Google Ads Best Practices for Mobile Apps with a Limited Budget

In this blog post we interviewed Ashley Black, a former Googler with nearly a decade of experience leading the App Ads sales team, on how small businesses and indie developers can leverage Google Ads for mobile, highlighting insights that often go overlooked.

[Roman from Tenjin]: Hi everyone, welcome to another edition of ROI 101. Today we’re going to talk about Google Ads. Not just Google Ads, but how small businesses and indie developers can use Google Ads to their advantage. Today I have a special guest to discuss it with – Ashley from Candid Consulting. Ashley, please introduce yourself.

[Ashley from Candid Consulting]: Hi, I’m Ashley. I think what makes me qualified to talk on this subject is I am a former Googler of almost 10 years. And I led the App Ads sales team at Google for almost 6 years where my team supported user-acquisition teams primarily at mobile game companies. And about 4 months ago I left and started Candid Consulting where I am advising a lot of small developers on how they can best execute a UA strategy on both Google Ads on iOS and Android, and for other platforms as well. 

[Roman from Tenjin]: Yeah exactly. Who else outside of an ex-Googler can tell us about the ins and outs of Google campaigns. I’ve asked Ashley to prepare some slides for us. We’ll start from the very basics of the structure of Google Ads campaigns, and then we’ll go to the more advanced stuff. The focus will be on the SMB business, indie developers and so on. I’ll start sharing my screen now.

[Ashley from Candid Consulting]: If you haven’t advertised with Google, or maybe you’ve tested on Meta before, the structure on Meta and Google are actually very very similar. On Google you have a campaign which is the highest level of things. And that’s where you set your bid for the event that you want your campaign to optimize towards. And one thing that I notice a lot of smaller developers doing when they initially set up their campaigns is they sort of just use the default Google gives which is “App Campaign number 1.” And what I really really want people to start thinking about is when you start expanding with Google or any platform, how will you look at the reporting of those things. And how do you differentiate between one campaign and the other. So my recommendation, and I think all of the larger UA teams follow a very similar naming convention where they have the app name, the events that they’re bidding towards because sometimes you may have a first open campaign, other times you may have a retention metric or a goal that you’re bidding toward, or a purchase indicating what exact event it is that the campaign is bidding on, the country that you are targeting and also the operating system. The reason why I include a lot of these is that Google makes it really hard to extract these things in reporting. That’s why I use these specific naming conventions for the campaigns. 

And then the next layer is ad groups. And that is where you have the opportunity to describe the themes of the assets you are putting in the campaigns. So, I usually encourage people to stick towards 3-5 themes. You can think of it as features of your apps that you have created assets for, or the style of the video or the assets that you designed. And that way you really get a chance to see what’s resonating with audiences really strongly. So the example I give here is an exercise app. Maybe your first name is “at home workouts” and all the text in there is like “save money on a gym” or “exercise from your living room” and so on. The image assets and the videos correspond to that. And the same thing goes for the other 2 like the meal planning or the ease of use. And really what you’ll start to see is that certain ad groups will pick up more. Like maybe “at home workouts” will get a lot more spend. And that is how you can figure out that this is what the algorithm likes, it seems that it’s resonating with the audiences, and then you can expand on that and optimize accordingly.

[Roman from Tenjin]: Are there cases where my campaign name can be too long? 

[Ashley from Candid Consulting]: I think about everything in excel sheets. I think about how I can easily cut up the data when I export this so that I can easily create a pivot table. That’s how my mind thinks. And so that’s why I use the underscore. And I like to have them very consistent so everything lines up in the right cells. 

And Google’s reporting isn’t great in a lot of instances. That’s why I’m saying do yourself a favor and do it right from the beginning so you don’t have to go back and rebuild things later on.

[Roman from Tenjin]: Does it ever make sense to restart the same campaign? So you shut it down because it wasn’t performing as well as you thought and then you’ve turned it on again later to maybe tweak the algorithm.

[Ashley from Candid Consulting]: Yeah, I think if you ask a Google rep or if you had asked me 4 months ago when I was still there, I would say no you shouldn’t. But in more practical experience I have seen that works sometimes where I think the algorithm gets fatigued at a certain point where it’s like oh this is stale. So actually if you relaunch it, sometimes you may see it pick up again. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a best practice but if you’re in a jam, I have seen it actually work. 

Watch the full video above to access the entire conversation.