Worst Google Ads Mistakes To Make...

I'm going take you through the most common Google Ads mistakes I see that are killing Google Advertisers performance. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Nik Armenis, your friendly Google Ads guy. I've worked across thousands of Google ad accounts and I want to share my knowledge with you.

My hope is that you can grow your business and get the most out of your Google ad spend. Google is an advertising juggernaut it's taken a huge share of advertising spend that left traditional media and went online. Furthermore, it continues to grow each and every day. Businesses spend more money on Google Ads each and every year because they provide more value to the business than the cost of the ads.

You probably came to this video because you've tried Google Ads and haven't had much success. You've probably thought that Google ads just don't work. Or don't work for you and your business. I want to change this thinking because I'm confident everyone can achieve some level of success with Google Ads.

Worst case, I guarantee you will learn something. So let's get into the reasons why your Google Ads probably aren't working. The first and the most important reason is not fully understanding how search advertising like Google Ads work. This also applies to binging ads and every other form of search engine based marketing.

Google Ads basically match user search queries with possible solutions. This might be webpages, images, videos, shopping listings. The list goes on. The better these solutions are, the more often people will use and stay on Google, the more people on Google, the more ad space Google can sell to businesses.

So as an advertiser, you want your ads and landing pages to be as accurate, specific, and congruent as possible. What this means is through the whole ad experience, the customer needs a seamless experience. Google rewards good advertisers with cheaper ads. This is done through the Google ad rank system. I don't wanna delve too deep into the ad rating system because it really deserves its own video and it's quite complicated.

But I want you to approach Google Ads with consideration to the person behind the device on the other end of the screen and think about what does Google value about making that experience for that person? Good. The better your ads align with people's problems and searches, the better the ads will do.

This means Google wants high quality ads matched to the correct keywords and products. They also want people to land on high quality landing pages that contain what that person is looking for based on what they searched. Some simple things you can do to improve your ad rank are make sure you're selling a good product or service that is actually in demand.

Do high quality research so your search ads and audiences are relevant. Work on improving your click-through rate on your ads. Work on improving your ads and landing page conversion rate. Fix your website, load speed and bounce rate. Understanding all of this will improve your ad performance.

Let's move to the next problem I see advertisers make, it's a super common one it's treating Google ads like Facebook ads. People in the online marketing space are so focused on Facebook ads. They then assume you need to use the same strategies, skills, and, and, and just exactly the same way you run Facebook Ads to Google Ads.

While I understand there's a reason for this, there's so much content and focus on social media style ads like Facebook meta ads. It's just plain wrong. The way you run Facebook ads is fast, it's erratic. It's lots of small changes all the time. It's about testing creative, changing audiences, testing copy, changing this, changing that.

Google Ads are not like that at all. Google ads are intent-based ads, so someone is searching for a new couch, an office chair may be a lamp. It is not disruption based marketing like Facebook or meta ads or other social media ad plug forms. We aren't stopping the scroll. Here we are presenting people with a possible solution to a problem or a question.

So my best piece of advice is stop trying to run Google ads like Facebook Ads. You don't need to be changing things all the time. In fact, doing so is likely a big part of the reason your ads aren't doing as well as they could be. This takes us to our next Google Ads mistake, and that is impatience and making too many campaign changes.

Too often not being patient will be a downfall for you with Google Ads. Most accounts are going to make so many changes. You can review these by going to the change schedule in your Google Ads. If there are a lot of changes there all the time, you're gonna know that that's impacting your performance. In the past, I've even had clients come in and go, look, on these days you made no changes.

We're paying you money. Why are you not making changes? I've had to politely explain that Google ads do not need a lot of changes. In fact, Most of the work happens in the upfront setup and making sure everything is set up and structured correctly, and then knowing what to do on an ongoing basis. For 90% of people watching this video, it would be best to batch all of your campaign changes to once a week.

Yes, you heard me right. In fact, if you're spending less than a hundred dollars per day, you can probably do it even less frequently, say fortnightly or even monthly for those spending even less. S the exception to this is if it is a large site, getting a lot of traffic with high spend, you're probably gonna be doing it two times a week, maybe three times a week.

But during big sales periods, this might increase to daily or even more frequently. This is gonna be for a really small percentage of advertisers, uh, and a very small portion of people watching this will need to make changes that frequently. Making lots of changes, basically reset the algorithm's.

Learning it means that Google won't be able to easily find you buyers. The next problem relates to set up an account structure. So most accounts I audit are really poorly structured. People are often using the wrong campaign types or have badly structured campaigns. However, the biggest problem I find when it comes to this, Is people just have too many campaigns running, unless you're running quite a complicated business with lots of different types of products or services.

My general rule of thumb is less is more. The fewer campaigns the better. This is particularly the case if you don't have a large budget, because if your budget is small, then it's gonna be split between so many products and keywords, right? So if you're splitting, say, a $20 a day budget across 10 campaigns, You've only got $2 a day going to each campaign.

If you've got multiple keywords or products in there, you're not collecting any serious amount of data. It's gonna be getting you a handful of clicks, right? Uh, and then there's gonna be no possible way for the Google Ad algorithm to find you buyers. While we're talking about data, this takes me to my next point, and it's a really common issue.

You need to make sure you've got proper conversion tracking in place. This means whatever event you're trying to achieve with your ads, that you are tracking it. So for most of you being e-commerce stores listening to me, it probably means you're gonna be tracking the purchase event and you wanna make sure you're tracking the purchase value event as well.

This way you can work out your return on ad spend. So other types of businesses might track things like downloads, form submissions, phone calls. And any other valuable event that happens on their website, you're now probably thinking, okay, Nik, I've got my conversion tracking working, but how should I structure my Google ad account?

I don't wanna overwhelm you in this article because this is a complicated topic again, but I want to cover it off at a really top level, what you should be doing. There's not really a one size fits all solution for campaign structure. Different people do this differently. But really how to think about it is you want to be grouping like products, services, keywords, or ads in a way that's gonna maximize your chances of reaching your specific goal.

So the better you group things, the easier it will be to report on to manage, and it's gonna make the Google algorithm work much, much better for you other than campaign structure. Uh, you also need to know what campaign type to use and when. So this is really important. For most businesses, you're going to want some form of presence across all the different campaign types.

So this can obviously be overwhelming, and it does take time and expertise to manage. So if you're a beginner, you probably want to keep things simple. But over time, what you can do is slowly start experimenting in different ways or setting up the campaigns slightly differently with different campaign types and structures Overall.

Go into campaign structure with an open mind. Google offers really some good solutions. Now, if you wanna be seen across all platforms with things like performance Max. If you are an e-commerce advertiser, uh, I recommend starting off with a single shopping or performance max campaign targeting all your products.

I know this goes against, uh, what everyone says is best practices, but if you're a beginner and you are just wanting to start actually doing something is better than, you know, giving up and not doing anything. So this is why suggest keeping it simple. Once you get into a routine, you're comfortable with the Google Ads platform and optimization, you can build further on this.

If you're more advanced Google Ads user start experimenting with different campaign types and structures. So try running multiple performance max campaigns with different products, or one performance max with multiple asset groups with different audiences and assets. Or you could even just do something like a single campaign with different asset groups or product groups with your different collections or products.

From there, you can add in things like search campaigns that target specific collections or your bestselling products. These are just some examples, right? Lead generation advertisers, uh, for you guys, people like plumbers, pest control, things like that. Local businesses and services start with a single search campaign.

I want you to break this campaign down into different types, into the different types of services, uh, or things that people search for. To find your business. For example, a plumbing business may have something like three different ad groups under a search campaign, ad group. One might target emergency plumbing.

The second might target block toilets, block drains, block pipes, things like that. The third could be more general, something like plumber near me, or plumber in my suburb, plumber in my city. The idea here is our ad copy must match whatever keywords are in our ad groups. Our landing page will also ideally match the ad copy and the keywords rather than being overly general.

While this is by no means the only way to approach account and campaign structure, it should give you a good starting point, uh, as to what's possible over time. Just experiment and see what's gonna work best for your business. So now you've got a good idea as to how to set up your campaigns. What should you be doing on an ongoing basis to improve performance?

This is where I see a lot of people miss the mark and why the ads aren't really working too well. The first and most important thing is to understand how to properly read data. Make sure you understand how to use the Google Ads dashboard and what each column means. So understand how to pinpoint trends within your data and what to do to change the performance of the ads, whether it's doing well or whether it's doing poorly.

To do this, you need to understand what you can actually change within each different type of campaign to improve performance. So some really common optimization mistakes I see people make, um, is failing to understand. So failing to understand these concepts is a recipe for disaster and why so many advertisers fail to see success with Google Ads.

Having a solid optimization checklist and schedule is vital to success. I'm working on providing you with my personal one. I just need to get it up onto a landing page. Once it's done, I will add it to the links below in this video and also produce a video talking you through how to use this checklist.

For now, I'll tell you what are the most common mistakes I see with optimization. The first is not having any sort of optimization schedule, uh, and doing things completely ad hoc. Going back to my earlier point, you are probably also making too many changes too frequently, so this is causing the algorithm to continuously reset and go back into learning mode.

The second really important factor is a poor landing page experience. Uh, I know a lot of people struggle with this one, but it's something you just need to come to terms with. You need to have a good landing page. Consumers are very picky when it comes to buying online. Small things can set 'em off and go, there's something not right about this.

They don't wanna be scammed or buy from someone who is taking, who's gonna take too long to ship their product or never ship it. Your landing page needs to be fast, easy to navigate, and have all the necessary info for making a purchase. Think about what you do when you buy online. What do you need to see?

Have that same information there. This includes high quality, clear images, but ideally video that showcases the product and also have an excellent description of it. The site needs to look legitimate, have social proof to give people the confidence to buy from you. Make the visitors experience a good one, and Google will reward you with cheaper ads.

The last mistake is selling poorly researched products or services that aren't in demand. Your product is the biggest determining factor as to whether or not you will succeed. Being in demand is far more important than hiring competition, so don't worry about competition. Too much worry about the product actually being in demand.

So make sure you do the research before you actually launch your business. Uh, it's super, super important. So that brings us to the end of the video, guys. I hope you've learned a few things to improve your Google Ads performance. A lot of this was like general information as a starting point. So please let me know in the comments below if you do implement anything in this video.

If you have any questions, even if you're struggling with Google Ads I want you to know don't give up. Continue to test and implement and educate yourself. So if you continue to do this through my channel or send me a direct message.