Let's Talk About The 5A's In Google Ads

`The 5A’s are simply Google’s pillars for “successful digital transformation.” These pillars are the fundamental principles to help users get to grips with digital transformation.

If you’re thinking of leveling up your digital activity but you aren’t sure where to start, start with the 5 A’s.

Audience

This is all about identifying who your core audience is and engaging with them to make your campaigns work harder. To make this easier, Google splits this pillar out into 3 separate steps:

Offline and online customer data: The more data you can plug into Google, the better! And Google loves nothing more than that sweet sweet customer data that you get through tracking, Analytics 4 and uploading customer lists into the platform.
Centralise your data: Pull your data into a singular place and make sure to analyse! Analysing the data you collect will help build a roadmap for a successful campaign.
Define your strategy: Just like any digital marketing activity, strategy is key. Running ads without a strategy is like driving a car whilst wearing a blindfold, it’s probably not the best idea.

Assets

We’ve already discussed the importance of strategy, but strategy doesn’t just sit with your audience and targeting, it also sits with your creative that is pumped into a campaign and the users overall experience:

Relevance: From your ad creative, to your landing page, relevance is extremely important. A highly relevant ad caters to the user, easing their experience, which gets a big green tick in Google’s eyes.
Simplicity: Speaking of easing the user’s experience… Ensuring the user’s journey is smooth and painless is another box you need to fill. Optimising all points in the user journey from both an ad and a website perspective is a great way to do this, especially when it comes to mobile devices.
Personalisation: Personalising ad creative to the user and their stage in the journey is not only cheered on by Google, but it is also a marketing strategy must-have to improve click-through rates and the quality of your clicks.

Attribution

Attribution is essentially the measurement of all touchpoints that led up to a conversion and how those touchpoints are credited in your reporting. This is an incredibly important tool and skill to understand.

Ads will often be the first point of contact between a consumer and your business, which means they’ll likely go down a journey ahead of converting with you. Measuring these touchpoints will aid massively in your decision making when running ad activity and allow you to truly establish what is working well and what isn’t.

Automation

Google wants us to leverage automation now more than ever before whilst encouraging account simplification, this is simply for the purposes of allowing your campaigns to learn at a faster rate due to being fed more information.

Much like ‘access,’ leaning more on broader targeting, smart bidding and the more automated/AI driven campaigns is the best way to get the ball rolling when it comes to automating your account. But remember, when it comes to automating your account… ALWAYS ensure you are tracking results and feed that tracking back into the platform!