How to Repurpose Winning Demand Gen Creatives (Before They Burn Out)

Your Demand Gen creatives are crushing it… then suddenly performance drops. 

In this episode of Google Ads Unleashed, hosr Jeremy reveals the “Zombie Campaign” strategy, a simple Google Ads Demand Gen tactic to revive high-performing creatives after they start to burn out. 

Learn how to repurpose winning ads using tCPA or tROAS bid caps, extend creative lifespan, and squeeze extra performance from assets that once drove conversions.

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

Sometimes you launch a demand genen campaign and you have creatives which are absolutely crushing it and then after a short amount of time they either become too expensive or they start to burn out. You have the same issue when you actually launch meta ads. Today I'm going to tell you how you can still repurpose those creatives without having to edit anything just by reusing the same ones. Hello and welcome back to Google Ads Unleash, guys. Hope everyone is doing fabulously this Monday morning or whenever you're listening. But today, I've got like a quick and dirty one. So, it should be quite a short episode really because I just want to share um a cool thing with you which is something I've been testing lots more and which has just simply started to work for us and that is what I call zombie campaigns. So, I had bit of um the inspiration from a very good friend of mine uh wi who sort of uses this concept very regularly on meta ads. So on meta um with my limited knowledge of course I'm pretty well aware of how everything works but I don't I'm not as deep in it as I'm with with Google ads of course you of course have to test creatives and we do the same thing in demand gen right very often we repurpose even just the best performing creatives from uh from a good push such as meta on uh demand genen and that works pretty well. Okay, so what typically happened and this is something that my friend noticed is that after a while creatives tend to burn out um when they're not absolute killer creative. Some of course some creative can run forever, right? Some I I know some ad accounts where the same ad has been running for years potentially even. But at some point the audience that you target is getting fed up with with the ad that they're seeing or um it just starts to become more expensive. It still may convert but the CPCs are creeping up or the conversion rate slightly uh gone down etc etc and you have it in your existing demand gen or meta ads campaign and it doesn't seem to work anymore. So what my mate done is the following. So he created a separate campaign which he calls a zombie campaign um put a bit cap on it. So he's that basically I'm not willing to spend more than X, Y, and Zed per click um or CPM or whatever in order to reach my intended audience. And he slapped those best performer creatives in there. So, I've done the same. Typically, I've I've already made a uh made a full episode on how to structure your demanding campaign. So, go and listen to that one. But typically, if we have a working setup that we are running, we do exactly the same. So, we have sort of an existing setup. We of course use third party attribution, post-purchase survey data and others to understand how well a creative is doing but at some point creatives may be burning out. So something that we've done a lot now in the recent weeks is when we actually understand that a creative has done sensationally well instead of just making variations or adding a different hook or whatever and trying to revive it which we don't do that much really. Um uh very rarely Do we actually produce creative ourselves? We want to produce creative ourselves further down the line. But what we are doing very regularly is to duplicate those into a new demand gen campaign but use either TCPA or Toras with it. Why that works is pretty straightforward because most demand gen campaigns when you create them new and when you launch them can only launch on a max conversion strategy. So So it's quite an aggressive bid strategy that will very aggressively try to go for um as many conversions as possible of course um whatever demand Jim can measure of course within the platform. So what the TCPA strategy does is or the Tora strategy is it limits your bids exactly like it does with my friend with this meta campaign where he has a bid cap. It limits the bids and the CPMs and and it just prolongs the lifetime of those creatives. Okay, so we've been doing this quite a lot with stuff that we in in in all of our ad accounts um well yeah in in in a lot of our ad accounts and it's worked remarkably well. So you can even go back historically looked at all the stuff that you've turned off that once worked pop it into this new campaign that you've created with a bitcap which is now working because you've been running a lot of demand for a while and um uh quite frankly off by heart I'm not sure if every new demand gen requires to be off max conversions nowadays but uh typically it's still a good idea because that's quite an aggressive bit strategy to test the creative and then you can put it into this new campaign for the TCPA I would probably look at a time period where your campaign worked really well look at what the onplatform TCPA or Toras was of that campaign and set it like slightly TCPA slightly below or the target draw slightly above that. Right? So, in order to get a conservative bid, what I've noticed is is that those campaigns don't f spend the full daily budget either usually. Uh so, you can be quite aggressive with your budgets on those because you know that the absolute proven best performers on demand gen. And it just adds another like 10 15% in volume to your existing uh setup because you're just repurposing those creatives. Again, what I would do do is separate those out by uh placement if you can. If you have enough volume for either um shorts in stream um and images, right? If you don't, more than happy for you to just create one campaign uh with this uh bid strategy. One ad group for the shorts, one ad group for instream, one ad group for your image placements, potentially an ad group for infe. And let it run like this. Copy that and let me know how it works. I'd love to hear your feedback. But that's why you need to be creative about your Google ads. And if you feel stuck, then just have a chat with me. Just send me an email jeremyanddigital.marketing or head to the website younganddigital.marketing and book a uh call with me on Calendarly or alternatively you can always message me on LinkedIn Jeremy and Google Ads and I'm happy to help you there as well and give you a helping hand. I hope this tip was helpful. Uh do let me know and I would love to see you in the next episode