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I have spent over $122 million on Google Ads to generate my clients over $10.2 billion in sales in over a thousand different niches. And these are the six Google ad hacks that I wish I knew sooner. Starting with hack number one.
Sabri Suby reveals 6 powerful Google Ads hacks to maximize ROI by focusing on high-intent keywords and crafting compelling ads that sell clicks, not products.
Key Takeaways
- A small number of high-intent keywords drive most of your Google Ads success.
- Ads should focus on selling the click through curiosity and information, not direct selling.
- Use data-driven approaches to identify and prioritize your best-performing keywords.
- Research your audience’s mindset deeply to craft compelling ad copy.
- Consistent focus on fundamentals and measurement is key to scaling Google Ads profitably.
What the video covers
- Sabri Suby shares insights from spending $122M on Google Ads generating $10.2B in sales across 1000+ niches.
- Hack 1: Focus on 'coliseum keywords'—a small percentage of keywords that drive the majority of leads and revenue using the 80/20 principle.
- Transactional keywords with high buyer intent are more valuable than high-volume, low-intent keywords.
- Export your keyword data to identify which keywords drive 80% of results and focus budget accordingly.
- Hack 2: Write ads that sell the click, not the product, by creating curiosity and promising valuable information.
- Use the Halo strategy by researching forums and communities to understand your audience’s hopes, fears, and desires.
- Write many headlines and select the best ones that include your coliseum keywords while sparking intrigue.
- Avoid vanilla ads that just repeat keywords; instead, enter the conversation already happening in the buyer’s mind.
- Sabri emphasizes fundamentals over shiny objects and recommends tracking platforms to measure revenue-driving leads.
- Further hacks (not fully covered in excerpt) include focusing on ad position, competitor targeting, and avoiding Google's auto-recommendations.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Overview of Google Ads Experience
- 01:41Hack 1: Focus on Coliseum Keywords and the 80/20 Principle
- 04:34Understanding Transactional Keywords and Buyer Intent
- 06:04Using the Halo Strategy to Understand Audience Mindset
- 07:47Crafting Headlines and Entering the Buyer’s Conversation
- 08:47Summary of Hacks and Applying Them to Your Business
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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When it comes to Google Ads, most people do it all wrong. They set up their Google Ads campaign. They go into Google Keyword Planner. They populate their campaigns with pretty much all of these irrelevant keywords because they're only
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doing it based on the cost per click. Now, what you must understand is that in any Google Ads campaign, there are 20% of keywords that move 80% of the freight, meaning they get you 80% of the leads, 80% of the revenue. And what most
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people don't realize is that the 80/20 principle is actually fractal. And what that means, in other words, is that you get 4% of keywords that drive 64% of the results inside of your campaigns. And if you don't believe me, just look inside
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your Google ad campaign right now. Do an export of all of the keywords and you will realize that 20% of your keywords drive 80% of the traffic and consequently 4% of the keywords drive 64% of your results. And once you do
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this exercise, you will see that there is a handful of keywords that I call coliseum keywords. It is the one keyword that you pretty much can build your entire business around. And this is what all of the pros do. They identify what
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are the few keywords inside their campaigns and their industries that really is the lever that drives most of the growth for their business. So instead of running around thinking about how do I get the most amount of traffic
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for my monthly budget, instead you want to look at it through a different lens and think about how do I make the most amount of money from my budget every month. And I realized this early on in my career. I actually cold called a huge
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insurance company through their call center and it ended up closing them. It was still to this day one of the biggest deals that I've ever closed in my life.
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And I never forget logging into their campaign and seeing that there were a few keywords in there like the word life insurance that was $182 a click. And this company was spending around $2 million a month on this single
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keyword alone. After running their campaign for over 6 months, we identified that the word life insurance was driving 64% of their results. And we found out that while we obviously needed to have a whole bunch of other keywords in the
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campaign, unless we were performing very, very well for that one keyword, our sales and our leads would suffer dramatically. So the way that you want to be thinking about your coliseum keywords for your own business is transactional keywords, i.e., keywords
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that have a lot of intent behind them. Don't look at them just based on how much search volume they get or on basically how much they cost to get that as a click. Instead, you want to put
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yourself in the shoes of the buyer and think about when you're looking at every single keyword on that list, do I think using my discretion that somebody typing that would be looking to buy my service?
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For instance, if you're an accountant and you're in New York City, going for the word accountant, that's a single keyword. It's going to get a lot of volume. The CPCs will be cheaper because there's not much purchase intent behind
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it. Instead, if you were going over bookkeeping accountant New York City, there are more queries in that. The CPC is going to be higher, but there's going to be a lot more buyer intent behind that. And you want to make sure that a
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vast majority of your budget is only focused on keywords that have a high transaction ratio. So, this is how to apply this in your business. If you're running Google Ads right now, go into your ads manager, export all of your ad
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spend by keywords, and add all the additional columns on there, whether it's cost per lead or revenue, and get that number, feed it into Claude, and basically say which of the keywords are driving 80% of the results. And then it
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will give you the list of keywords. And then you're going to find out that there's probably four or five keywords in your ad account that are literally driving 64% of your results. And I'm going to tell you in a moment exactly
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what you want to do with those four to five keywords. And that is hack number one, coliseum keywords. And this isn't theory. I'm not some armchair expert.
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This is literally the stuff that I use to go from cold calling businesses in my bedroom making $150 a day to then taking that money, investing it into ads and traffic and Google Ads, and it ultimately landed me a seat on Shark
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Tank. So, now you know exactly how to find the most valuable keywords in your market. Now, I'm going to show you how to actually write ads that grab your prospects by the throat and demand their attention. Which brings us to hack
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number two. So, when it comes to Google Ads, 2% of advertisers literally get 50% of the traffic. And half of all Google searches result in the user not clicking on any ad at all. And the reason that that is is that most people's ads are
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limp, boring, and vanilla. And what you will notice very, very quickly is that everybody does the same. They just take that keyword, they stick it as the opening headline, and then they write a limp description, and then they're kind
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of done. Or they commit the worst cardinal sin of all, and they try to sell people their product or service from the ad itself. People can't buy from your ad, so why try to sell it?
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Instead, what your ad must be doing is simply selling the click. You must load up your ad with a huge benefit. Yes, you must include the keyword, but there must be a level of intrigue. Intrigue and curiosity is one of the most powerful
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human emotions that exist. And all we're trying to do is to steal the vast majority of people's attention on that Google search page to get them to click to our ad. So, the way that we do that is by understanding what's behind the
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click. When you use Google, you use it because you're searching for information. But most people, they don't think about that when they're writing their ads. They think, well, this is an advertisement, so I must sell my thing.
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But what people want is information. So, we must promise them from the ad itself that they are going to get the information that it is that they're looking for by clicking on our ad.
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Sounds pretty elementary, but you'll be absolutely surprised with how many people ignore this basic fundamental.
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So, how do you write a good Google ad? Well, first of all, we don't sit down with a blank piece of paper and try to come up with a great ad. That is what amateurs do. What we do is we do
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something called the Halo strategy. We take your coliseum keyword and we jump onto Google and we start looking around in forums on Quora, on Reddit, and we start to populate the Halo strategy worksheet that has all of their hopes, fears,
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pains, and dreams. We don't want to guess what our market wants. We want to enter a conversation that is already taking place in their mind. And then I want you to open up your Google Ads build-up. And I want you to completely
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unleash hell. I want you to write as many headlines as you possibly can. And then I want you to whittle it down to the 20 best headlines of all. And the way that we think about headlines on Google Ads, we first must deliver on the
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click. We want to take our coliseum keyword and we do need to, more often than not, include that somewhere in the ad. So say that you're a divorce lawyer.
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You jump onto Google, you type it in, you can see four ads that come up on the screen. Divorce lawyers in Lelyale, professional divorce lawyers, separation experts. Like, they've all got the keyword directly at the start of the ad.
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Instead, what we want to do is we want to sell the click. Somebody that is typing in divorce lawyers, they have got questions that they need answers to. So, what we're going to do is going to go around in all
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these divorce books. We're going to do all of the hard grunt work to find out the emotionally charged ad copy that we can put together that is going to make it next to impossible for somebody not to click our ad. So, check this out. A
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top divorce lawyers secret checklist finally revealed. 22 tip offs your husband may be cheating on you. Nine foolproof ways to discover if your husband is hiding money. This is really understanding the psychology of that marketplace. is you go around and you
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look at the stats online, you'll find out that most divorces happen because there is some infidelity happening within the marriage and then you can see who are the people that mostly are searching for divorce lawyers. You will see that there is a skew towards women.
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That's why we use the husband line on there. So, it's really understanding the market to write an ad that is irresistible for people not to go out and actually find the answers to these questions that we're posing to them. And
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especially when you're competing with all the advertisers that are all doing the same thing, you got to zigg while everybody else zags. And this is how you get disproportionate returns from every dollar that you spend. You can come up
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with endless ads that literally come into any market and wipe the floor with the competition by just applying just a little bit of creativity. And that is hack number two. Sell the click. And if you're enjoying this, you're getting
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value out of it, make sure that you are subscribed because your boy is going to be dropping way more source in the coming weeks. So, when it comes to actually bidding on these keywords, what most people do is they just hand the
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keys to Google and they let this thing run rampant and just ding ding ding on your credit card. So, instead, let me show you exactly what I would do if I had a samurai sword to my neck and I
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would be beheaded unless my Google Ads campaign was profitable. Which brings us to hack number three. So, when it comes to building out Google ad campaigns, there's typically two different approaches. One approach is what I call the fishing troller approach where
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there's a fishing troller. They cast out a big net and they run them all in there and then over time they basically throw out the fish that they don't want, aka the keywords that are unprofitable for them. It sounds okay, but it is a very
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costly exercise because you need to buy all the data and you end up spending a huge amount of money on clicks that were never going to be profitable for you in the first place. And the next way is
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what I call the knife to the neck approach. And it's you had a knife to your neck. This was your last $2,000 and this campaign absolutely positively had to work otherwise you would be beheaded.
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And this is exactly what I recommend that you do is you sit down and you look at your coliseum keywords and you scrutinize every keyword on there and you say, "What is the nature of that click? What do I think that someone
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would be looking for when they do search that? Does it have a high transactional intent behind it?" And if the answer is no, it doesn't make it on our list. So, we're going to populate our ad campaign only with those keywords. And every
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single day, we're going to log in and we're going to see, are we hitting our daily budget? based on these keywords.
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And if we're not, we're going to keep on increasing our bid by 10 to 20% per day until our ad is guaranteed to be at the top of the page and we are spending our budget. And if we still do that exercise
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and we still haven't hit our budget, only then are we going to start adding other keywords in until we hit our daily budget. This way, you're really controlling the keywords that your ads show up for, and you can be way more
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intentional. And then every single day you want to look at what are the keywords that are hitting KPI or aren't hitting KPI. And the KPI for you will either be cost per lead or rorowaz. And then over time like a bonsai tree, we
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want to trim and prune this thing where we're removing keywords that aren't getting us the results. So the keywords that we do have in there are getting more budget and then the results just compound and get better and better over
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time. So here's how to specifically apply this for your own business. Every single day, try to identify five keywords that have high transactional intent that you can add to your campaigns. Then you want to look for about 15 to 20 negative keywords,
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meaning you do not want your ads showing for these keywords and add these to your campaigns so that over time you're spending 10 to 20 minutes per day in refining and trimming this bonsai tree and basically making sure that you are
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spending more money on the things that are working and less money on the things that aren't working. And that's how you drive profitability longterm. And that is hack number three, the bonsai tree.
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Okay, so that's how you make sure your campaigns are profitable. But now, let me show you the dirty little secret on why I bid as high as humanly possible on my most valuable keywords, which brings us to hack number four. Most people
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think the job is done once their ads are showing up on page one. They do a little bit of hygiene check as they do a couple of Google searches. Yeah, there my ads are. I'm Look, look, there I am. I'm on
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position three. I'm on position four. This is an amateur move because Google's own stats show that position one in the ads is double the amount of traffic from position number four. And that first ad literally steals 70 to 80% of all the
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clicks on the ads. So think about that, right? You are literally able to grab the lion share and market share of all the traffic by ensuring that you are page one position number one. So what we are going to do is we are going to find
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out not what are the cheapest leads, not what are the cheapest clicks, but what are the leads that drive the most revenue for our business. So you can set this up with a tracking platform like Wicked Reports or Hyros or a whole slew
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of other tracking reports where effectively we get the actual data of what leads came into our business and what keywords they actually searched for to become a lead. And then what you want to do is you want to jump into your ads
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manager and you want to see what your search impression share is for that keyword. All search impression share is is the amount of share that you are taking up when people do those searches.
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So let's just say that you have a 50% impression share. That means if 10 people were to jump onto Google and search for that keyword, your ad would only show up five out of 10 times. And what I have found from spending hundreds
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of millions of dollars on Google ads is the sweet spot of where you want to be operating is between 80 and 85% impression share. Because when it comes to positions of the ads, the results aren't linear. They compound. You want
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to make sure that you are literally taking the lion's share of your marketplace by bidding the most aggressively. So after we've achieved this for our coliseum keywords and we've got an 85% of search impression share.
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We've kept on increasing our budget and there's no more traffic to buy for those keywords. That's where we start to add other keywords on that might have less intent behind them but are going to ultimately fuel our strategy and also
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drive more traffic over time. But the thing that you want to make sure that more so than anything is that 80% of your budget are going to those coliseum keywords that you know have the highest LTV. You don't want to treat all
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keywords equally. So, I recommend splitting up your budget and having 80% in a campaign with just your coliseum keywords and then the other 20% for all of these keywords that go a little bit further outside from the bullseye and
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might be a little bit more informational, a little bit more researchbased queries and not so much transactional queries. So, let's wrap all this up into the action steps and how you can deploy this right now in your business. You want to go through
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and make sure that for your top four to five coliseum keywords that you have an 80 to 85% impression share for them.
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Keep on increasing the bids until you achieve this. And the only way that you can do this is you have the data to do it. So then block out a 1h hour meeting with yourself on the first Monday of
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every single month. sit down, look at all the sales that you did in your company and then have on that also all the keywords that those people specifically typed in in order to become a lead. And then make sure that your
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media buyers know, yo yo yo, spend 80% of our budget on these keywords cuz they brought us the biggest, fattest, juiciest clients each and every month.
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And that is hack number four, position number one or nothing. And now look, the moment that you do this and your ad account starts printing money, a little ding ding ding is going to go off in the fine headquarters of Google and the
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Google reps are going to start calling you and they're going to tell you certain things to activate in your ad account that is going to burn your profit margins to the ground. So, I'm going to tell you exactly what to do
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when that phone starts ringing. Which brings us to hack number five. So, every single month you're going to be getting emails and you're going to be getting calls from the fine folks over at Google and they're going to call you up and
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say, "Hey, Sabry, I'm just looking at your account here and I can see that you don't have these features turned on and you don't have Pmax on and you don't have AIAX and you don't have all of these little whistles added onto your ad
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account that you should really add because you're missing out on all this traffic." Then you're going to be tempted. You're going to be like, "This is Google.
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They're calling me. They're telling me these are the things I need to do on my ad account. Surely they have my best interest at heart." And then you do those changes to your ad account and lo and behold, you spend a lot more money,
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but you don't make a lot more money. You don't get a lot more leads, but you do get a bigger bill at the end of every single month. And you see the fine folks at Google, they have commission based on
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the amount of features that you have enabled in your account that you must hit. They want to learn on your money.
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They want you to enable all the features so that they can see what is working and what isn't. So, we are going to ignore their calls. We are going to block their numbers. We are not going to listen to
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their advice cuz the most advanced thing that you can do is to do the fundamentals. And that's exactly what I have been giving you in this video so far. And how do I know this? How do I know that this is the case? Cuz I've
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been lured into this many, many times. And I say, "Hey, this sounds great." And I can count on one hand the times that these things have actually worked. And even when they do work, they are not mega needle movers. They haven't
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geometrically changed my business. So instead, I learned the hard way. I spent all the money. I have the battle scars to prove it. And now I just focus on the fundamentals. Do I have the best ads?
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Are those ads the most relevant to the landing pages that I'm sending them to?
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Do I do all the tracking that I need to to know exactly what are the keywords that are making the most money? Am I spending 80% of my budget on those keywords? And I repeat that cycle. I do
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not be tempted by shiny object syndromes. I keep to the fundamentals. So the way that you can specifically apply this to your business right away is by having the auto apply recommendation off to have Google's number blocked in your phone so you do
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not get tempted to pick it up and to try any of these features. and you say to yourself, I'm not going to do anything else until I know what my four to five coliseum keywords are and until they're
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spending 80% of my budget and I have a dedicated landing page for every single one of them. Then I will start to experiment. And the key rule is that you don't roll out any new features until you are spending your entire budget. You
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have 85% search impression share. So you're mainly focused on search. At the end of the day, their core product is search. And that's what remains to be the most profitable thing on Google. And that is hack number five. Do not take
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the rep's call. So, you've protected your account from the Google rep. You are page one, position one for your most valuable keywords. Now, it is time to break the legs of your competition in front of the eyes of your prospect.
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Which brings us to the sixth and final hack. So on Google, you can actually bid on your competitor's brand's names. Now, it's a little bit of a dirty thing.
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People don't really like to talk about it. Everyone does it, but everyone does it the wrong way cuz they are lazy marketers. And what they do is they take their landing pages and they just go, "Oh, like there's 100, there's 2,000,
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there's 5,000 searches for this biggest competitor in my marketplace. Let me build a competitor ad group, add my competitor's brands names in there, and then basically send that traffic to my landing page. Look, you are going to get
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traffic, you are going to get leads, you are going to get sales for a result of it. But more often than not, these are the least profitable parts of most people's campaigns is cuz they do it in the shitty lazy way. Instead, if you
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haven't already been picking up what I'm putting down, we're going to do things the hard way, but the right way, so we can have more Denieros in our bank account each and every month. So, what I want you to do is I want you to
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highlight the five to 10 biggest competitors in your market. I want you to populate their brand names into Google keyword planner. That's going to show you the amount of searches that those competitors get. And that's going to tell you which are the ones that are
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getting the most traffic and they're going to get most of the attention when we're building out our ad. And instead of just having a basic landing page that gets all of the traffic from our whole campaign and setting our competitor
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campaigns, we're going to be building specific ads that again kick the bruised knee of our prospect. They're searching for a competitor. We want to put a seed of doubt in their mind and get them to click through to our landing page. And
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then what we are going to do is we're going to have a dedicated landing page for each and every competitor that we're going up against. And we want to say all the pros and cons of doing business with
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us. and doing business with them. We don't want to leave it by chance. We don't want to just hijack their traffic.
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We want to break the legs of this competitor in front of the eyes of the prospects. So, they know unequivocally, 100% we are the business to do business with. And the reason that this works is that people are naturally going to be
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comparing other people. It's very rare that if you're selling something that's expensive, that somebody is just going to come through, do a Google search, and do business with you and not get comparative quotes. But depending on where you are in the world, it is
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actually illegal to include that competitor's brand name in your ad if their brand name is trademarked, which most people are. So, you need to get a little bit creative with the way that you actually still get clicks, but don't
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mention their name. You can bid on their brand name, you just can't write it in the ad itself. So, there are a few ways to do that. A great way is to get a second opinion or I suggest that you see
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this before hiring them. It doesn't name them, but it brings up enough curiosity to make them want to come through and check you out. And this isn't the case in every market, but you want to check this out so you don't get in any hot
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water. Then, once they arrive on the landing page, this is when you want to do all the selling that needs to be done. I'm talking about comparative tables, showing the differences, the pros, and the cons. I don't like
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on competition. I like building myself up and showing all the proof elements of why people should do business with me more so than why they shouldn't do business with the other person. Depending on how aggressive that you want to be, you can go very hard in
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the paint here. Here's how to apply this specifically for your business in your industry. I want you to find three of your biggest competitors and make sure that they are also the ones that are getting the most amount of search
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traffic. Then what I want you to do is to build three dedicated landing pages specifically addressing your service offering versus the competition. If you want to get sneaky, you can talk about prices. You can bring out reviews. You
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can do all of that kind of stuff depending on how hard that you want to go. Then I want you to shave off 5 to 10% of your overall search budget on going on bidding on your competitor's brand names and scoop up all those
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lowlying cherries that are out there in the orchard. And that is hack number six. break their legs. So, everything that I've shared with you in this video is the fundamentals. And the most advanced thing that you can do is to
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follow the fundamentals. Make sure that you master these things before mcking around with Pmax or AIAX or any of these fringe features. And if you're wondering, Sabry, you're on Shark Tank, you're making all these millions. Why are you giving us all the source? Why
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are you producing all of this content? Well, I made a promise to myself. I was raised by a single parent mother. I was raised in a house with not an abundance of money. And I said, if I ever make it,
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I am going to do everything in my power to put out content to help people not experience that pain. And my way of doing that is by making this content and sending the elevator back down to you guys that are just on the come up. And
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so this content can change just one person's life that is out there watching it. All the efforts, all the content that I put out is worth every single second that I spend doing it. And if you liked this video, you're going to
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absolutely love this one that I put together on how to become disgustingly good at digital marketing. Like, subscribe, and I'll see you in the next one.
Topics:Google AdsGoogle Ads hackscoliseum keywordspaid searchad copywritingkeyword researchdigital marketingpay per clickadvertising strategySabri Suby
