Google has dominated the digital advertising landscape for a long time now. In fact, they’ve monopolized the space for so long that they’ve been subject to legal scrutiny.

Despite this, Google remains the firm favourite among advertisers. Stats published by Quartr indicate that advertisers spend more on Google ads than both Meta and Amazon ads. In Q3 2024, advertisers spent $58bn on Google and YouTube ads, versus $40bn on Meta and $14bn on Amazon.

But Google’s foundations are being shaken. With massive new social media platforms like TikTok entering the search ad space and AI chatbots launching in-app ads, Google may finally see some challenges to its title as the top advertising platform out there.

So how important is it for advertisers to diversify their ad spend away from Google? And how easy is it to diversify when Google holds so much data? In this Paid Media Lab episode, we caught up with Matt Shenton, biddable director at Croud and host of the Paid Search NYC podcast, to find out how to expand your paid media strategy across other platforms.

Matt talks about getting more from the Google ecosystem, how to maintain ad spend efficiency when moving to new platforms, and how to determine attribution when you’re spending across more channels. Plus, get Matt’s take on the future of Google ads in an AI world:

Episode timestamps: 

0:00 - Coming up
0:15 - Intro
2:09 - Matt’s insights from Paid Search NYC
3:31 - US vs. UK: Marketing mindsets
4:22 - Key advice for platform diversification
10:52 - Budget reallocation mistakes
13:44 - Ad platforms with the most potential
19:17 - Matt’s thoughts on Perplexity / AI ads
21:17 - Testing channels/platforms fairly & cheaply
25:15 - Marketing efficiency ratio & MMMs
26:10 - Maintaining marketing spend efficiency 
29:06 - Testing brand campaign value effectively
31:12 - Matt’s attribution strategy
36:35 - Will Google still dominate PPC in 2 years? 
39:29 - Final thoughts

Expanding within the Google ecosystem

While diversifying your PPC scope is a great way to reach new audiences — and appropriate for many brands — Matt recommends maxing out your potential within the Google ecosystem before you move away:

“There's probably more you can do to grow within the Google ecosystem. And I think it's important to make that point because it is still one of the most sophisticated media landscapes available, from the variety of inventory — video, image, text — to the quality of the platform first party data, which feeds the targeting.

You can scale across the funnel in multiple formats or within the Google ecosystem. So I don't want to sound too pro-Google, but I think it's important to think about things in that way before diversifying straight away.”

To make sure you’re ready to diversify, Matt recommends analyzing two key elements: setup and headroom. Check your Google ads campaigns are set up correctly, you’re following all current best practices, and your campaigns are structured appropriately.

Next, analyze your headroom. If you’re just using Google Search without Performance Max, YouTube, or Demand Gen, you’re probably going to reach a limit fairly quickly. Exploring other Google ads products lets you take advantage of Google’s sophisticated capabilities while experimenting with new funnel stages, audiences, and creative formats.

Where should you take your PPC campaigns after Google?

So once you’ve fully optimized your Google campaigns, where next? Matt recommends looking at advertising on Meta, which is the second biggest advertising platform, encompassing Facebook and Instagram ads:

“I think once you've done [Google] Search, you've done YouTube — and you're running YouTube in a way that's multifunneled, it's not just all CPA-based — and you're getting into consideration, you're running Demand Gen… You're probably then in a position where you've got assets that you could then repurpose into other channels like Meta.

If you can do Demand Gen in Google, and that's working for you, you'd probably be able to get it to work in Meta, because those products are relatively similar and the creative is the biggest part of what dictates if it's good or not. So if one's good, it will probably do well on the other.”

At this point it’s worth highlighting Matt’s caveat from early in the conversation, which is: the ad platforms you choose really depend on lots of different factors, including your vertical, size, and maturity as a business. For example, TikTok isn’t always the best platform for B2B PPC lead gen, especially compared to professional channels like LinkedIn. It’s all about analyzing each platform’s potential with your audience in mind:

“Once you've got Google running well across the core ecosystem, and you've got Meta running well, you've then got a more sporadic choice of platforms. Start to think about: where's my audience overindexing? An easy example would be TikTok. If you're in beauty, that audience overindexes from a discovery point of view on that platform. Or if you're going after B2B, SaaS, you might go Reddit, because there are people researching those kinds of terms. 

On these channels, you have to be a bit more deliberate in terms of where the audience is overindexing. You don't necessarily need to do that too much on Google and Meta because those platforms have mass appeal.”

Is it worth exploring ad opportunities in LLMs?

ChatGPT and other LLMs have become widely used in recent years, with many now using them as an alternative to traditional search engines. To capitalize on this boom in popularity, it’s expected that AI firms will find a way to include ads on their platforms.

Matt says people are using chatbots and search engines in different ways, with high purchase intent searches more prevalent on Google vs LLMs. This may be why initial attempts to monetize LLMs via advertising haven’t gone brilliantly, with Perplexity recently ‘deprioritizing’ its ad offering. But Matt believes there could be a future in LLM advertising:

“If you think about what AI search and conversational search is and what it could be, there's almost an opportunity to collapse the search funnel. Because you can take someone who's having a conversation about something that's very informational and discovery-based, and then take them on a journey through that conversation to the point where they then buy a product.

I think it's most evident in ChatGPT. Whenever you converse with it, it says at the bottom: would you like me to do this, this, and this as a follow-up? It carries on the conversation. If they engineered that experience to guide you to a point where they then put something in front of you as a product or service, it's almost like a salesperson. They’ve got you talking. Now they just need to find out how to sell to you.”

For now, LLM ad opportunities are very limited. But in future, they could provide another advertising avenue to explore, especially for discovery and other top-of-funnel activity.

How to test new platforms (without overspending)

It can be difficult to know where to put your ad spend without taking heavy risks with your budget. If you get a worse return than you were getting from Google, it becomes hard to justify your diversification plans. So it’s really important to do plenty of research and test your campaigns on a limited budget beforehand.

Matt recommends breaking your platform analysis down into four parts.

• Audience analysis:“You only have a finite amount of time, you don’t want to be running 10 different platforms. So make sure the platform you're looking to advertise on still has the volume from in terms of your market.”
• Data availability: “What's the platform's quality of first party data? Google's the gold standard. Reddit doesn't have a ton of first-party user data on you compared to Google. That means the targeting isn't as good, so the CPAs might be higher.”
• Media buying strategy: “How do you buy media on that platform? On TikTok, you can buy in different formats: CPC, CPM or impressions. So what's the one that makes sense from a volume and audience perspective?”
• Engagement metrics: “Think about how you judge the success of that platform. In the early stages, you're probably going to be looking to benchmark engagement metrics with somewhat similar platforms that you're running. As time goes on, you can kind of move to those harder metrics: CPA, ROAS, etc.”

This approach helps you justify every move you make, rather than taking a shot in the dark. So even if you don’t get the results you’re looking for initially, you know the campaign was conceived on a solid basis. This can give you the confidence and data to make decisions — whether to continue testing and refining your campaign, or head back to Google.

How attribution modelling can improve your holistic view of marketing success

When you’re diversifying your ad spend, it’s important to get an accurate picture of results. Individual platform analytics help fuel the algorithms that influence future conversions. But they also tend to flatter themselves in terms of attribution, so Matt recommends looking at media mix modeling (MMMs) and incrementality alongside platform data to give a more rounded, realistic view of results:

“There's loads of these attribution systems you can build and put together, but there's going to be so many debt gaps in the data that the success of your overall marketing effectiveness is going to be partly dictated by your attribution model. I think it's so difficult to get that model exactly right. You kind of have to go with your best guess, use these longer term systems and tools to validate the true value, and then adjust the model.

So I guess you're working in different time zones. Platform data is hourly, daily. Your source of truth is more on a weekly basis. Then your MMMs and incrementality are on a monthly or quarterly basis. If you do that all well, it all feeds each other, and you optimize in a smarter way over the long term without losing the ability to optimize in the short term.”

How to maintain ad spend efficiency when you diversify across platforms

All advertisers want to get the best possible return from their ad spend. And if you’ve spent time carefully refining your Google campaigns, you’ll want to maintain that efficiency when you branch out into other platforms. So is it possible?

Matt recommends a three-pronged approach for keeping your ad spend under control. First, review your account structure. Second, make sure the first party data you’re bringing in is as clean as it can be (particularly conversion data). Third, optimize incrementality. Matt says this is the biggest opportunity for improvement: 

“We don't find many clients these days who aren't bringing in good CRM lead data with LTVs or profit data. Most sophisticated advertisers are doing that now.

But there's still quite a few that are heavily invested in brand search because they haven't figured out how to come out of that space in a way that leaves everyone happy. They don’t want to damage the numbers within a silo (even though if you take search holistically, it looks fine). Incrementality is still the one key area of optimization.”

Incrementality testing is essential for advertisers looking to squeeze as much value as they can from their budgets, as it shows what’s really moving the needle in your campaigns and helps you move away from last-click attribution. Here’s how Matt suggests testing incrementality:

“There are two different ways you can approach it. You can come out [of the ad space] and then reassess maybe after a couple of weeks or a month. That works for advertisers who are in a less fast paced, volatile market, where you've not necessarily got new competitors coming in all the time.

For advertisers that work in a space that's more dynamic, there are automated third party tools that can scrape the SERP every five, 10 minutes. Is there a competitor? Are you P1 in organic? Put a negative keyword in, pull the ad out, save the money, reassess. And that's an effective real-time solution.”

Will Google continue to dominate the ad landscape?

Google’s search market share has fallen in recent months, leading to speculation that its dominance in the sector may be waning. But despite other platforms’ best attempts to topple them, Google looks likely to retain its crown as the king of online advertising. Matt shares his view:

“I think Google will still be in its current position, if not even more dominant. The regulatory risk feels like it's fallen away. From a user behavior's perspective, we know now that it's not a zero-sum game. LLMs are additional, they're not taking away from Google. So Google isn't losing massive market share.

And then if you think about who has the tools, data and experience to figure out how to monetize this new way of searching, who are you going to choose? Are you going to choose the company that's been doing it for 15, 20 years? Probably. Are they on the back foot a little bit with conversational search and AI? Yes. Have they caught up? Yes. Are they in the best place to figure out how to monetize it? I think so.”

Matt’s top tips for diversifying PPC campaigns and ad spend

Considering branching out across more PPC channels? Here’s a round-up of Matt’s top tips:

• Audit your Google setup before reallocating your budget to other platforms — Fix any structural or setup issues to ensure you’re getting the most from your Google ad spend.
• Expand within Google first if possible — Explore channels like YouTube and Demand Gen if you’re not yet using these.
• Assess each platform’s strengths before deciding where to expand — Consider other platforms’ first-party data and whether your audience has a significant presence there.
• Allow a learning period for each platform — Don’t pull your budget without letting campaigns run long enough for the algorithms to understand your audience and objectives.
• Validate performance using platform analytics and MMMs — Platform-reported conversion data can be misleading, so make sure you have a source of truth as well.
• Feed platforms high-quality first-party data — Performance increasingly depends on data quality. You need good input to receive good output.
• Test incrementality systematically — Use the right tools and data (depending on how volatile your competitor landscape is) to determine when you can safely pause campaigns without losing performance.

Optimize ad spend across platforms with Lunio

Choosing the right ad platform for your audience and brand can help you broaden your reach and make more sales.

Huge thanks to Matt Shenton for highlighting the best practices and pitfalls involved in diversifying your PPC spend — make sure to check out Matt’s Paid Search NYC YouTube channel and podcast for more insights.

No matter which platforms you’re using, Lunio can help you optimize your ad spend.

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