Expanding ‘Under Cover’
So you want to increase your search term coverage…
How do you deal with decreasing ROAS as you expand further away from that core, proven, high-intent search territory?
You can expand into new, lower-value search terms much more safely, by doing it in combination with tight targeting from other variables.
More generic, less tightly targeted keywords can become viable when you specify that those more loosely targeted impressions will only show to more highly targeted users.
For example, use:
- Remarketing audiences (standard and customer match)
- Other highly-relevant audiences (including combined audiences, which can hugely increases their relevance by using the intersection of two or more different high-quality audiences)
- Proven top tiers from location / demographic / device values
In practice, this means creating one or more separate campaigns or ad groups for the broader keywords, with that narrow targeting in place.
Your ads are then only shown to members of those tightly-selected segments most likely to convert.
With this technique, your audiences are doing a lot of the targeting work, leaving you freer to try search terms that don’t give such a strong a signal of intent.
Those broader keywords that were otherwise too generic may now be worthwhile.
This video is an extract from the unit How to Scale an Account in the course Google Ads Level Up.
The full training goes through:
- Vertical vs Horizontal expansion
- Using the search term report as an expansion tool
- Expanding ‘under cover’
- The best options beyond search
…and a whole load of other methods, aspects and effects of scaling a Google Ads account.
For access to this lesson (plus 40+ more Google Ads training videos, exclusive resources, private members group, fortnightly live sessions and more…)
Join Google Ads Level Up.
