What is Google Ads

You can:

• tap into your professional network,
• advertise in specialised magazines, online or offline,
• go door to door,
• post on social media and hope someone is searching for your services.

If you sell an everyday product, this might work well. But if you offer a specific product like a fridge, an insurance policy or a pair of trainers, it’s very likely that all of the above will bring very few results, or will require a hefty budget to reach a meaningful sample of prospects.

This wonderful place is called Google.

If you’ve worked on your website and above all your SEO (search engine optimisation), you should be able to reach the first page of Google and collect a huge amount of traffic “for free” (if we ignore the effort of creating content, the technical quality of your site, your PR or link-building work).

For everyone else who can’t be on the first page of Google, and who has no visibility online, there is the Google Ads solution.

Put simply, Google Ads is probably the best advertising solution in the world for advertisers. A genuine stroke of genius from Google, which made it rich — very rich.

Google managed to monetise its traffic by connecting advertisers with potential buyers, through an advertising platform that is revolutionary in many ways, which you probably know as Google Ads or, formerly, Google Adwords.

Google Ads offers several advertising solutions:

Sponsored links

Google’s most popular advertising tool is the sponsored link (Search Ads). It’s a search result within Google that gets pushed to the top of the results, with a small “Ad” label (very discreet).

Sometimes you’ll see images: those are Shopping Ads, available through Google Ads but also through other platforms known as CSS.

The Shopping Ads network

Shopping ads showcase your products directly as images, with the price and the store name, at the top of the results. It’s a formidable format for e-commerce, because the shopper sees the product before even clicking.

The YouTube Ads network

This is one of the most underused networks in Google’s advertising suite, which lets you advertise with video on YouTube.

There are different formats, but the most popular and most accessible is the so-called “pre-roll” format, i.e. just before the user’s video plays.

It’s often left aside because video production for small businesses used to be expensive and hard to access.

Over the past few years this format has become more accessible with the arrival of software that makes video creation easier, but also the rise of freelancing, which gives businesses access to affordable experts.

At Donutz, we think it’s a very powerful network; but yes, it demands very high-quality content to engage your audience in under 5 seconds. A real sport.

The Display Network

Finally, there’s the Display Network. An interesting network, but fairly tricky to master.

Interesting, because we don’t spend all that much time on search engines, and far more time on the web and social networks.

Tricky, because on the Display Network there’s really a mix of everything. You can find very “quality” sites but also junk sites whose only mission is to manufacture fake traffic and fake clicks to take your money. Sadly, Google isn’t very aggressive on this topic… then again, it makes a lot of money from it, so why bother.

That makes it a network that’s very hard to access for small advertisers, who will generally use it for retargeting campaigns, where the risk is lower.

That said, if you have the right strategy and understand how this network works, you can do interesting things, in our view.

One of the recipes to succeed on this network is to accept that: 1) it’s a tool to work on brand awareness and engagement first, and 2) you have to be careful not to be misled by a bad reading of the data in your campaign reports. Too often, advertisers pick the wrong KPI on the Display Network, get discouraged too quickly and don’t invest enough to get real results.

That’s the power of the Display Network!

The whole core principle of Google’s advertising solutions — and of almost all so-called programmatic platforms — is based on auctions.

Concretely, every time there’s an opportunity to place an ad, Google asks all the advertisers competing for that placement (a sponsored link, a banner, a video ad) how much they’re willing to pay to get it.

• The one with the highest bid wins the deal and sees their ad in first position.
• The second-highest bid will be in second position, and so on.

Generally, on Google’s solutions, you pay per click: the impression is free. That’s quite cool, because you only pay for qualified traffic, i.e. intent to visit or buy.

For example, if a user searches Google for a “65-inch Samsung OLED TV”, they’ll see your ad promising to help them find the TV they’re looking for, and they’ll click to be redirected to your site.

At this stage, you know enough to start working with an agency and advertise on Google Ads.

But know that behind your bids there are hundreds of possible settings and thousands of combinations.

You could, for example, decide to advertise only to a young audience, with an affinity for basketball, living in Paris and searching for red sports shoes.

Running campaigns on Google Ads requires very strong technical expertise, but also advanced market knowledge.

Today it’s becoming simpler and more affordable thanks to the arrival of artificial intelligence and automation: smart bidding, smart campaigns, smart shopping, and the latest one, Performance Max.

It lets you spend less time tinkering with your campaigns, and more time on fine strategy and on the ad copy, as well as on the website itself (copywriting).

Since then, Google has pushed two new campaign types fully driven by artificial intelligence that are reshaping strategy: Performance Max (Pmax) and Demand Gen. These aren’t gimmicks: they sit at the heart of Google’s vision for the years ahead, and they directly impact the networks we just covered.

Performance Max, the swiss army knife of Search and Shopping

Performance Max is a single campaign that runs simultaneously across all of Google’s networks at once: Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps. It’s Google’s AI that decides, in real time, where your ad shows and how the budget is allocated toward the best-performing placements.

Concretely, Pmax has become the default way to do Shopping: today, most Shopping activity goes through it. “Classic” Search and Shopping don’t disappear, but they now coexist with Pmax.

Our recommendation: don’t blindly switch everything to Pmax. The right approach is complementarity — keep the Search and Shopping campaigns that perform, and add Performance Max for expansion and new-customer discovery. Pmax is also becoming eligible for Google’s new AI placements (generative answers such as “AI Overviews” / “AI Mode”), a space that’s going to grow.

Demand Gen, the modern alternative to YouTube and Display

Demand Gen is Google’s answer to visual advertising and engagement. It replaces the old Discovery Ads, has absorbed the “action” video campaigns (Video Action), and standalone Display campaigns are being progressively migrated into it (a migration tool is rolling out during 2026).

Its appeal: it taps into massive and highly engaging inventory, often left aside: YouTube (including Shorts and YouTube Search), the Discover feed, Gmail, and since 2025 the Display Network. In short, it’s a single place to reach users across all of Google’s visual properties.

Above all, Demand Gen doesn’t work with keywords but with signals: you feed the AI audience and intent signals, and it goes and finds the right people at the right moment. “Lookalike” audiences, for example, become optimisation signals rather than fixed targets. It’s a genuine modern alternative to what YouTube Ads and Display used to be.

The paradox: the more Google automates, the more human expertise matters. Everything now comes down to the quality of the signals and content you feed the machine — exactly what a good agency knows how to steer.

Elementary, my dear Watson. As you’d expect, I’m obviously going to say yes, you need an agency — and I’ll tell you exactly why.

We’re better than you

Don’t take it the wrong way, but as an agency, we’ve worked with dozens or even hundreds of different companies and businesses. That lets us learn the subtleties of the Google Ads tool very quickly, but also find hacks that transfer from one industry to another.

We stay up to date

Google Ads evolves very fast, and it can be hard for you, even with an in-house team, to be 100% up to date on every innovation.

We arrive with a ready-made tool stack

Because we manage millions of euros of media budget, we’ve done the work of testing and selecting the best tools — including the best AI solutions — to build the highest-performing strategies. It’s what we call our stack in the industry.

For you, this changes everything: you don’t have to start from scratch, test dozens of tools, get it wrong and start over. We arrive with the right arsenal, already proven on other accounts — a huge time saving, and a real head start on your competitors.

We’re your shield against Google

Would it cross your mind to negotiate a settlement directly with your insurer? If you did, rest assured you’d lose far more than if you’d hired a competent lawyer. We play a similar protective role between you and Google. We’re on your side and we challenge what Google wants you to do: buy clicks. Whether it works or not isn’t really Google’s problem… but it becomes ours.

Keep one thing in mind: until proven otherwise, the advertising platforms — Google and Meta alike — work for their own interests. Their number one goal is that you spend as much as possible with them. They won’t make your life easier by taking the shortcuts that actually save you money.

Getting the most profit out of every euro invested remains your responsibility (or your agency’s), never Google’s or Meta’s. That’s exactly the role we take on for you: challenging the platform and tipping the scales in your favour.

Google’s automations are generic and don’t work for everyone

Behind the pitch, there’s reality. Even though Google’s solutions have improved a lot, they remain very generic, and unfortunately they don’t work for everyone. The issue often comes from the fact that Google’s logic isn’t aligned with that of every advertiser.

Google lives in a world where money is unlimited: if your campaigns are profitable, you should spend indefinitely more and never stop them. In practice, that’s completely absurd. As a business, you have budget limits, but also stock / availability limits, or very strong seasonality. That’s where an agency steps in to put strategies in place that fit your needs and your limits. You’ll save money and increase your profits.

It takes more than ads to sell

There was a magnificent era when you could have had the worst website in the world and become a billionaire buying traffic on Google for €0.01. That time is long gone and the competition is fierce. Having great campaigns is sadly no longer enough to win on Google Ads.

If you want to win against your competitors, you’ll need to work on your content, build a conversion funnel and optimise it; you’ll also need to find hacks. It’s becoming an increasingly complex, multi-technical job, where you have to leverage all your assets — and the most important of all: your data.

An agency like Donutz can provide its expertise in Google Analytics, Looker Studio or Google Tag Manager to tag your site and collect important data to optimise your campaigns.

A creative studio, senior teams, 10+ years of experience

A good campaign is worthless without good content. At Donutz, we have an integrated creative studio to produce visuals and videos that perform, senior teams steering your acquisition, and more than 10 years of experience accumulated across many industries.

All of that is enormous value that doesn’t fit into any tool or automation: it saves you time, and above all it lets you get far more return on every euro invested in advertising.

What are the different types of Google Ads agencies?

We distinguish 3 broad families of Google Ads agencies.

• The giants: for very large brands with several million euros of budget, who want advanced billing services. On the technical side, it holds up on very big budgets. If you’re a small advertiser (less than 500K budget/month), your account will be barely optimised, but you’ll be able to tell your boss you work with one of the biggest agencies in the world. Fancy!
• The hyper-experts: small agencies but with senior experts, often one or two founders who share their experience and vision. They guarantee very high-level digital strategies and often manage several acquisition channels to perfection. Their rates will be 15-20% higher, but the ROI far greater — the extra cost is easily absorbed by the increase in your profits, and you drastically reduce failure rates.
• The specialised agencies (60+ consultants): generally more affordable, they run on well-oiled processes that don’t suit every business. With a strong shopfront (or a strong presence on Google), they have no trouble finding new clients and mostly seek to absorb as many as possible. This appetite for growth translates into difficulty recruiting and keeping talent: the accessible solution becomes hiring junior profiles and apprentices, trained quickly then sent out “into the field”. They depend heavily on Google’s automations and challenge them very little.

There are different engagement models:

• On performance, on profit (PROAS) or on the revenue generated.
• As a percentage of media spend — generally between 10 and 20% (depending on your budget).
• Hybrid: a fixed base + a variable on performance or media spend.
• Flat fee: a fixed price to manage your campaigns.

There is no best model, to our knowledge. It depends on the agency and on your project.