How Advertorials Can Help You Take Over the SERP and Win More Sales

In this episode of Google Ads Unleashed, host Jeremy breaks down the power of advertorials - paid articles that look like editorial content and guide users to convert without aggressive sales tactics. 

You’ll learn when to use advertorials, how they help you capture more SERP real estate after maxing out Search, Shopping, and Demand Gen, and the step-by-step process to launch your own campaign. From comparison pages to cross-domain tracking and even affiliate tie-ins, this episode shows why advertorials can outperform standard prospecting campaigns.

👉 Want to see how this strategy could work for your brand? Connect with Jeremy on LinkedIn or via email for a deep dive.

Get your free 30 minute strategy session with Jeremy here: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/

Scale your store with 1:1 coaching: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/1-2-1-coaching

Transcript

Hello guys, and welcome back to Google Ads unleashed. Hope everyone is doing fabulously this Monday. And I want to start with a scenario. Imagine you are after a new keyboard for your Mac, you know, like an external one, or for your home computer. Have you look for best keyboards online, and you find an article, click on it, and it compares the top five best keywords keyboards in the hours of Freudian slip keyboards in the UK and guides you towards making the best purchase for the best value of money that Welcome to the world of advertorials. That's exactly what has just happened. You fell basically for an advertorial. So this is a user journey that is starting to become more and more common, and that which we see work better and better for a lot of our partners. So this episode is all about what they are, when are they used, and how you can launch your first advertorial campaign as well. Let's dive right in. So first of all, what are advertorials? So advertorials are paid ads that are designed to look like an editorial article, and they blend ads with an editorial style content. That is why they're called advertorial right? So it's basically a made up word between the two. They usually are on third party sites, and they're not on the same website as yours, and they usually are written in order to instill sort of trust into what is written, and that they're usually quite filled with a lot of informative material. And they are usually written in such a style that they gently guide the user from whatever their research and whatever they've looked for towards conversion without an aggressive sales tactic. So when are they used, and what can they look like, sort of what's, what's the whole point of them? So usually we come up with them when we add two crossroads. The first one is more out of necessity. So something that, unfortunately, I think it's, it's a good thing, and unfortunately, happens to us quite a lot, is that we scale up so fast that we run out of search volume. Yeah. So this is a common issue that we face. So whilst we, of course, try to always combat this with better offers, improve quality, score, go horizontal, like with more products, different nations, different languages, etc, there is just, it happens quite a lot that we just run out of volume, right? So there's not more brand search. We've maxed out shopping and p max. We've maxed out search campaigns. We Max we're maxing out demand gen, and then we are looking to expand further. And the easy way to simply expand is to take up more space in the SERP, and that is what we do then, with advertorials on a different ad account. Okay? So we just expand more into the same search volume by basically just taking more of the impression share. There's also sometimes, very rarely, advertorials can be used when there's very, very little search volume directly for your product, but a lot of search volume for the problem, right? So that is when people are very problem aware, but they're not solution aware. We had a client many, many moons ago who sold supplements for dogs, right? So any kind of supplement you can think of, for instance, for gut health, for their food, etc, etc, and one of the supplements they sold was against arthritis and dogs. So naturally, there was not a lot of search volume for supplements for dogs against arthritis. Okay, so that didn't really happen very often, but what happened very often is people searched for my dog is limping, or my dog is not walking, right, etc, etc. And that is where advertorials came in, and they can look completely different, right? So, for instance, they can be told from the first person perspective. For instance, that advertorial I just talked about, talked about that this guy discovered this thing because his dog was limping, and then his dog was able to walk again, more or less after a couple of weeks, right? There is also other forms, right? Sort of you probably have seen sort of ones where they basically just write. Write about the product itself and all of its benefits, benefits, right? Something like seven benefits of drinking greens, powder, something like that. Or the ones which are my absolute favorite, because they're super, super easy to do, are the comparison advertorials. So we've done this for several brands now, we even done this for we even just completed one last week, and we done this for a brand that sells a particular kind of shoe, and basically we have got a third party domain now, and we are when someone searches for that type of shoe, we have designed a page now that when they click on there, they will find a comparison advertorial. So it's a third party page that sort of pretends, I guess, to be an authority in this area, and has compared the best sort of brands in the market for that particular shoe. Why is that the easiest one? Because it's very easy to replicate. Because with the for instance, the dog one, which I've just mentioned, it was ridiculously hard to find a good copywriter who could write such a fabulous, fabulous story which was so compelling and really, really convincing and kept the readers in basically to every word so that it was then guided towards the sale. The comparison advertorial is relatively easy to build, and also it can be replicated quite easily for most one product stores, right? So how do you go about it? And how do we go about it is relatively straightforward. You first of all get a third party domain, something that has to do with the product, something that can be, yeah, that sounds a little bit like the product, for instance, that particular shoe I just mentioned. We have a website that says something like men's trends or something like that, right? Or with another client of ours, where we have the where we sell acupressure mats. We literally have a domain, literally just called acupressure mat, dot, whatever the ending of the country is, right? So it's really not easy. That's the first one that you do. Then the second thing that you get is some sort of landing page building tool. We usually recommend framer or funnel ish or landing key or click funnel, something that's relatively easy to make, yeah, so that you can make it yourself. Then you want to in the third step, hi, a good copywriter who can put together such an advertorial for you. If you are wondering how these look like, have a search for any kind of mundane product. I bet you any money there will be advertorials out there comparing, for instance, the best collagen boosters out there, or the top five travel pillows or gone as well, right? So have a look, and you will find those and how they look like and you can relatively easily replicate them. Then you will have to set up cross domain tracking as the next step, right? That's quite difficult again. You will need either some experience there, or you will need some sort of copyright, um, some sort of tracking specialists who can set that up for you. You can sometimes very easily even set it up through Google Analytics four, right? Because it's quite easy to set it across the main tracker in Google Analytics four, and then you chuck a campaign into a separate ad account after you've hooked everything up and let the ads run. And what happens then is that, let's say someone searches for this particular shoe, and our advertiser, our client, is actually appearing in position one and then position two, three, whatever. I know they don't formally exist anymore, but that is when they're our advertorial campaign hits for the same kind of words. And we are doing this at the moment in several in several domains. So we do this for supplements. We do this with a client who sells knives. We do this with the client who sells travel pillows. We do this the acupressure guy, etc, etc. Okay. Usually, how these advertorials are then best built is that you, of course, position your product as the number one product, and then you can test, for instance, sending them to a sales page, an offer page, or something similar. And the other ones you want to, of course, send to your competitor pages, or, much better, you create an affiliate link for their Amazon offer, and then send them to the Amazon listing. So if someone ends up buying on Amazon, you actually get a commission from that sale as well. So that's how you maximize your money in that regard. We do these as well. So if you are interested in any thing of that. And wanted to learn simply reach out and let you know at the end of the podcast how to do so there's just now, of course, one thing that you will have to think about, and that's a little bit of the ethics around it. So there are some mandates. So I would probably read up on this before that you have to be quite honest about who you are and disclose that, of course, yeah, so I believe BuzzFeed, for instance, was penalized for misleading advertorials because it wasn't clear up front who the brand was that was behind that okay. And in print and online, a lot of countries such as the United States, for instance, they require that paid editorial content is marked as advertisement, right? So you just have to be quite careful of that. And you also have to be careful of ethical implications, right? Because, to a certain degree, this is a level of misdirection, right? There's no doubt about it, and I'm not going to stand here and say that that is not but you have to sort of guide your own advertisers agenda and how you want to position a product in front of a user with, you know, the risk of reader deception. Okay, so I would not, I would probably try and strike a balance of seeing this as an additional channel, but of course, not using the power of such an advertorial and third party page to spread nonsense, to sell fake products or to sell crappy products. Right? So I would remain educational and value focused. I would always clearly label that it is an advertorial to be compliant. And I would just be honest with the users who are reading it, we're seeing some really good results in some of the accounts. This is the God's honest truth. The advertorial actually outperforms our our normal prospect and search campaigns, which is quite actually shocking, to be honest, but it just shows how good it is at turning cold traffic into people who are ready to purchase. And like I said, if you want to learn how to do this, simply reach out. It's Jeremy at young and digital dot marketing or Jeremy young Google ads on LinkedIn, you can find me there. Simply connect, have a chat with me, and I'd love to do the same for your brand. Thank you for listening. This has been Jeremy young, a personal Google Ads expert, and I wish you a happy and productive week ahead.