Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 97 - Google Ads Mistakes

I've been working in Google Ads for more than a decade and I've helped optimize more than 10,000 Google Ads accounts. Here are the top 10 mistakes I want you to avoid.

I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working for big brands at Google, and now I work for you.

This is Inside Google Ads: Episode 97, Google Ads Mistakes.

And this episode, by the way, is adapted from my free newsletter The Insider, where I share a real Google Ads case study from one of my Google Ads coaching clients on every single issue.

We have more than 8,000 email subscribers now. The way I put together these top 10 mistakes is I looked back over all 36 issues of The Insider that I've shared with you over the last year, put together some common themes and here we go.

The first kind of mistake I frequently see in Google Ads accounts is what I call a foundational failure. 

Some kind of issue with the conversion tracking or something that makes it so Google Ads doesn't have the data it needs to optimize. This stuff is the number one silent killer of your Google Ads campaigns.

1. So the number one mistake I want you to avoid in Google Ads is incorrect or incomplete conversion tracking.

And here's how you're actually gonna know if that's a problem you have. When you are looking at your campaign report, not the overview, the one where you go campaigns, campaigns, campaigns, I want you to add a segment for conversion action. And then you'll be able to see what's actually included in that conversions column and if it is in fact what you want your campaigns to optimize for.

This will also show you if, for example, you have a campaign level goal versus an account level goal, or if you are counting a dreaded page view as a conversion.

2. The number two mistake I want you to avoid is blindly trusting the numbers you see in Google Ads. 

If you see something questionable, question it. Data that's too good to be true is probably incorrect, and data that's too bad to be true is also probably incorrect.

For example, you may have a campaign that shows it has had no conversions over the last 30 days, but you've been getting form fills and phone calls, so check your conversion tracking. Similarly, you might have a campaign that says it has a 50% purchase conversion rate. No matter how great your products are, that is very unlikely to be true. Even 5% would be an excellent e-commerce conversion rate. So you'll want to double check that as well.

3. And the third mistake I want you to avoid is only looking in Google Ads to understand performance. 

Because of privacy changes and cookies and all kinds of things, your Google Ads data will never be perfect. And no other data source is going to be perfect either. But if you really want to understand how your Google Ads are doing, look at Shopify, look at Google Analytics, and look at a more holistic view of how your investment is driving results for you.

For example, I've shared the story before of a Performance Max campaign for an e-commerce client that looked like it was doing absolutely terribly. But then when we looked in Google Analytics, we saw there had actually been a ton of purchases that were being attributed to other sources, even though the only change this business owner made was turning on PMax. So because of the way PMax was working, there was a lot of display inventory and YouTube inventory, not all of the awareness and consideration being driven by PMax. It was being attributed to PMax.

So to ensure you have a proper foundation in place, verify your conversion tracking, question questionable numbers, and look beyond the Google Ads platform.

The next category of mistakes I want you to avoid is something I'm calling strategic sloppiness. 

This is where you just have the wrong keywords, the wrong structure, something in the way you set up your campaigns is making it so that Google has trouble getting you the results you need. I find this often happens because you see someone's advice, maybe my advice, someone else, and we'll say, use Exact Match keywords. Right? Or we'll say, have this number of keywords in an ad group, and you just follow it to a ‘T’ without considering your own business context. 

Yes, of course, it depends, but I will never say to you just, how many keywords? It depends. What campaign should I use? It depends. I will always tell you, it depends, and here's what it depends on.

4. Mistake number four that I want you to avoid is not segmenting by intent. 

You want to organize your search keywords by theme with roughly 5 to 15 keywords per ad group. Is three keywords bad? No. Is 18 keywords bad? No. Think of the 5 to 15 as a rough guide.

For example, let's say you are a cleaning company and you offer residential cleaning and office cleaning. Those should probably go into separate ad groups because the intent is really different. The deal size is different. The person searching is really different. In fact, they might even need to go in separate campaigns so you could have a separate budget for those different services and a separate bid strategy for those different services, but at a bare minimum, different ad groups. 

Whereas, let's say you offer residential cleaning and home cleaning. Those are synonyms. It's the same service, even though the way the person is searching might be slightly different. So those keywords could live together in the same ad group because they have the same intent.

Segment by intent also applies with audiences. Let's say you have a Demand Gen campaign and you're a moving company. And so you're targeting a life event for people who are moving soon and maybe an in-market audience of people in-market for mortgages. You could put those in separate ad groups if you're going to have really different creative, but those could also probably at least start in the same ad group because what you're really getting at is someone who will soon need moving services for their home.

5. The fifth mistake I want you to avoid is going too big too quickly. If you are small, start small.

That means for small business owners with small budgets, anything $1,000 a month or less is considered a very small budget in Google Ads, broad match keywords are likely not the best choice for you. Not because broad match is bad, but because you aren't going to have enough budget to give the system what it needs to learn the right queries for your business. So if you're a small business, start with exact match keywords and only a few of them, maybe a smaller area. Start small. 

Whereas if you have a large budget, if you're starting to spend like $100,000 per month on Google Ads, you probably aren't going to want to use exact match keywords because you're not going to get the scale you need. So you would probably need broad match as long as you have proper conversion tracking implemented in order to get the scale and the traffic volume you need.

6. The next mistake I want you to avoid is thinking that keywords and search terms are the same thing. 

I was actually on a Google Ads coaching call recently where my longtime client invited their new agency. And it was the most contentious call I have ever had because this person at the agency was trying to convince me that you just need to look at keywords, and when you look at a search terms report, it's just showing you the other stuff you advertised on in addition to your keywords. 

I tried to explain it kindly. I eventually had to cut off the conversation because he was just wrong. And I'm like, if this is a guy who, let it be known to me, has been doing Google Ads for 15 years and doesn't even know what a search terms report is? That's an issue. 

If you're newer to Google Ads and you don't know what a search terms report is, that's okay. Many people don't. And that's why I'm here sharing this with you.

Your keywords are how you tell Google the kinds of searches you want to advertise on. Your search terms report tells you the actual searches you advertised on. And it's possible that your keywords exactly as written will not appear in your search terms report at all, especially if you're using phrase match or broad match.

So once your Search campaigns are up and running, you want to check your search terms report regularly. I generally recommend checking it on a weekly basis, but don't just liberally play whack-a-mole with negatives everywhere. If you're seeing irrelevant search terms, look for the root cause first. Is it actually maybe the wrong keyword? Is it actually maybe the wrong match type? Do you actually have the wrong bid strategy in place?

As a general rule of thumb, if you're finding that you have to negate at least 10% of the search terms you're seeing, you've got a root cause you need to address first. Pause the negatives, address the root cause.

To recap, segment by intent, start small if you're small, and review your search terms report regularly, but be cautious with the negatives.

The third category of mistakes I see in Google Ads is what I'm calling metric misinterpretation.

And this is a tricky one because what it really comes down to is lacking the expertise and experience to actually understand what you're seeing, and then plan and action accordingly, implement, and evaluate it.

If the way someone's been trained is just do this, do this, do this, do this, do this, right? A checklist rather than a strategic understanding, then when something deviates from plan, which happens all the time in Google Ads, they get stuck and don't know what to do.

And I see this a lot with business owners as well managing their own Google Ads. Something doesn't go according to plan, so they start making a million changes to try to fix it when that actually makes things worse and not better. 

So always, always, always look to diagnose the underlying problem, the root cause, and address that before moving on. In fact, that's why I created my newsletter, The Insider, because I noticed this gap with so many Google Ads practitioners that I was meeting with in my Google Ads coaching practice. It's not that they didn't understand the fundamentals, that's not fair to say, but maybe they just didn't have enough hands-on-keyboard experience to develop those strategic problem solving skills. And as a result, they weren't able to strategically problem solve.

So by sharing all these cases and real life examples with you, I want to help you build those skills so that the next time you come across an unexplainable problem, you can really reason your way through it, stay calm, find the root cause and solve it.

Here are a few specific things you can do to avoid mistakes around metric misinterpretation.

7. Mistake seven in this episode is not clearing the basics first. 

What do I mean by that? Well, it's really easy to jump right into what's happening with conversions and conversion rate and conversion tracking and landing page. But the first thing to focus on is what's happening in the auction, your click-through rate and your CPC.

For example, if your click-through rate is way too low or your CPCs are way too low, it means you're probably opted into the Display Network. Or if your CPCs are too low but your click-through rate is too high, it means you're opted into Search Partners or you're advertising on your brand name.

I know you may be rolling your eyes at me like, “Jyll, I know that already. I know not to do Search Partners. I know not to do Display Network.” I know you know, but I still see this quite frequently in the accounts I see every week where someone won't realize they're opted into Search Partners, or someone might not realize they're opted in Display Network because they don't know that the icon next to your Search Campaign changes when Display Network is turned on. Or maybe you did turn them off, but you haven't turned off auto apply recommendations, and so Google has automatically turned them on for you. 

So some of those really basic things that you may be tempted to just skip over because you say, of course I know that. 

Another great example is the location settings, to target locations based on presence, not presence or interest. I know you know that, but I still see this all the time with experienced practitioners. I've made this mistake too, where we're just go, go, go, go, go, and we forget, or we take over a campaign that someone else is managing and we just don't think to check it.

So clear the basics first before we go into complex solutions.

8. Mistake number eight I want you to avoid is jumping straight into problem solving without structuring your reasoning. 

For example, let's say you've seen a major shift in CPA or in ROAS. Don't freak out. Build a hypothesis, investigate it, then test it.

Let's say the CPA in your campaign suddenly skyrockets. There's only two reasons that could be. Either your cost-per-click went up or your conversion rate went down, or both, but that's it. So look at the data, figure out which one it is, and then figure out why that happened. 

For example, let's say your CPCs went up and that's why the CPA went up. Okay. We don't need to touch the website. It's not a conversion rate issue. Let's focus on CPC. Why did CPCs go up? The change history can help you narrow this down, but really now there's just six things to investigate: bidding changes, quality score changes, competition changes, query demand changes, different search term matching, or ad text changes. 

So if, for example, you haven't changed your bid strategy and you haven't changed your ads, then all you need to do is look into competition, demand and your search terms report and boom, you can solve your CPA issue.

Structure your reasoning so that you can save time and find the root cause of issues.

9. Mistake number nine I want you to avoid is thinking that quality score doesn't matter. 

If I hear one more person say that quality score doesn't matter because it's a diagnostic tool and it's not an auction input I may scream! So I'm going to do a whole episode about this soon because, as you can tell by the unusual tone in my voice, this really grinds my gears. But let me give you the shorter answer right here. 

The quality score metrics that you see in your keyword report are diagnostic tools. So that quality score number from 1 to 10 is not an actual input. However, your actual ad quality, which Google does calculate but does not tell you, is a key auction input and does determine your ad rank. And I'm going to quote Google directly here. I'll put this link in the episode description as well.

"Our assessment of the quality of your ad is summarized in your quality score, which you can monitor in your Google Ads account. Higher ad quality generally leads to better performance, including better ad positions and lower cost." 

And here's the part that so many people get wrong, not because they're dumb or stupid. It's really confusing. But this is the part that people get wrong, because then Google goes on to say this:

"Quality score is a diagnostic tool that can help you identify ads with a lower user experience than average. This tool gives further insights on whether you should focus on improving your ad relevance, click-through rate, or landing page experience. Your quality score is shown on a scale of 1 to 10 based on estimates of your performance compared to other advertisers. Note that while we provided this diagnostic score to help you identify which of your ads might need quality improvements, these scores are not inputs in the ad auction. Use quality score to diagnose low quality ads rather than trying to optimize the 1 to 10 score you receive."

What Google is saying there is the quality score number, 1 to 10, that you see in your report is not an auction input. But your ad quality itself, as determined by things like your ad relevance, click-through rate, and landing page experience, is absolutely a key auction input. So don't get that twisted!

And the mistake to avoid is to think quality score doesn't matter because it does, and it can always be improved.

I had to let myself cool off for a moment. To summarize, you can avoid metric misinterpretation by clearing the basics first, structuring your reasoning, and remembering that quality score can almost always be improved.

The final category of mistakes I want you to avoid are those around unreasonable expectations.

It may be that your client has unrealistic expectations. It may be that your boss has unrealistic expectations. You may have unrealistic expectations of your own account. So you need to set realistic goals, manage stakeholder expectations, and understand true opportunity size. 

These are things that may not be considered Google Ads skills, but they are an absolute necessity for you if you are managing Google ads, either for yourself, your company, or a client.

10. Mistake number 10 I want you to avoid is poor communication and stakeholder education. 

Yes, it is your job to educate your managers, colleagues, or clients about the nuances of Google Ads. For example, making sure they understand conversion lag to explain why you shouldn't pull reporting on the first of the month or resisting the urge to just do something if there's no strategy behind just doing it.

And then I called this episode “10 mistakes to avoid,” because that has a nice ring to it, but I actually have 11 mistakes here for you!

11. The final mistake to avoid is thinking that opportunity is infinite. 

Remember, in order to show a Search ad, someone has to be searching for something that matches your keywords. So if you're already dominating your core keywords with high impression share, then increasing your budget is only going to inflate your costs. You need an actual expansion strategy if you want to continue to grow.

Because if there is no user search, then there's nowhere to put your ad. This may mean more keywords, looser keyword match types, or testing audience targeting in Demand Gen, which is one of my favorite recommendations these days. But if you want to grow and scale and you're already maxing out your existing opportunity, jacking up the budget isn't going to do anything good. You need to actually expand your targeting to grow the opportunity.

So I want you to avoid unreasonable expectations by making sure that you're communicating and educating stakeholders, and that you are recognizing that opportunity isn't infinite and there are plenty of different ways to scale and grow your account.

To wrap up, the most common thread across all of the Google Ads advice I give you is that we've had a shift from a reactive, control-focused approach to a holistic, data-informed strategy. 

I love the analogy of your Google Ads campaigns as a house. If the foundation, your conversion tracking, is flawed, then the entire structure, targeting, bidding, and creative, will crumble. So you need to ensure that the right people are arriving at the house via your audiences and keywords. That they are being invited in with the correct message via your ad copy and creative, and that once inside the house, they can easily find what they're looking for. That's conversion rate optimization.

While the tactics and whistles and doodads and tools keep changing in Google Ads constantly, the fundamentals of how Google Ads works have not changed. Focus on strategy first, tactics second, and you'll be able to drive sustainable, scalable Google Ads results for your business, your company's business, or your clients’ business.

If you think you might need some renovations on your Google Ads house, you can book a Google Ads coaching call with me at jyll.ca, that's J-Y-L-L dot C-A, or follow the link in the episode description. And if you'd like to receive those real life Google Ads case studies in your inbox every other Tuesday, you can subscribe to The Insider at learn.jyll.ca, that's J-Y-L-L dot C-A, or follow the link for The Insider in the episode description.

I'm Jyll Saskin Gales and I'll see you next time Inside Google Ads.