Watch The Video

Transcript: Aori Google Ads (AdWords) SKAG Generator Review

Typically, there are two schools of thought when it comes to setting up a PPC campaign on Google Ads. The first approach is you use SKAGs, also known as single keyword ad groups, or you don’t. You just set up campaigns with targeted ad groups. Now, the first approach I mentioned, single keyword ad groups known as SKAGs mean you set up a new ad group for every instance of keyword in your account, meaning your campaigns are really focused and really relevant because every keyword has its own dedicated ad group.

In addition to that, every single ad group will of course have its own ad set so your keyword can propagate across all levels of the campaign, making your campaign really relevant, meaning higher quality scores, meaning cheaper click costs, meaning more efficient campaigns. Of course, with all this aside, creating a SKAG campaign is time-consuming. You either need to be a wizard at Microsoft Excel, a wizard with Google Ads editor, or you need to just sit down in the interface if you can’t do either of those things and build those campaigns manually, which by the way, I would never ever advise, but there is a tool that can help you save time and build SKAG accounts in Google Ads in a few clicks of a button, and this tool is called Aori.

In this video, I’m going to review Aori and actually break down whether or not it’s a good product and actually take a look at the system and advise at the end of it, my score of its rating. Let’s have a look at this tool and see how much time you can save by using it.

[music]

Darren: Hey, guys, I’m Darren Taylor of thebigmarketer.com and my job is to make you a PPC expert. If you’re new to this channel, I’m a trainer and consultant specializing in PPC on Google Ads and Bing as well and if that sounds of interest to you, you should consider subscribing to the channel. In this video, we are reviewing Aori, which is a Google Ads keyword tool, I suppose, that allows you to build out single keyword ad group campaigns or known as SKAGs in Google Ads within a few clicks of a button.

Let’s take a look at the tool and understand in these three criteria in terms of, does it work? Is it value for money and does it save you time? They’re the three criteria we’re going to take a look at in this review. Let’s dive into the system itself. In a nutshell, Aori allows you to build single keyword ad groups on both Google and Bing Ads because it plugs into both systems and it allows you to roll them out pretty quickly and it’s something that can save you quite a bit of time.

It also provides a budget management tool, but we’re not going to review that today. We’re going to simply take a look at the capability of this tool to create single keyword ad groups. To get started, simply sign up on Aori’s website, create an account and then once you’ve done that, what you will need to do for the first thing is to link your Google Ads or your Bing Ads account into Aori itself. Obviously you use your authorization, you set up your authorizations and you allow the system to take data and push data into Google Ads,

then from there you could start building your campaigns because the account for Aori is linked to your Google Ads account.

The setup is really simple and really quick. Once you’ve connected your account, it’s a case of just building your campaign. It’s really straightforward. Of course, the same principles of building a campaign in Google Ads apply the same way they will in Aori. Before you build any campaigns, if you’ve taken my PPC accelerator, you’ll know by now that you need to plan ahead. Building your keyword list and doing your keyword research, writing your ad copies and planning ahead in your campaign strategy. Once you’ve done all of that, you’ll be ready to literally start building your campaign within Aori really, really quickly. I’m going to assume at this point, when you’re building a new campaign, you’ve already done your keyword research.

Before you go ahead and build out your keywords in match type, don’t do that. Stick to broad match at this stage and the reason for that is because the way Aori works is you define your match types within their system. All they need is your seed list of keywords. You haven’t even got to segment them into ad groups because, of course, remember we’re building single keyword ad groups in this system. Draw your whole keyword list out for every keyword you want in your accounts or your campaign and then all you need to do is copy that keyword list directly into Aori and Aori will do the hard work for you and build out your single keyword ad groups and your keyword match types based on the keywords you’ve fed it into the system.

Aori also has a keyword suggestion tool. The pitfalls of that tool are the same as the pitfalls in the keyword suggestion tool in Google Ads itself, it can often suggest irrelevant keywords and keywords that aren’t necessarily right for your campaign. Rely and fall back on your own keyword research and avoid the suggestion tools at the point of creating campaigns, because you could be, I guess, drawn into adding keywords into your account that aren’t necessarily going to help you because you think they might work but in actual fact they might not.

This feature of the system, I suppose, is not as good as the actual SKAG builder itself. You’d continue to build your campaign out as normal in terms of choosing your targeting, your budgets and all of the usual things you would do when setting up a campaign, you’ve added your keyword list into Aori. The next stage, of course, that takes a long time, especially when setting up single keyword ad groups is adding your ad copies themselves.

If you know already, you would have created ads outside of Google Ads and have some templates ready to go and upload into Aori in the same way you would with Google Ads. However, there is one additional benefit Aori has, and that is you can insert the keyword you’re targeting and your single keyword ad groups into your ad copies in Aori within the templates.

All you need to do is drag a template placeholder that will contain the target keyword for your ad group, and it will automatically populate that keyword into your ads when you look at your campaign in Google Ads. It saves you a lot of time, making your SKAG campaign highly relevant because remember, the whole point of creating a SKAG campaign is you can make sure that the hype relevance of your target keyword is carried across from ad groups into your text ads across every single keyword.

At this point, with your keyword list uploaded and your ad copies created, you’ve basically done that. It’s really easy to use this system. You can create a campaign and roll campaigns out really, really quickly. It builds out all your match types for you, creates your ad groups, creates your text ads once you’ve written them and added the template to import the keyword into those text ads, you’ve done your budgets, you’ve done your locations, you’ve done pretty much everything you would do in a Google Ads setup. The only thing left for you to do at that point is to click go and import your campaign from Aori into Google Ads.

Once you’ve done that then the campaign appears in Google Ads as you have set it up in Aori, the only thing left to do is refine your campaign in Google Ads. This is a really important stage and I suppose a shortfall in Aori as well, because of course, it would be great if you could edit all of your settings within Aori so you didn’t have to jump between the two systems, but it’s really important. You go back into Google Ads and do things that you normally would do in terms of your audiences and things like that and more of your bidding strategies and have a look at specifically some of the settings you don’t get in Aori and tweak those in Google Ads itself.

This is particularly important if you’re using manual CPC, because you can’t set your keyword bids in Aori. When you transfer over to Google Ads, once you’ve imported the campaign, go ahead and set your entry keyword bids at keyword level so that you can make sure you’re in the right place when it comes to competing on the Google Ads auction, because Aori doesn’t have that functionality.

Once you’ve done that, Aori has set up your campaign in Google Ads, it will usually be paused as you can define whether it goes live straight away or whether it’s paused when you create the campaign in Aori and then import it into Google Ads. At this point, you’re ready to go. There’s only one more thing, which is a shortcoming of Aori I will mention, and that is, Aori syncs your Google Ads account via the API. Any changes you make in Aori or any changes you make on Google Ads, Aori can overtake them and overwrite them automatically.

I guess this is against what Aori may advise, but I tend to get better results out of it by building the campaign and then unlinking completely within Aori, because once the campaign is built in Google Ads, I’ll manage the campaign within Google Ads itself using all of their settings and ensure that Aori can no longer talk to my campaigns and override any settings I change or anything like that.

The campaign building side of things, fantastic, it works really well. In terms of that sync and automation and making sure that the changes in Aori are reflected in Google Ads post live, I would tend to remove it and make sure you have full control over your own campaign data. Aori is as easy as that. It can create campaigns at scale very, very quickly. I love tools that allow you to save time and focus on actually managing the nitty gritty and the difficult parts of campaigns. Once you’ve done the hard part of understanding your business and setting up your campaigns on Google Ads and planning what you’re going to target, the building of what you’ve planned already is the longest part and the hardest, the most laborious part, and this tool can save you a lot of time by making sure you can actually go ahead and do the hard part.

I would say it’s a good tool. I did say we’re looking at three criteria and the first one I mentioned was valued for money. Value for money-wise, Aori starts at $60 per month. For a lot of subscription tools out there, that seems quite expensive, but if you’re creating campaigns at scale and doing this regularly, maybe as an agency or as a freelancer or someone that does regular campaign setups within a business that scales, it’s definitely worth the money. Of course, once you’ve created your campaigns, you can always cancel your subscription because it’s not a contract, it’s a rolling subscription, so you can use it as much and as often as you like.

When you put it like that, $60 is not that expensive. I do think this tool has value for money. The next thing I mentioned was the ease of use. How easy is it to use and does it actually do what it says it does and of course the answer to that is yes, the tool is easy to use, it does what it says it does, you can create campaigns at scale very quickly. In fact, in my upcoming video, I’m going to walk you through the system itself and walk you through the very beginning of researching keywords all the way through to building a campaign in Aori itself. We’ll see how quickly you can create campaigns at scale. It’s definitely a tool that saves you a lot of time and does exactly what it says it will as well.

My verdict on Aori is that I’m going to give this tool four and a half stars as my review score because I think it’s a great tool and it saves time and it’s value for money as well. Speaking of value for money, if you sign up to Aori today using the affiliate link below, you can get your first month of Aori for $40 off. You get $40 of credit into your account if you sign up using the link below. Again, full disclosure, it’s an affiliate link and I’m going to start mentioning people I actually use in terms of tools I use day-to-day and start showing you what I do with third-party tools. There will be affiliate links included as well.

If you sign up down below, you will get $40 credits for your first account. Guys, let me know in the comments if you think this could be a good tool for you, maybe you’re an agency or freelancer or creating campaigns at scale, let me know in the comments what you think of this tool when you start using it. I’ll be more than happy to discuss it with you down there. Like this video. If you like it, don’t forget to subscribe and also don’t forget to check out the other content across my channel. I’ll see you guys on my next video.

This video was brought to you by the PPC Accelerator, a Google Ads training program with over 80 videos of content, you also get two additional courses around the Google Tag Manager so you can track and tag all your activity, you also get access to the Excel course which shows you how to report on your PPC results using Excel spreadsheets, you also get unlimited and unrestricted access to me as your tutor. I’ll be there to help you every step of the way and of course, you get access to all future content on the course including the really advanced stuff. Check out the PPC accelerator and join today.