Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 142 - Q4 Holiday Prep [Keep Optimising]
Due to the length of this interview and the presence of multiple speakers, this transcript may contain errors.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday will be here before you know it. Are your Google
Ads ready for the upcoming holiday season?
Today, I'm sharing a conversation I recently had with Chloe Thomas, host of the excellent Keep Optimising podcast.
In this conversation, I break down the latest Google Ads updates that e-commerce business owners like you actually need to care about. We talk about bidding strategies, customer lifecycle goals, AI Max, and more.
So, this is one you won't want to miss if you're getting ready for the holiday season.
I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working with big brands at Google and now I work for you.
This is Inside Google Ads, Episode 142: Holiday Prep.
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Chloe: Hello, Jyll.
Jyll: Hello again, Chloe. Thanks for having me back.
Chloe: Awesome to have you back on the Keep Optimising podcast again because you brought us such great insights last year. I just... we have to have Jyll back. So, how has life been for the last 12 months in the world of Google Ads?
Jyll: I mean, the only constant is change, and that has continued to be true. Uh, one of the biggest changes has probably been something that as users we've all been experiencing: AI search, AI overviews, AI mode, etc. And so we'll get into how that impacts ads as well.
Uh, but I'd say it's a really good time to be a Google Ads practitioner. There's lots of opportunity out there to still drive great results for businesses through ads.
Chloe: Yeah, you'd almost think over the last 12 months Google would have been so busy trying to win the AI and organic results in the Gemini game that they might have, you know, slowed down evolution on Google Ads. But I'm, I'm delusional. I know. It's like...
Jyll: Chloe, come on. Never. Never. No. Oh, and to Google's credit, you know, every year in May, there's this annual event called Google Marketing Live where Google announces the vision for the next year, and I'm fortunate to have been invited to attend the last two years.
And some years, it's sort of like a nothing burger. Like, yeah, there's a bunch of announcements, nothing much. This year, there were genuinely some really exciting changes announced. Some have already rolled out, some have not, but that's what we'll be talking about today. So, I'm really looking forward to diving in.
Chloe: Yes, because of course Google Ads is built for all kinds of different businesses. And anyone who's worked with Google Ads for a long time will know some Google updates aren't worth a lot. So it's really important to pick through what's worth caring about and what's not worth caring about. And you're here to do it for us.
So, Jyll, I know, as we were discussing earlier, you like to split Google Ads out into bids and budgets, targeting, and creative, which seems like a very sane way of dividing it all up to me. So, we're going to go with that. So, in the world of bids and budgets, what's new that we need to actually care about?
Jyll: The first new thing to actually care about is something Google didn't even announce. It just happened. And that is that you can now use Maximize Conversion Value bidding in Shopping campaigns.
And I know that might sound really nitty-gritty, but the reason this is exciting is a Shopping campaign. Your standard Shopping campaign, it's the one that's not AI powered. It's not cross surfaces. It's just showing your products in Google search.
Chloe: So this, this isn't PMax.
Jyll: I’m not talking about PMax. I'm talking about good old-fashioned Shopping campaigns. The campaign type where you connect your Google Merchant Center feed to Google. Standard Shopping so your products with pictures and pricing can show up on Google Search results.
Up until recently, there were only three bidding strategies you could use in Shopping, which meant there were only three goals you could have: Manual CPC, which is like the old-fashioned, you know, set the max amount you're willing to pay per click; Maximize clicks, which tells the campaign to spend my money to get as many clicks as possible—notice click, click; and then the third option was Target ROAS, which is a great bid strategy for shopping (target return on ad spend) but requires a lot of data to learn. It's the most sophisticated. It was sort of like we had crawl, crawl, run with no walk option in the middle.
And so with no fanfare, it just started appearing in accounts and it's now in all accounts. You can use the bid strategy called Maximize Conversion Value. And what's so great about that is now if you're starting a new shopping campaign or perhaps you have a lower budget shopping campaign, you can give Google the direction to spend your money in order to get as much conversion value as possible, not just clicks. So this is a really great update for new campaigns or for smaller budgets that has gotten no fanfare. So I wanted to give it some fanfare here.
Chloe: Whoa. Oh, definitely. Because back in the day when I was involved with lots of Google Shopping campaigns, mainly for retailers with lots of different price points and lots of different types of products, and the complexity of trying to get a decent average order value out of Google Shopping was a nightmare.
So, I think if I was trying to predict or trying to say which goal I would most want in Google Shopping, I think it's probably up there because all the data is right there in Google Ads. So, it doesn't require you feeding in X, Y, and Z. It's really quite simple.
Jyll: Absolutely. Yes. And so the goal should be getting to Target ROAS. With all bid strategies, I recommend starting with the maximize bid strategy to move towards the target. But starting a new campaign on Target ROAS is generally not a good idea because you don't know what you don't know. Google doesn't know what it doesn't know. So now we have this option in Shopping to start on Maximize Conversion Value.
And it can also be a good idea, let's say you're running a standard Shopping campaign and Black Friday's coming up where you know your ROAS is going to really change and you don't want to be held back by that. Switching to Maximize Conversion Value during a sales period can also be a good idea because it tells Google to just make sure you spend the budget in full trying to get conversion value, but like don't let the ROAS hold you back because consumer behavior will be changing so quickly—by the time Target ROAS caught up, the sale would be over.
Chloe: Clever. Okay. Anything else new in bids and budgets?
Jyll: Yes. So along the same line of by the time Google caught up the sale would be over. There's this new feature coming out. It may not be in your account by this holiday season, but it's called Promotion mode. And so this is for Search and Performance Max, I believe. You might need to double check me on that. And what it does is it lets you essentially tell your campaign that a promotion is coming. So before the promotion happens, you can tell it during this time period, adjust my bidding behavior like this, adjust my budget like that, and then when that period ends, go back to normal. So, right now there are features in Google Ads that let you do this. They are called seasonal bid adjustments and seasonal budget adjustments. You'll find them under tools. And this is kind of bringing those all under a campaign setting called promotion mode to really get ready to, to borrow that word that Google loves, supercharge your campaigns during the promotional period.
So, this may or may not be out in time for your holiday season, but it's something I would keep an eye on. Not just for the holidays, by the way. Maybe you're going to have a New Year's sale, a Mother's Day or a Father's Day sale, a back to school sale. And so these are all times when you might benefit from promotion mode. If you don't see it yet, then you should check out seasonal bid adjustments and seasonal budget adjustments.
Chloe: Nice. So, kind of a bit of consolidation and a bit of enhancement at the same time. Very cool. Anything else in bids and budgets?
Jyll: Well, one of the other newer features is called Smart Bidding Exploration, which has been really tricky to wrap our heads around. And so, I'll say this is one most advertisers probably don't need to use.
And so, what Smart Bidding Exploration does, it is a setting with Target ROAS. And it lets you tell Google, let's say your Target ROAS is 400%, a ROAS of four. You might say, "I just want to take a bit of my budget and explore what would happen if my ROAS were 10% lower." And so by using this Smart Bidding Exploration feature, you can drag it down like 10% or 20% and it allows Google to fish in a wider pool of queries, so to speak.
There's been a lot written about this, so we could do a whole episode on Smart Bidding Exploration, but I don't want to because at the end of the day, I believe this is a feature that most advertisers just don't need. There's lots of other ways to test this as well. So, if you see that, by all means, feel free to test it, but I would not put that at the very top of your testing calendar this year.
Chloe: Okay. So, that's what it is, but probably not for most people listening to this episode.
Jyll: Probably not. It's really designed for if you're completely maxed out on opportunity, you're not losing any search impression share, and you're looking for ways to grow, and one of the levers you're thinking about is a lower ROAS, then by all means use Smart Bidding Exploration.
But I find very few advertisers are in the category of I'm maxing out my budget and I'm maxing out my results and I can't find a way to grow.
Chloe: Yes, I've done everything there is possible to test on Google Ads. What am I going to do next? I know, I'll throw away my profit.
Jyll: Exactly. So in that scenario, fair enough. But most advertisers are not in that scenario. So there's a lot of other features I'd recommend before that one.
Chloe: Got you. So, not something we're definitely saying don't use, but probably not because you're probably not right.
Jyll: Probably not the best tool for the challenge you're trying to solve right now.
Chloe: Okay. Anything else? Bids and budgets, or should we go on to targeting?
I mean, I'm writing my second book about bidding right now, so of course I could talk all day about that one. But let's move on to targeting. There's some fun changes coming up there, too.
Chloe: Okay, cool. So give us one of them.
Jyll: All right. Well, one—this is kind of a hybrid between bidding and targeting, actually—it's called customer lifecycle goals. And this is something that's actually been in Google Ads for a while, but I feel like it flies under the radar and people don't really know about it.
So essentially, customer lifecycle goals is a way to get your campaigns—Search, Shopping, PMax—all have varying features from this to either focus on new customers only, or to focus on existing customer retention, or to focus on high-value new customers. There's all these different modes within it that let you guide at the campaign level who it can go after and how your campaign should behave when it encounters them.
So, for example, one of the common complaints people have about Performance Max is, "Oh, it's just retargeting my existing customers, right?" So, you could turn on New Customer Only mode in Performance Max, which essentially excludes your customer list from the campaign. So, it says I'm only going to go after new customers. Or you could take it to the next level and go high-value new customer mode. And there the campaign is not only going to go after new customers, but people it predicts will be high-value new customers.
So there's a whole lot of options here. Google keeps adding more little features and bells and whistles to customer lifecycle goals. So my advice, if this is never something you've looked into before: first, you have to make sure you set it up properly. And you actually set it up properly in your conversion summary in Google Ads. And by "set it up properly," I mean you have to actually have a customer list that you keep updated and connect that to the customer lifecycle goal so it knows who's a customer and who's not. And then once you've done that, you can explore the different options at the campaign level to see if you might want to use this feature.
Chloe: You know, that does sound like one where if you haven't fed the data to Google, you know, Google can't do it off the stuff it gets anyway. You've got to feed them some information that's accurate. Otherwise, you can tick all the boxes you like on the actual tool and it's not going to give you the results, is it? Yeah.
Jyll: And that's the most common thing I've seen with Google Ads coaching clients will meet and go over their campaigns, and at least three times in the last 3 months, they've had a campaign that said new customer acquisition when new customer acquisition wasn't even turned on, or new customer acquisition, but what they put as a customer list was just a website retargeting list. So, not only were they excluding customers, they were excluding anyone who had ever been to the website before. So, it's no wonder PMax wasn't working. You know what I mean? Like, if you don't want it to do retargeting, then again PMax is not the right tool for the job.
And I've seen more than one account where they've made that mistake. They've just taken an all-websites retargeting list and said, "Yep, there's my customer list." It's like, well, there's a big difference between visiting your website once in the last 90 days and having purchased from you. So you definitely need to set that up.
And for that reason, again, customer lifecycle goals can be really good for the modes it has, but people tend to overuse it, like, "Oh yeah, I don't want PMAX to go after existing customers." And then the next day, "Hm, why isn't my PMAX hitting my ROAS goals?" Because you didn't set it up correctly. Yeah.
Chloe: Yeah. Cool. So, that one's definitely if you can set it up correctly, that is well worth a test, isn't it? Anything else in targeting?
Jyll: Yeah. There's this new feature that Google announced called AI Max for Shopping. And I haven't seen this rolled out to most accounts yet. I've seen reports of people spotting it here or there. It's definitely not a wide rollout yet. I'm hoping it'll be available this holiday season.
And in a nutshell, AI Max for Shopping—think of it as your in-between step between standard Shopping and Performance Max. So on standard shopping, which we spoke about earlier, plain Shopping ads in Google search results based on your feed. And at the other end of the spectrum, we have Performance Max, which is Search, Shopping, Display, Discover, Gmail, YouTube, everything, all-in-one campaign, AI-powered targeting, etc. So, what AI Max for Shopping does is it lets you add a bit of AI fun onto your standard Shopping campaign without going all the way to PMax.
And so, specifically, it lets you serve Search and Shopping ads out of a single campaign instead of having to have separate Search and Shopping, which can be great for data consolidation. And then it has the option to use this text customization feature. So in a Shopping campaign, your headline for your ad is just your product title from Merchant Center. With text customization, you're giving the AI permission to write new titles that may be more appealing to people.
For example, maybe you have a, you know, 100% cotton furniture cover, and someone searches for the best furniture cover for pets. Right now in standard Shopping, your title will always be “100% Cotton Furniture Cover.” But with text customization turned on, Google could then rewrite the title dynamically for that search: "Cotton furniture cover for pets," for example. So it can really help in scenarios especially like AI overviews, AI mode, more conversational queries. So that's text customization.
And then there's also the option to use final URL expansion. That's a feature that's available in PMax, that's available in AI Max for Search. And so that lets Google send traffic to a page other than your landing page if it thinks that's going to convert better.
So an example I give here is: let's say you have 20 different mugs on your website. You probably can't show 20 different mugs at the same time in search results. It's just too competitive. So if someone is searching for a pink ceramic mug and you have 20 pink ceramic mugs, maybe only a few of those products will show. But if they click on it with final URL expansion turned on, Google could send them to your pink mug page with all your pink mugs rather than just the one single product. And you could see how if you have Search turned on, that could also be really helpful.
So I say all that to say, I'm really excited to test AI Max for shopping. If you're already using PMax and love it, by all means stick with PMax. But if you're someone who is still using standard shopping, maybe you have some search campaigns as well, and you're looking for some of those AI benefits without going all-in on PMax, then I think AI Max for shopping will be well worth testing. I'm really excited to test it with my clients.
Chloe: I mean, yeah, there's a lot of people who've been quite resistant to PMax and quite anti-PMax. So, this does feel like it's a nice, more controlled option.
Jyll: Understandably, exactly. It's using some AI, but it's still keeping it to Google search results, Search and Shopping. Uh, yeah. So, I'm really excited for that one to roll out.
Chloe: Nice. So, we had three new things in bids and budgets. Do we have three new things in targeting?
Jyll: Oh, I mean, we could keep on going here, but as these are the two really major ones, I would say AI Max for Shopping, and then these customer lifecycle goal features we've discussed.
Chloe: Cool. Okay. Let's talk creative then. What's new that we need to care about in creative? Because I suspect there's a huge amount of new stuff in creative that we don't need to. So, give us the highlights.
Jyll: I would say the number one thing with creative is actually some new updates that have come to Google Merchant Center. And so Google Merchant Center, I mentioned it earlier, but that's kind of the library within Google where your product information lives. So your website will connect to Google Merchant Center. Google Merchant Center houses all your product information, your what's in stock and photos and links and pricing and attributes and all that. And then Google Merchant Center in turn talks to Google Ads as well as organic Google search.
And so there are some new feed attributes that have launched, which means new details you can give about your products that folks should be aware of.
So the first is video. Right now, with every single product in your feed, you can have an image or multiple images that tell Google what the product looks like. And that's, you know, the image they use in ads. But now you can also add a video, which can be really helpful, and the video is going to start showing in shopping results as well. Google announced that a while ago. So the video attribute.
There's also the lifestyle image attribute. So most images that you have in Google Merchant Center are your kind of e-commerce flat white background images. You can also add others that you let it know like "this is more of a lifestyle image," which it can use across some of those different surfaces. Google likes to say YouTube, discovery, etc, and then there are these new conversational attributes, which is a fancy way of saying AI. So in your Merchant Center feed you can now give at the product level all these different attributes to let Google know how to handle your products in AI mode.
For example, you can give it within the feed specific product Q&As, like "these are questions and these are answers," so that it then knows the kinds of prompts to place you against, or you can tell it what related products are. So if there is a phone case and you also sell the phone, maybe it could figure that out, but you can now put that straight into the feed so it knows what those associations are.
So I say all this to say, feed attributes I know sounds like one of the dullest possible areas of Google Ads, but, you know, your Google Merchant Center feed information is how even your standard Shopping campaign decides who to target and what the ad looks like, never mind your AI Max, PMax etc. So getting those attributes right completely can change the performance of your ad. So I want to highlight some of these new attributes folks may not be aware of that you may want to take a look at. And if you're not rolling them out across your whole feed, like pick the top 5% to 10% of your products and make sure you are updating these attributes either in Google Merchant Center, through a supplemental feed, or through your feed management provider.
Chloe: Yeah, it does sound like the days of just letting the tech rip the content off your website and spit it into Google Merchant Center are definitely over. Now there is feed optimization and feed merchandising, which was very possible before but is clearly critical now if you want to win the game.
Jyll: Yes. And I mean getting that automatic, you know, if you have a Shopify store and it automatically creates a feed and you connect to Google channel, great for getting started that way by all means. But if you're managing Google Ads in-house for a brand, if you're working at an agency, feed management is so, so, so important because it determines, like, what the ad looks like and what you serve on. That's where you do the targeting and the creative for your product ads. It's in Merchant Center; it's not in Google Ads itself.
Chloe: I'm going slightly tangential here, but maybe I'm adding two and two together and getting 20. So, do tell me if I am. But if we've now got the ability to target shopping on size of basket for Google, then having set up related products in our product feed is going to massively help Google increase the baskets for that goal.
Jyll: Yeah. It could potentially. Yes, it really... like, we don't as Ads practitioners and as the public, we don't have visibility into what people are typing into AI and what they're searching for. Like, our ads can show there; Google just gives us no reporting on it yet.
So that absolutely could help, you know, a specific user or a variety of users who are talking to AI mode or engaging with AI overviews to get the right recommendations from you, from your business, and increase that average order value. Absolutely.
Chloe: Okay. What else in creative is new and worth paying attention to?
Jyll: I mean, of course, we have to talk about AI. There are lots of AI features. You'll find some of these within Google Merchant Center itself, and you'll find some of them within Google Ads in Asset Studio. And some of those features are the same, and some are different. I genuinely think this is just two product teams at Google that don't talk to each other.
So features you will find either in Merchant Center, in Google Ads Asset Studio, or in both include things like background removal, for example, or scene replacement. So let's say you have, you know, a mug and it's Halloween coming up and you want like pumpkins and things in the background, it can, you know, do that with a click. And what's cool is you can then download those photos and use them on social media or elsewhere. You don't have to just use them in Google. Video generators, animation generators, all these different ways that we can use AI to augment your existing product photos.
So, I would not say that this replaces a skilled designer at all. This is AI, but this is more for teams that perhaps don't have access to a designer, or around the holiday season your design team is overloaded and literally has no more capacity. Then for some of those more simple basic tasks, this can be a really helpful tool to use.
Although your ads will have an AI disclosure. I know, uh, New York (either city or state) now has rules around that. I would expect that to happen in more jurisdictions. Even in Google's Ads Transparency Center, which is like the Google Ads library, we're now starting to see disclosures there, not just about who paid for this ad and why you were targeted, but like if this ad contains AI. So that just is a caveat I want to give folks that if you do use any of these AI tools, there are now disclosures and things that are starting to roll out to users in certain places.
Chloe: And you mentioned video there, which apart from YouTube ads, which I would imagine the majority of our listeners are not proactively—they may be advertising there without knowing, but they're probably not actively trying to do it—is video now becoming a thing in Google? Because I mean, it has to at some point become a thing in Google Ads if we look at all the rest of the digital advertising platforms. So, where are we with video?
Jyll: Oh yeah, video is a thing. If you're not on video, you are missing out. And when I say on video, I do not mean that you need to have a multi-million dollar production and a giant YouTube budget. I actually have quite a few Google Ads coaching clients now who are small businesses, by which I mean they spend less than $100 a day on ads and they're running video campaigns, either a Demand Gen campaign or a Video campaign, $5 to $10 a day and seeing really great results for it.
Sometimes a way that can be really useful is on a retargeting basis. So just showing ads to people who've been to your website before, who've engaged with your videos before, and are staying in touch. Another way that can be helpful is from a prospecting perspective. For example, let me say—this may not be as applicable to an e-commerce business, but if you're operating, you know, you do business in one town, like you have one store in one town—targeting the whole town through YouTube can cost $10 a day. And so, even if you don't see direct ROAS from that one campaign, it can be absolutely worth it to take 5% to 10% of your budget and just make sure you're reaching everybody.
I have an example of this from one of my clients working with a home services business, and that business owner got four different phone calls in the first month from people who said, "Oh, hey, I saw your ad on the TV. I saw your ad on the TV." And it wasn't traditional TV; it was YouTube on TVs.
And so, even bringing that into the e-commerce space, you can't just launch a Shopping or a PMax campaign on November 1st and expect to kill it Black Friday, right? You have to build demand before you capture demand. And so a Demand Gen campaign in Google Ads can be a great way to do that if you have not already launched one—like, do so today. Okay, holidays are coming up. And you can start with a very modest budget of $10 to $20 a day.
Unlike in PMax, you can choose your targeting. You can attach your Merchant Center feed to it if you want to. And you can even start Demand Gen with just images and show image ads on YouTube. I would definitely recommend thinking about YouTube, building that mid-funnel awareness, getting people interested so that as the big holiday purchasing times come around, you can capture that demand you've invested in creating.
Chloe: Well, and even if you don't have a physical store to give you which city to target on, you just have a quick look at your stats and you can find which cities, which counties, which states are the ones where most of your customers are. Run the ad there, you know, geographic. Yeah.
Jyll: Or use this year as a test, right? Like maybe this year you pick three cities, counties, or states—however you define it—run video there and nowhere else, and just let it run.
And 6 to 12 months from now, look at what your brand demand looks like, meaning people searching for your brand specifically. Look at your conversion rates and shopper behavior in those places versus others. And I would be very surprised if you don't notice any difference at all.
Chloe: Yeah, it's a super, super easy thing to test for low money now we have that geographic targeting. Jyll, anything else the audience needs to know about that they need to take action on with Google Ads for this coming peak season?
Jyll: I would just say remember that it is a marathon and not a sprint. So you know September by now you should have your holiday strategy locked and loaded. I would say October 1st would be like the latest to start your holiday campaigns. You're going to want to probably be cross-channel, not only doing Shopping and search. So whether you're using PMax to hit other channels or Demand Gen or video, you want to be reaching people. You want to have great offers, great messaging, right? All those core marketing things.
And then, you know, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are huge global shopping events right now, but it's not over then. There's tons more shopping that still happens in December in the lead-up. And then even after Christmas, there's a ton more shopping behavior as people are spending gift cards or monies or doing exchanges, or Boxing Day which we have in Canada as well as the UK.
So really budget and plan for the entire holiday season, not just Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And then even if you're in certain industries, January could be your peak season. Athleisure, right? Or meal kits. So many businesses where January could be even bigger. So, it ain't over till it's over. And make sure you're budgeting and planning appropriately for the entire peak period.
Chloe: Well said. Okay, Jyll, it's been great chatting to you about all of this.
Listeners, make sure you stay tuned right to the end so you don't miss out on Jyll's insider tips on Google Ads and my suggestions for other ways we can help you improve things even further in your businesses.
Chloe: Okay, Jyll. So far, we've gone deep into which new Google Ads features you need and a few you don't. Now, you get to wow us with your insider knowledge about the whole of Google Ads.
So, for the following questions, your answer can be anything to do with Google Ads, which of course does include everything we've already been talking about.
Jyll, are you ready for the insider tips?
Jyll: Bring it on.
Chloe: Okay, let's start with newbie advice. If we've inspired someone to take their first step, what do they need to know to give themselves the best chance of success?
Jyll: Ads pour fuel on an already burning fire. And what I mean by that is if you're just getting started with Google Ads and you haven't yet figured out what's the right positioning for your product, is your landing page optimized, do people even want what you're selling, then ads don't fix that problem. They just make that problem worse.
And so I like to give the example: you know, I have one client who invented a new product in the pet space and ads have been amazing for his business. And he thinks I'm magical for teaching Google Ads, and I tell him, "No, no, you're magical. You invented the product, right?" There is demand and ads are capturing that.
Whereas, I had another coaching client who came to me with a product that he wanted to sell and people didn't want it. No one was searching for that product. When they were searching for something similar, they bounced off the website and that was a problem that ads can't fix. I was not able to help him. So, you need to have something that people want to buy, and then ads can work really well. But if you don't have the marketing basics down, then running ads will be lighting your money on fire.
Chloe: I love that phrase. Ads is pouring fuel on a fire that already exists. I may have to steal that and repurpose it. Oh, it's perfect though. It gets to the heart of the issue. Once you've started, of course, you've got to keep optimizing. So, what's your favorite way to improve performance?
Jyll: Do less. People try so much to do more. Do more. Test this. Do that. Turn this on. Try that. Add this. Do that and you just kind of optimize yourself into a hole. So, my favorite way to improve performance is just to zoom out and prioritize and actually just try to do a little bit less.
Chloe: That's such unheard Google advice, but such great Google Ads advice. If you spread that budget across everything, you're not going to learn anything for six months or more.
Jyll: Are you trying to optimize your campaigns every single day? You are making it worse, not better. So just zoom out, do less.
Chloe: Yeah. Cool. Okay. If someone listening wants to learn more, is there a cheap or free resource you would recommend?
Jyll: My Inside Google Ads podcast, wherever you are listening to this, you can listen to Inside Google Ads. Just look it up.
Chloe: Simple as that. And it's a must-listen to everybody. So if you're into your Google Ads, we only do it once a year; Jyll does it 12 months of the year. So go and get yourself signed up to the Inside Google Ads podcast.
Finally, Jyll, crystal ball time. Dare we ask what's coming up in the next 6 to 12 months that we should be getting ready for?
Jyll: I mean, always more AI, AI, AI, AI, but with that I will say: with more AI, it's not again about doing more and what are we going to launch and how are we going to take advantage of AI. Focus on your fundamentals. If you have a solid campaign structure, if your conversion tracking is properly set up, and your Merchant Center feed is in tip-top shape, you'll be well positioned to take advantage of the new ad formats and new services that are sure to be coming with AI.
So, yes, shiny object, exciting, but just focus on your fundamentals, and then you will succeed with whatever Google dreams up next over the next 6 to 12 months.
Chloe: Always.
Chloe: Nice. Yeah, with all these new things, it's always the fundamentals. If you've got the fundamentals right, you'll be okay. Yeah. Jyll, we are very nearly at the end of the show. Could you please let the listeners know a bit more about what you do and where they can find you?
Jyll: Absolutely. I'm a Google Ads coach, which means that I help agencies, marketers, freelancers get better results from Google Ads. I've actually now completed more than 1,000 Google Ads coaching calls with more than 350 clients since I left Google in 2021.
So, you can learn more about me on my website, jyll.ca, as well as my courses, book, audits, and all that other great stuff.
Chloe: Brilliant. Well, Jyll, thank you so much for being on the Keep Optimising podcast. It's always great to catch up with you. So, thank you for bringing us such great advice. And that's a wrap.
Jyll: Thanks for having me.
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I hope you now feel confident in what you need to do and don't need to do to prepare your campaigns for the holiday season.
Be sure to tune in next week as I'll be going much deeper on those tricky little customer life cycle goals.
I'm Jyll Saskin Gales and I'll see you next time inside Google Ads.