Module 3 - Targeting Topics

What are topics in Google Ads?

Topics are the more general, overarching categories that Google offers you whenever you go to set up your video campaigns. When you get in, Google gives you the opportunity to use these generalised topics.

I would use this in a general way. Very rarely do we use topics on their own.

How should topics be combined with other targeting?

Topics should be overlaid with placements, keywords and audiences, and we will talk about overlaying a lot in this course. More often than not you will combine a topic with an audience, because you want to know that people are on a particular topic.

It is the combination of these different types of topics with audiences and with keywords, overlaying all of these things together, that is going to find you your perfect audience and eventually serve you up the set of placements that meet that criteria. At a later date you are then going to go on and see where your conversions are coming from and which topics are working.

How do you find the right topic?

You find it by searching, because a lot of this is built within Google and you can drill down. Whatever top line term you put in, Google is then going to show you where those are mentioned.

If you were looking for technology, you get technology products within beauty and fitness, technology within motor, and industrial product design. Try science and you get science fiction and fantasy films, and magazines. You might have the topic of estate agents, and you get shared workspaces in business and industrial, property development, real estate listings, and lots and land. Some of those come out a bit off topic.

These are going to be people who fall within those areas and are actively browsing these particular topics online. Use it as a top line thought, as a generalised route into an audience, and then overlay certain keywords or certain audiences with it.

How many topics should go in one ad group?

Try to stick to two or three topics per ad group. Do not try to choose everything that is relevant.

If you choose multiple topics and multiple audiences and put them all into one campaign, the chances are one of those topics or audiences has a very big reach and is quite broad. The majority of your ad spend will get served into that one topic, and you do not then learn what is happening in the others.

If you want to test certain topics against each other, create a campaign with an ad group for one topic and an audience, and a separate ad group with a different topic and an audience. Then at least you can compare, once you start to get results, what is working and what is not.

We learned this ourselves in the early days of YouTube ads, two or three years ago. We were putting too many topics into a particular campaign, and it just becomes far too broad. One or two of those topics steal all of the budget and you do not learn anything about the others.

How should you split your budget across topics?

You are better off splitting the budget across multiple campaigns. Let us say you had a 50 or 100 a day budget. Split that across multiple campaigns, and even if you have only got 10 or 15 dollars per campaign, you then learn more. Google gives you the opportunity to spread the budget across the different topics or audiences that you have created.

How specific can topic targeting get?

Topic targeting can get very specific once you combine it, because Google is putting people into a cohort based on these choices. Explore within topics, because there are hundreds, thousands of different ones in there.

Let us make one up. Fishing. I do not even know whether it has got that in there, I have never searched it, but look: boats and watercraft, aquaculture, GPS and navigation, fish and seafood. Then under hobbies and leisure there is hunting and shooting, and fishing.

If I was advertising a fishing business and I combined that with particular product names, I could get really narrowed in and dialled into an audience that you would not be able to reach if you just ran your campaign on a topic.

So just a topic is probably too broad. It is a bit like a broad keyword. Use the topic to combine with keywords, or use the topic to combine with an audience, and then you will understand where within those audiences you are getting your conversions.