

"What do you do when you've built a career around being really, really, ridiculously good at buying keywords, and then Google says you can't use keywords anymore?

What about when you're Google, a company that's built one of the most beautiful business models ever to exist, monetizing the world's largest database of intent. You earn $300 billion a year selling ads against these user queries. Only now, one in six of those searches already comes through in a medium other than text.

I'm Jyll Saskin Gales, a Google Ads Coach, founder of the Inside Google Ads course, podcast, bestselling book, and conference. I worked at Google for six years, and now I advise business owners, agencies, and marketers like you on how to get the best results from Google Ads. And more and more these days, that means helping you shift your perspective about how Google Ads works.

Here's my thesis up front: There's no longer an old way or a new way of managing ads effectively. 'The only way to win in AI is with AI,' according to Google. However, the fundamentals of Google Ads remain remarkably unchanged.

I actually sell merch on my website: 'Team Control' versus 'Team Automation' t-shirts. And I'm sorry to say that I'm going to have to update my merch, because it's no longer about control versus automation. It's about control with automation. These are not opposing teams or opposing sides. They now go hand in hand to drive scale and success in Google Ads. 

We're going to explore the three pillars of Google Ads—bidding, targeting, and creative—to unpack what's changing, what's staying the same, and what it means for how you manage paid ads going forward."

And if you'd like to hear the rest, you can join us at Inside Google Ads Live in Toronto at the CN Tower. Yes, that CN Tower! On October 29th, 2026. You can buy your tickets on my website. The link is in the episode description. And of course, tickets to all my upcoming speaking engagements are always at jyll.ca/speaker. That's J-Y-L-L dot C-A slash speaker.

Before I sign off for today—because by this point I know only my most loyal viewers are left—I have three things to say. 

First, thank you so much for tuning in to this podcast every single week. It is a labour of love, time, and energy, and you make it all worth it. So, thank you! 

Second, if September and October 2026 are a long time ago by the time you see this, fear not. You can still go to jyll.ca or jyll.ca/speaker. I do a handful of conference speaking engagements every year, so that will always be updated, whether it's 2027, 2028, 2029, 2030, or beyond.

And last but not least, you may not be aware that I host an online event called PPC Zone for free. I've hosted more than 50 speakers on this virtual stage. And at each event, I bring three speakers to each share a 7-minute presentation about a topic of their choice. Then we have a live panel and the whole thing wraps up in under 45 minutes. 

This has been a bi-monthly event for the last couple years. I'm considering making it monthly next year. But either way, wherever you are watching or listening to this, I recommend subscribing to the PPC Zone podcast as well. 

Or if you're on YouTube, just go to my channel and you can subscribe to that playlist. If you'd like to speak at PPC Zone, everyone is welcome. No experience necessary. You can learn more and apply now at ppc.zone.

I hope you've enjoyed this off-the cuff, unpolished, but perhaps quite interesting episode of Inside Google Ads. 

Be sure to tune in next week. The episode title is AI Just Broke This Google Ads Account. 

I'm Jyll Saskin Gales and I'll see you next time inside Google Ads.