Google Ads Campaign for a New Product

Situation

The company had a new product and brand in the market and was ready to begin advertising for it to generate demand. To begin, I chose Google Ads for its strong intent-based platform. I provided the design team with guidelines to follow in creating a few different landing pages to test, identified keywords and negative keywords, and built out the campaign in Google Ads.
Google’s new business team was assisting me as this was a new ads account. After the campaign began running for only a couple of days, I realized we weren’t receiving the forecasted amount of conversions and our daily budget was being burned through by noon.

Action

Something neither I nor my partners at Google had considered, was setting up scheduling for the ads. In Google Ads, an advertiser can choose to run their ads on specific days and at specific hours. After reviewing the campaign, I realized this was the answer to our problem, except since this was a new campaign, we didn’t have historical data to look at. Instead, I looked at the data of a similar product. First I created an exploration funnel in Google Analytics 4 to see when customers landed on the thank you page, and then confirmed my analysis by pulling data from our data warehouse Snowflake. I took the exported CSV and used a pivot table in Excel to organize the days and times. I was able to confirm what I saw in Google Analytics. Once the campaign was running again, I conducted conversion rate optimization A/B tests on the landing pages.

Results

I learned that most customers landed on the thank you page at noon – 1 pm and 6 – 11 pm. I added the scheduling and the issue with our budget burning up early, was solved. Conversions increased considerably now that the ads were running when customers were applying. The campaign started to produce a great CTR of 15%, while the financial services industry standard is only 5.6%