Andrea Dela Paz, Galactic Fed Paid Media Specialist, tells us all about her experience as a home-grown FedHed and shares how businesses can better leverage Google Ads for growth. 

Paid Media Encourages Continuous Learning

Andrea was recently recognized in the first cohort of The FedHead Awardees for her positive impact and outstanding performance in Q3 of 2021. She was the recipient of the 2021 Rockstar Award for her invaluable contributions to the Galactic Fed team.

Not only is Andrea a FedHead Awardee, but she is also purely home-grown talent at Galactic Fed! For the last three and a half years, Andrea has been helping clients take their growth up and to the right. As a star in the Galactic Fed galaxy, we just had to ask her to give us a peek inside her brain and find out more about her paid media brilliance. 

Prior to starting her career in paid media with Galactic Fed, Andrea worked in Human Resources and Recruitment. She was excited to take the leap into digital marketing and embrace the challenge of learning a new skill from scratch. Andrea was also drawn to the ever-changing landscape of marketing that meant she would never grow stagnant in her line of work. 

Despite being a 2021 Rockstar, Andrea is actually most proud of her contributions to defining some of the “Galactic Fed Way” internal processes. On top of that, she is proud to be part of the Galactic Fed team that manages one of our tenured clients, Alma, and helped them expand their reach to generate high-quality leads. 

Andrea takes continuous learning seriously. When she’s not working on a client account, Andrea is reading up on industry trends, shadowing other account specialists, and communicating with the Galactic Fed team. 

Why Google Ads are Critical for Every Business

When you open your internet browser and fire up a search engine, where do you start? If you’re like Andrea—not to mention 90+% of internet users—you turn to Google or Facebook to find pretty much anything you’re looking for. 

Google Ads can have great benefits for any kind of business. For instance, the Google platform has a massive reach (up to 5.4 billion searches a day). When a consumer needs an answer, they often rely on a few Google searches to give them that answer. When they are looking for a product, service, or solution, they do the same. In addition, Google ads allow brands to set up highly-targeted ads that reach the right audiences at the right times, using a wide range of ad types. 

Google ads campaign types include:

• Search - appear on results pages when a person enters a query
• Display - appear on a vast number of websites within Google’s Display Network
• Video - video ads will show up on YouTube and Google’s Display Network
• Shopping - appear based on a store’s product data
• Apps - promoted across campaign types using content from an existing app

For businesses with steep competition, Google Ads can help them position themselves among their competitors so they can stand out in the marketplace. 

Another benefit of Google Ads? They are suitable for large and small businesses, for brick and mortar to global businesses, and from low to high marketing budgets. Anyone can run Google Ads, at any stage of growth, and see results as long as they use the right strategy! They can design campaigns specific to the business goals from brand awareness, lead generation, sales, and more.

Google Ads are great, but Andrea does have some words of advice for businesses that have never worked with them before: “Reflect on your business and what you want out of running Google ads,” she suggests. Andrea adds, “I would also highly advise starting as focused as possible, to avoid overspending at the onset.”

According to Andrea, the best way to stay focused when you’re starting out with Google Ads is to:

• Start with a strong group of keywords
• Keep to specific targeted geographic areas
• Limit ads to high-traffic times of the day
• Hyper-target audiences in your demographic

Andrea also stresses that before starting a new Google Ads campaign, businesses must first audit their paid media processes.

The Importance of Paid Media Audits

A paid media audit can uncover tactics that aren’t working or reveal new opportunities for a business. While it’s common to conduct an audit at the onset of campaign builds, it’s equally important that businesses undergo regular paid media audits. This helps a brand ensure that its marketing efforts are still aligned with its goals. An audit will show your team how current campaigns are performing and help you identify ways to scale up based on what strategies are already working. 

A good, in-depth paid media audit should include:

• A summary of the account’s current performance
• Usable and profitable insights regarding the different aspects of the account
• Recommendations for how to optimize the account
• Possible areas of improvement moving forward

We asked Andrea to share her process for conducting a Google Ads audit, and she was more than happy to tell us her (not-so-secret) secrets. 

Step-by-step: A Beginner’s Guide For Auditing Your Google Ads Campaigns 

Unfortunately, there is no definitive process for doing a Google Ads audit—every audit we do at Galactic Fed is different depending on the scale of the account. It can take as little as 30 minutes or more than two hours to really get a sense of an account’s performance. Galactic Fed Google Ads audits are done layer by layer, from reviewing account settings to ad group structure, ad copy, and targeted keywords. 

If you’re auditing your own Google Ads account, you can use this easy step-by-step list to make sure you’re reviewing the most critical components. 

Step 1: Determine your goals. 

If you cannot provide a clear vision for your Google Ads strategy, you probably won’t be able to run successful campaigns. Make sure that your goals with Google Ads align with your overall strategy, and are achievable using this paid media platform. 

Here are some questions to consider:

• What are you trying to accomplish with Google Ads?
• How can Google Ads support your company goals?
• Which KPIs will you track?
• What metrics are important to your marketing strategy, and how will you measure these?
• Have you linked your Google Ads account to your Analytics account?

Step 2: Review your account settings and campaign structure settings.

Now that you have defined your goals, you need to make sure your account and campaign structures are set up correctly.

If you’re starting from scratch or restructuring your Google Ads campaigns, this might be called an “account build.” This step encompasses checking all of the nuts and bolts of your campaign, such as budget, location, and ads scheduling. If these foundational pieces are set up incorrectly, your ads campaigns won’t be successful. 

Here are some questions to consider:

• Is your budget sufficient?
• Does your bid strategy align with your budget? 
• Are your ads being delivered to the right targeted locations and audiences?
• Is device targeting important for your campaigns?

Step 3: Improve your ad group structure.

When you’re organizing your Google Ads groups, follow this policy: organize early and often. Seriously! If your ad groups are hard to navigate, they will be even more difficult to pull insights from. In the world of Google Ads, more specific ad groups are better (i.e. fewer than ten keywords in a single ad group). 

Here are some questions to consider:

• Do your ad groups have 10+ keywords in a single group?
• Can you restructure your current ad groups to simplify the structure?
• Are you using single keyword ad groups (SKAGs)?

Your Quality Score could even be improved by making these changes. CXL conducted a study that found that SKAGs increased CTR by 28.1% in two months. A simple fix can go a long way!

Step 4: Look at your Google Quality Score.

Google’s Quality Score rates your ad and keyword combinations on a scale from 1-10. A higher score indicates to Google that your ad is relevant, likely to get engagement, and leads to a high-quality landing page. Knowing this, you can analyze your scores by campaign, ad group, and keywords to determine where you’re experiencing poor performance. Use this information to optimize your campaigns or pivot ad spend.

Here are some questions to consider:

• Are your current keywords delivering below-average performance?
• Does your ad offer relevant messaging for your audience?
• Is your ad copy strong enough?
• Is your landing page loading quickly?
• Is your landing page mobile-friendly?
• Has your landing page been set up to convert visitors?

Step 5: Make improvements using audit findings. 

Overall, Andrea notes that the most common audit findings are usually related to campaign structure—specifically how keywords or ad groups are organized into manageable and highly optimizable structures. Audits are not intended to scrap your current strategy completely, but to find areas of improvement that can be fixed to optimize your performance. 

Google Ads Advice Every Business Should Follow

It’s no secret that we love using Google Ads at Galatic Fed! However, no one can ever truly be a master of Google Ads. Do you know why? Google Ads is an ever-changing platform. Not one best practice can be continually relevant in days to come. 

However, whatever is the current trend or best practices in Google Ads, businesses should always ensure that their account or campaigns are highly organized. As long as campaigns and ad groups are in a good structure, analysis of performance will be a breeze, and implementing optimization will be a quick fix (and not a daunting task). 

How Alma Increased Leads by 264% Using a Targeted Google Search Strategies

Andrea is no stranger to conducting a Google Ads audit and implementing changes to boost performance. Let’s take a look at the success story of Galactic Fed client, Alma. (You may recognize this as the client Andrea mentioned earlier.)

Alma is a two-sided marketplace for therapists who want a platform for hosting their private practices. Alma helps therapists manage their practices while also connecting clients with the right therapist for their needs. With the growing number of providers, Alma approached Galactic Fed to create a strategy that would bring in consultation leads to meet provider growth. The paid media team identified Google Search Ads as a prime channel for boosting lead numbers. 

The Galactic Fed team started building their B2C campaigns in March 2020, targeting only audiences in New York City. Since then, they have vastly expanded the market into 13 states and have scaled up spending to $100K a month, with an average of 1,700 leads.

This is just one example of what is possible when your business invests in a Google Ads strategy. If you’re ready to connect with an expert like Andrea to start growing your brand using Google Ads, contact us today!