The Best Google Ad Campaign Type for Lead Generation
You either have a service business or online info publishing business and you need more leads. You've heard Google Ads is a great way to generate more leads for your business but you're not sure which type of campaign to create, there are just too many options, you can run any of the following:
Search Campaign (With or without Search Partners?)
Performance Max Campaign
Sign up for free access to this post
Free members get access to complete blog posts like this one, plus exclusive Google Ads strategies and case studies.
You either have a service business or online info publishing business and you need more leads. You've heard Google Ads is a great way to generate more leads for your business but you're not sure which type of campaign to create, there are just too many options, you can run any of the following:
Search Campaign (With or without Search Partners?)
Performance Max Campaign
Display Ad Campaign
Youtube Ad Campaign
There are also Shopping Ad Campaigns but those are exclusively for ecommerce businesses so you know you don't need that since you're just looking to generate more leads.
What I usually recommend for clients is to first max out their ad budget with a Search Campaign without Search Partners or Display Network enabled.
Then try testing out including Google search partners and maybe Google Display Network. This means your text ad will show up on other websites other than just the Google.com SERPs. It's best to test this out using a Google Ad Experiment so you can easily compare the results against the original campaign that is only showing ads on Google.com.
After that, if you still have ad budget to spend, go ahead and test out Google Display Ads by creating banner graphics and test out Youtube Ads by creating a few video ad assets.
I've seen Performance Max work well for ecommerce businesses but the general consensus among Google Ad Managers is that it's not great for lead generation campaigns. If you're the experimental type then by all means test it out yourself. Each business is different and you may see that it generates okay results for your business. If you do test out Performance Max it may make sense to pause your search campaigns since Performance Max will basically show your ads on all channels, including Google Search. For this reason, if you also have a Google Search Campaign running simultaneously then you may experience some keyword cannibalization.