How To Determine What Paid Media Channels Are Right for You via @sejournal, @timothyjjensen

For businesses just beginning to test the waters in paid media, identifying the right channels to start with is foundational to success. Splitting a budget prematurely among too many platforms is not likely to yield positive results, and launching on a platform that’s not a good fit for a business can cause difficult conversations around the value of paid media as a whole.

In this article, we’ll review a series of questions to ask when determining the PPC channels you should use.

What Are Your Business Goals?

Of course, the ultimate answer to this question for most businesses is to drive return on investment (ROI). But think through what you are seeking to achieve in the near and short term, and how you expect paid media to contribute.

Some potential answers include the following:

• Selling products online.
• Driving foot traffic to physical stores.
• Generating leads via contact forms and/or phone calls.
• Driving signups for online accounts.

An ecommerce business should consider platforms and campaign types that allow for syncing a shopping feed, such as traditional Shopping campaigns or Performance Max in Google or Microsoft.

→ Read More: The 5-Step Process To Setting Crystal Clear PPC Goals

How Familiar Is Your Brand?

Is your company a startup that is unfamiliar in a market with established players? If so, then branding-focused campaigns on social channels may be worthwhile for an initial focus.

You can build awareness first, and then use retargeting audiences to reach individuals who have engaged with ads, as well as launch paid search to capture intent from those who first see your brand ads. YouTube can also be an effective channel for showcasing your brand as well as building viewer-based audiences.

If your product is a straightforward product or service that people need (i.e., tax preparation services), you may not need to establish brand familiarity first, and can likely lead with search ads to meet people while they are looking for what you provide.

What Is Your Product/Market Fit?

What individuals are you seeking to sell to? Think about how you can match up available options for targeting on an ad platform to your desired audience.

If your product or service is easily identifiable with search terms (for instance, furnace repair), search can be a good place to start, as you’ll reach people who are in immediate need. Keywords are easy to define, and you know individuals will be making use of search engines to find your service.

If you’re promoting a product that has a very precise usage and little margin for error in relevance, campaign types likely to go broader with targeting are not ideal for a starting point. For instance, if you’re selling wheel bearings for industrial trucks, you’re better off launching with a traditional search campaign than a Performance Max campaign that may struggle to narrow in on the relevant audience.

If you’re promoting a product with potential wide appeal and opportunity for visual representation (such as colorful phone cases), running a Meta campaign with broad targeting may be a good route to both showcase the product and reach people likely to engage with it.

→ Read More: A Complete Guide To PPC Ad Targeting Options

What Existing Performance Data Do You Have?

Have paid media campaigns ever been run before, or are you starting from scratch? If there is historical data from past campaigns, review that to see what channels may or may not have performed.

Of course, be sure to take into context how campaigns were set up, and don’t completely write off a channel because it may not have worked in the past. Shoddy campaign builds, mediocre offers, and poor landing page experiences may have all contributed to poor results.

What Data Can You Send Back To Ad Platforms?

In an ideal world, you should send conversion data for the most valuable actions, such as marketing/sales qualified leads and completed sales. In reality, this setup can sometimes take time and complexity to get in place, and not every business has the infrastructure in place from the beginning to track to this level.

If you don’t have conversion data for “down funnel” conversions, such as reaching a qualified lead status, focus on campaign types that allow for more control over targeting to start, such as search or LinkedIn. Avoid campaign types like Performance Max, Display, or Demand Gen that may generate questionable leads if you are just optimizing for a form fill.

Additionally, data integrations can tie into audience creation, such as syncing lists of individuals who have submitted an initial contact form to be nurtured with retargeting ads. Analyzing match rates for your lists across various platforms may provide clues as to which channels your audience is most likely engaging with.

What Is Your Budget?

A starting budget is a crucial piece in both determining what ad platforms are realistic to run on and whether to launch on one or more platforms to start.

While the ideal budget amount for launching on a new platform can be subjective, generally, you should avoid splitting a low budget between multiple platforms. Using a more limited budget in one channel, such as paid search, Google Demand Gen, or Meta, is often the best option to get started.

Additionally, some platforms require higher budgets in order to realistically get off the ground. For instance, LinkedIn tends to have high CPCs and needs enough data to be able to optimize toward those likely to convert. In my experience, monthly spends lower than $10,000 are not likely to give you the volume you need to succeed on that channel.

→ Read More: From Launch To Scale: PPC Budget Strategies For All Campaign Stages

What Assets Are Available?

Do you have a stockpile of creative or access to design resources? If image creative is a hurdle, starting out by launching in search can be an easier lift as you only need to plan for text-based assets.

Thankfully, AI-based image creation tools, such as Google’s integration of Nano Banana Pro into Ads, can help to make generating creative less of a challenge, depending on your industry. Of course, if you need specific product photography or are in a heavily regulated industry with compliance restrictions, the use of AI tools may not be an option. AI-generated images should always be reviewed for brand accuracy and quality, and outputs may not always meet professional standards.

If you have video production capabilities or can develop an AI-generated video that works for your brand, video-centric channels like YouTube may be an option. However, you need to think about ensuring that the videos you have are tailored for the channels they’re on. Repackaging a TV ad is not likely to work on TikTok, where videos should have a more personal and informal feel.

Start Planning And Start Testing

Once you’ve asked these questions about your brand and laid out initial goals, brand familiarity, data, budget, and assets, you can begin building out campaigns. After launching, you can then start gathering data and working towards expansion into additional channels.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock

10 Remarketing Lists To Boost PPC Performance via @sejournal, @brookeosmundson

Remarketing lists continue to be one of the more dependable tools inside PPC accounts, especially for search campaigns. They give advertisers clearer control over who sees ads, how bids are adjusted, and how messaging aligns with prior brand interaction.

As tracking becomes more constrained and audience signals less granular, first-party data carries more weight in day-to-day performance.

Remarketing allows you to act on what users have already done, rather than relying entirely on inferred intent or broad audience definitions.

Where many accounts fall short is in how those lists are actually applied. Lists get created, added at observation, and then largely ignored.

Without a clear purpose tied to bidding, exclusions, or messaging, remarketing ends up being underutilized.

The strategies below focus on remarketing lists that directly influence PPC decisions. Each example is designed to support how users move through the funnel and how accounts are realistically managed, not how they look in theory.

Top-Of-Funnel & Awareness Remarketing Strategies

These three remarketing strategies cover the basics of top-of-funnel marketing and utilize different campaign types to help leverage your RLSAs.

1. Target Users Who Have Engaged With A Video Campaign And Encourage Them To Take Action

If you’ve tried YouTube Ads in any form and have struggled to determine or quantify success, then this strategy might be for you.

YouTube ads are a great way to gain awareness of a product, service, or brand – but how do you get a new user to take action from that first touchpoint?

Enter in remarketing lists.

Google Ads allows you to create different types of remarketing lists based on your YouTube videos. There are two key requirements for using this list type:

• These lists can only be used in other YouTube or Search campaigns – not Display.
• Your YouTube channel must be linked to your Google Ads account.

To set up YouTube remarketing lists, navigate to Tools > Shared Library > Audience Manager.

In Audience Manager, hit the “+” button to start segmenting your YouTube remarketing lists.

From there, Google gives a multitude of options to start leveraging your YouTube video engagement for remarketing. These options include engagement from:

• Views to videos.
• Subscribes to the channel.
• Visits to the channel.
• Likes on videos.
• Add videos to playlist.
• Shares of videos.

Further, you’re able to segment further to make your remarketing lists as specific as possible:

To leverage these newly created YouTube remarketing lists, try adding them to your existing Search campaigns as “Observation Only” at first to understand if these users are more likely to interact with your campaigns versus someone who hasn’t seen your YouTube videos.

Taking it a step further, you can create new Search campaigns that specifically target these users.

The benefit is that you can provide different messaging to these users who have already interacted with your brand.

2. Exclude Low Quality Or Irrelevant Website Traffic From Search Campaigns

If you’ve run any type of awareness campaign, you’ve likely seen a boost in traffic overall, including irrelevant webpages or low-quality visitors.

What do we constitute as low-quality or irrelevant webpages?

• Any page that wouldn’t result in a purchase, such as:
  • Careers page.
  • Investors page.
  • Advertise with us page.
  • Customer Service page.
• Users who stayed on the website for less than one second.

Excluding these types of website visitors from the get-go can help make your remarketing efforts more cost-efficient in the long run.

3. Create Lookalike Audiences From Your Own First-Party Data

Using Google’s affinity audiences or attributes that consider someone at the top of funnel for your product or service can be daunting, especially if you’re a small business or have a limited budget.

It may feel that you don’t have a lot of options to reach new users without paying dearly for it.

But, have you ever thought about using your most valuable assets to build awareness?

Leveraging your own first-party data to create Lookalike audiences gives you more leverage than third-party data, such as Google’s affinity audiences, to reach like-minded people of users who already love your brand.

To create an audience like this, there are a few options to consider:

• Create a remarketing list of past purchasers using Google Ads or Google Analytics.
• Upload a list of past purchasers to Google Ads.

Depending on the size of these lists, you’ll have the option to create a Lookalike audience and use it for either YouTube, Display, or Search.

The example below shows what a remarketing list based on a completed purchase URL looks like when created in Google Ads:

I personally like to use Google Analytics when creating remarketing lists because you have many more segmentation or filtering options to be as specific as you need to be.

As a reminder, your site must be tagged and linked with either your Google Analytics property or Google Ads tag.

Consideration Stage Remarketing Strategies

These four remarketing strategies help move the user from the consideration to the purchase phase quicker using different bidding strategies and offers.

4. Increase Bids For Qualified Visitors Of Your Site Who Haven’t Made A Purchase

An easy way to leverage qualified users in your existing Search campaigns is to increase the bid on those users simply.

You don’t need to create separate campaigns for these users if you don’t want to. Segmenting these users and manipulating the bids on them keeps your account management under control.

To use this strategy, you’ll first need to create a remarketing list of users who haven’t made a purchase yet. You can use qualifications only to include people who:

• Have made it to the cart checkout.
• Visited a certain number of pages.
• Spent a certain amount of time on site.
• Visited certain categories/high-value product pages.

Once you have created those, it’s time to add them to an existing Search campaign and increase the bid.

What this means is that you’re willing to pay more for their click because they’ve already interacted with your brand in some way.

In your Search campaign, navigate to “Audiences” on the left-hand side.

In this example, I’m setting the audience at the campaign level, but you can set it at the ad group level as well.

Make sure to choose “Observation,” so you’re still able to capture other new users who are researching your brand.

Once you’ve added your qualified remarketing list, it’s time to increase your bid adjustment.

Still, in the Audiences tab, you’ll see your remarketing list added.

In the columns, you’ll see “Bid Adjustment.” Choose the “pencil” icon to change the bid as you see fit. In this example, I’m going to increase the bid by 15%.

Once you’ve implemented this change, be sure to continuously check back on the audience performance and determine if bids need to be changed based on performance.

5. Increase Bids For Users Who Have Completed A Micro-Conversion

This strategy is similar to the example above, except for the type of user you want to target.

If a user has completed a micro-conversion of any sort, they’re likely a high-qualified user to make a purchase.

What are examples of a micro-conversion? Depending on your product or service, these could include:

• Signing up for emails or newsletters.
• Downloading an ebook.
• Signing up for a webinar.
• Requesting a free sample.

These types of conversions show a user is active in research mode and seriously considering your brand.

By increasing the bid in your search campaigns for these users, you’re saying you’re willing to pay more for their clicks because they’re that much more likely to convert.

The process of setting this strategy up is the same as above, with the exception of creating a remarketing list based on the success of these micro-conversions.

6. Test Maximize Conversion Value With Cart Abandoners

This remarketing strategy would require you to create a separate campaign targeting only cart abandoners.

You may be asking, “Why not just use Maximize Conversion Value for everyone?”

If you’ve ever tested out the Maximize Conversion Value bidding strategy in Google Ads, you’ll know exactly why.

The reasons I don’t recommend using this for all campaigns include:

• You can’t set any maximum ceiling values.
• Not all users are ready to purchase.

By segmenting a search campaign specifically for cart abandoners, you can test this bidding strategy at a lower threshold – and with the most qualified users who are most likely to make a purchase.

Similar to the above examples, this strategy tells Google that you’re willing to be more flexible in how much you pay for someone to make a purchase.

And what better way to test this than with users who were almost ready to make that purchase?

To set this strategy into motion, you first need to create a remarketing list of “Cart Abandoners.”

This will look different for everyone, but it will likely be URL-based and able to be created in either Google Analytics or Google Ads.

After that list has been created, it’s time to set up your new search campaign.

This campaign can be a duplicate of any other search campaign. Just make sure to exclude your Cart Abandoner list from that existing campaign. We don’t want any crossover here!

When creating the new campaign, this is where you’ll set the bid strategy to “Maximize Conversion Value” in the settings.

Google Ads does give you the option to set a target return on ad spend, giving you somewhat control over campaign performance.

Depending on how much flexibility you have in your marketing budget, you can either leave that blank or set a target.

If you do set a target ROAS, make sure not to set it too high right away. Otherwise, the campaign won’t be able to effectively learn.

7. Create Offers Based On The User’s Interaction Timeline

Did you know you can create the same remarketing list of users, but segment them by the number of days?

Say you had a cart abandoner and wanted to move them toward purchase ASAP. You may be willing to give them a higher discount since the purchase was still new in their mind.

If they still haven’t purchased within three days, you may choose to still give them a discount, but not as high as the first offer.

After seven days, you still want them to keep your product top-of-mind, but that discount or offer may change again because they’ve waited so long.

So, how do you go about setting up this strategy?

First, you’ll want to create three different remarketing lists (for this example only).

Create cart abandoner audiences separated out by one day, three days, and seven days.

In Google Ads, you simply change the “membership duration” for each list. An example of where to change that during list creation is below:

Once these lists are created, I recommend setting up different ad groups for each list. You’ll want different ad groups because the offer will be different for each list.

The last crucial piece of targeting cart abandoners is to exclude purchasers from your campaign. You will do this in the “Audiences” tab of your campaign and add your “Purchasers” remarketing list as an exclusion.

Post-Purchase Journey Remarketing Strategies

Once a user has made a purchase, that’s not necessarily the end of their journey!

These remarketing strategies enable past purchasers to become your most valuable asset and opportunities for repeat purchasers to become brand advocates.

8. Cross-Promote Other Products Based On A User’s Purchase Behavior

One of the best ways to create a repeat purchaser is to recommend complementing products based on a user’s purchase.

For example, say you’re a makeup brand, and a user just purchased their first tube of lipstick and mascara from you.

An effective remarketing strategy would include creating lists of past purchasers segmented by product category. This enables you to cross-promote other products and exclude product types they’ve just purchased.

In this example, you may create a remarketing list of users who have bought lipstick or mascara. You can then use that list to remarket products like foundation or eye shadow to encourage a repeat purchase.

These lists and strategies would work well in Dynamic Remarketing Ads or Google Shopping Ads. Because these products are much more visible, you’d want to use those campaign types to your advantage.

9. Exclude Past Purchasers To Maximize Spend Efficiency

As mentioned in strategy No. 7, you’ll want to exclude past purchasers from current acquisition campaigns to maximize spending efficiency.

An example of lazy remarketing is for a user to see an ad for a product they have already purchased.

Not only does that create a bad taste for the user, but that means you’re wasting valuable marketing money on people who have already purchased.

Now, there are certainly times when you’d not want to exclude past purchasers, especially if your product is a repeat purchase.

But, in these examples, your search campaigns are likely going after new users.

To exclude past purchasers, go to Audiences on the left-hand side of your campaign, then find the “Exclusions” table.

10. Create Brand Advocates From Your Existing High-Value Customers

It’s true when they say that your customers are your best advocates. They have put their trust in you to deliver a high-value product or service that they have come to know and trust.

So, how do you turn them into advocates?

This remarketing strategy still includes utilizing that same past purchaser list. A few different options you could potentially offer past purchasers:

• Create a referral program and give discounts to each person who purchases.
• Offer discounts based on providing a positive public review.

Just because someone has purchased from you once does not mean they become a loyal customer. Sometimes it takes additional motivation to want to purchase again.

Loyalty or referral discounts are a great way to keep your existing customers coming back to you, as well as utilizing their own referral vehicles to generate new customers.

Creating referral programs is a low-cost and efficient multi-channel awareness strategy that is mutually beneficial for you – the brand and the customer.

Using Remarketing Lists With Intent, Not Just Coverage

Remarketing lists are most effective when they are built to support specific decisions inside your account. That includes how aggressively you bid, who you exclude, and where you shift budget based on user behavior.

Rather than treating remarketing as a single tactic, it works better as a system layered throughout the funnel. Lists tied to meaningful actions, like product views, cart activity, or prior purchases, tend to deliver far more value than broad, catch-all audiences.

As broader targeting becomes less reliable, remarketing offers a level of control that is increasingly hard to replace. When lists are thoughtfully segmented and actively used, they help PPC managers spend more efficiently and act with more confidence.

The real impact of remarketing does not come from how many lists you create. It comes from how intentionally those lists shape your bidding, targeting, and messaging decisions.

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Featured Image: Tetiana Yurchenko/Shutterstock

Why Paid Search Foundations Still Matter In An AI-Focused World

At this point in time, AI search products such as Google and Microsoft’s PMax (and now AI Max) have firmly woven themselves into the toolkits of search marketers around the globe. But as many search marketers rush to not only test new products but also scale paid search activity, there is an increasing tendency to neglect the core elements of what makes a successful paid search account: audience, structure, and intent.

Within this article, I’ll aim to throw paid search foundations back into the limelight, placing an emphasis on why core concepts remain important and highlighting the fact that AI products don’t necessarily replace foundations but only serve to enhance them.

How We Got Here

It is, of course, important to stress that the shift towards AI prevalence has been a gradual one. From the early days of obsessing over match types and manual cost-per-click (CPCs) to Smart Bidding playing a greater role in finding customers across varying points of the user journey – we’ve come a long way to get here. With products such as PMax claiming to “do it all for you,” we can see that the “hands on” approach of yesteryear has become less active.

With every step taken towards the current climate, we have handed a little more control to the machine. While this has allowed us to scale campaigns on a much greater level, when comparing the role of a PPC manager now to 10 years ago, the day-to-day tasks look exponentially different.

But as automation has increased, so has the machines’ reliance upon clean and consistent foundations. AI features can only optimize based on what we feed it. If structure, signals, or audiences aren’t clear, the machine has no concept of what “good” looks like. Because of this, AI hasn’t removed the need for fundamentals; it’s made them more important.

Structure Is Still Integral To Success

Automated systems and products such as PMax encourage greater levels of consolidation through feeding insights to the algorithm and letting it decide what works best for us. However, in practice, structure remains one of the biggest drivers around whether AI drives success or not.

PMax is not psychic. It doesn’t have a full understanding of specific product margins your business may have, your product development lines, or your business’ full commercial realities (yet!). The only way to do this is to make those distinctions clear. This is where structure comes in! A well-structured account provides boundaries for the machine to work with. It helps by:

• Providing clean learning environments: Grouping products and services in a logical manner helps to ensure that products such as PMax aren’t trying to learn everything all at once. Through clear separation, you increase the likelihood of more accurate outcomes.
• Maintaining budget control: If everything is thrown into one campaign, it makes it increasingly more difficult to avoid under-performing products from cannibalizing budget.
• Reducing conflicting intent: When campaigns mix differing intents (e.g., providing varying conversion actions that are contradictory from a user journey standpoint), the machine receives much greater volumes of noise. Through clear separation and delineation within a well-structured account, advertisers can reduce skewed data and improve performance.

Audience Insight Remains AI’s Compass

When it comes to understanding people, human marketers will always hold a competitive advantage. Knowing why people convert, what motivates them, and ultimately, the understanding of human nature will always mean that human marketers have an intrinsic intuition that search features such as PMax will never have. Acknowledging this, it’s key that humans feed quality customer insights into these platforms to ensure that the machine can gain a better understanding of what makes us tick.

As an example, a family car buyer and a luxury SUV buyer may both search for [SUV cars], but their motivations and expectations differ dramatically. AI can easily cluster this behavior, but it takes human insight to translate that behavior into effective positioning.

Taking this into account, the foundational understanding of a) what makes a solid audience grouping and b) how to implement said audience is again where foundational understanding comes into play. The strongest performing PMax campaigns are the ones filled with the richest insights. CRM, loyalty information, and higher intent user signals often significantly improve PMax’s ability to drive performance. AI products can only feed off information you provide, and those signals must be rooted in real audience understanding.

When you understand your audience deeply, AI has a stronger foundation to optimize from. When you don’t, you leave the machine to guess.

Intent (And Keywords) Still Drive Everything

It could be argued that automation has accelerated the death of keywords, but what it hasn’t done is decrease the importance of intent. Search has always been (and remains!) an intent-driven channel. PMax might automate placements and assets, but it still requires queries and signals to understand what someone wants.

We might now be seeing fewer search queries (much to my annoyance!), but the system is still learning from billions of intent signals. Taking this into account, having a core, foundational understanding of intent enables you to:

Identify and prevent wasted spend. ALWAYS my ace card. Negatives and keyword exclusions remain critical in helping to guide AI products. Advertisers who refine intent signals almost always outperform those who automatically assume that ‘leaving it to the machine’ is the best approach.

Match creative with motivation. Understanding customer intent will help to ensure that you avoid over-generic ad copy and craft content that customers actually engage with.

Align landing pages with behavior. AI can send traffic to your pages, but if the content doesn’t match user intent, account efficiency will be impacted.

A Whole New World

To quote the 1992 Disney classic “Aladdin,” it really is a whole new world (pretty sure they had PMax in mind when writing that song…). However, while the further acceleration of AI products may have changed the mechanics of search advertising, what it hasn’t done is make the fundamentals less important.

Audience insight still guides strategy. Intent still shapes relevance of content. Structure still shapes accuracy. These are not only essentials that have stood the test of time but will also provide a clear advantage to advertisers who can recognize their benefit.

The future of paid search truly isn’t a case of fighting the machine; it’s about ensuring we influence the algorithms by providing richer context and insight, in turn utilizing their ability to scale to further drive results.

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Featured Image: N Universe/Shutterstock