As a leading digital marketing agency in Australia, who manages Google Ads campaigns on behalf of our clients, we make no money from the number of clicks on the ads themselves. In fact, as a responsible digital marketing partner, we pride ourselves on creating the most efficient ad campaigns as possible, which generate the maximum number of leads for our clients with as few clicks as possible.
We make money by managing our clients’ ad campaigns efficiently, and we retain our clients by generating valuable leads, via our specific process of building and managing Google Ads campaigns, over the long-term.
Recently, we have experienced a new challenge to our industry from none other than Google itself! It seems Google has an internal sales team dedicated to attempting to contact our clients directly. They are trying to get our clients to use the automation tools built into the Google ADs platform, which we know will waste our clients money.
What is frustrating is that Google is ringing our clients directly and suggesting that we are mis-managing the accounts and are limiting our clients lead generation, which is absolutely incorrect.
With over 40 years of cumulative experience managing Google ads, our team knows exactly how to set up campaigns. We have experience with managing geo-location targets, negative keywords and progressing through the various campaign types based on how our clients’ campaigns mature over time.
It seems, however, that Google has a platform underlying the Google Ads platform known as the “Discovery Network”.
Let’s consider the pros and cons of using the Discovery Network according to Gemini:
Pros of the Google Ads Discovery Network:
- Reach a Broad Audience: Tap into a vast pool of users across Google’s popular platforms, many of whom might not be reached through traditional search campaigns.
- Visually Engaging Ads: The image and carousel formats allow for compelling storytelling and showcasing your products or services in an attractive way.
- Drive Awareness and Consideration: Ideal for introducing new products, building brand awareness, and moving users further down the marketing funnel by capturing their interest during discovery moments.
- Leverage Google’s Machine Learning: Google’s algorithms automatically optimise ad delivery and bidding to find users most likely to convert, reducing manual effort.
- Potentially Lower CPCs (Cost-Per-Click): In some cases, the CPCs on the Discovery Network can be lower compared to highly competitive Search keywords, offering a more cost-effective way to reach a large audience.
- Cross-Platform Reach: Your campaigns can reach users across multiple touchpoints within the Google ecosystem, increasing brand visibility and potential for engagement.
- Effective for Audience Building: By reaching users with relevant interests, you can attract new potential customers and build your audience for remarketing efforts.
Cons of the Google Ads Discovery Network:
- Lower Intent: Users on the Discovery Network are generally in a browsing or discovery mode, meaning their intent to purchase or take immediate action might be lower compared to someone actively searching for a specific solution.
- Less Granular Control: Targeting options, while powerful, might not offer the same level of granular control as keyword-based targeting in Search campaigns.
- Creative Dependency: The success of Discovery campaigns heavily relies on visually appealing and engaging creatives. Poor creatives can lead to low engagement and wasted spend.
- Conversion Tracking is Crucial: To effectively measure the ROI of Discovery campaigns, robust conversion tracking is essential to understand which audiences and creatives are driving desired actions.
- Learning Period: Like all Google Ads campaigns, Discovery campaigns require a learning period for the algorithms to optimise performance. Initial results might vary.
- Potential for Lower Conversion Rates (Initially): Due to the potentially lower intent of the audience, initial conversion rates might be lower compared to Search campaigns. However, the focus is often on upper-funnel metrics like awareness and consideration.
- Limited Reporting Metrics: While Google provides reporting on Discovery campaigns, the metrics available might be slightly different or less granular than those for Search campaigns.
So, let’s compare the first bullet point from each list.
The first pro is “Reach a Wide Audience” and the first con is “Lower Intent”.
So, from Google’s perspective, reaching a wider audience actually means showing our client’s ads to more people that would be considered “tire kickers” and would 100% increase the click-through-rate, which is great for Google and bad for our client’s budgets.
The first con is “lower Intent” which translates to less people seeing ads that actually want to purchase the product or service that we are advertising, which again is not in the best interest of our clients, because we want high intent searches that translate to an immediate need or desire from our client’s potential customers.
So, we produced this article for the purpose of educating our clients, and anyone else who is receiving unsolicited phone calls from the internal Sales Team at Google.
In one instance the Google Sales rep was calling our clients directly and attempting to set up an hour-long meeting with us and our client, so they could “walk us through” how to set up a Discovery Network Campaign, and our client complained to us that the sales rep was “very aggressive” on the phone.
This is not only unprofessional, but a downright direct attempt to get our clients to waste more money on ads that have lower intent users and reach a wider audience.
Of course, Google makes more money in this scenario, but our clients get less leads and spend more on non-performing ad campaigns.
We suggest to all of our clients that if they receive a direct, unsolicited phone call from a Google employee, that they direct the Google rep to contact their digital marketing agency immediately and to stop calling them.
And for any business owner who is managing their own Google Ads campaigns, to remember that “Google is NOT Your Friend” and Google’s primary concern is not your business but theirs.
By turning on all the automations available in Google Ads, and utilising things like the Discovery Network platform, you will definitely make Google more profitable and definitely increase the amount of ad spend by promoting your own products or services to low intent users of the platform.
We surmise that, because of the increased use of AI tools used to search for products and services across the world, Google may be experiencing a reduction in ad spend across the entire platform, and they are being proactive to get more businesses to increase their ad spend to offset these losses.
Don’t fall into the Discovery Network trap!
