Learning the hard way.
From my own experiences with Google Ads campaigns, managing small and large budgets for over 15 years, I’ve learned which recommendations need to be ignored and which ones are actually valuable, using old fashioned trial and error. But it always depends on the products or services the company is advertising, along with their targeted location and strength of competition.
For example, a small shop or salon which is selling popular items or services, targeting local customers, can get decent results by simply allowing Google to auto-populate their advert, and automatically apply all recommendations. With a smaller budget, targeting a specific location, throwing the net as wide as possible is often effective. Even if a local customer isn’t specifically searching for your products or services, they are a potential customer in the future.
Big budget campaigns.
Where the “cookie cutter” approach usually fails is when you have a national campaign, with stronger competition. When you are responsible for justifying the spend for a large campaign, you need to know what happens with every single click that your advert acquires. You need to monitor the conversion rates, fine-tune your keywords, monitor the search terms and constantly add negative keywords.
Of course there are Google recommendations that offer good advice, and can be applied after studying the fine details. But in my experience, the majority of recommendations are simply advising you to widen the net, making your campaign less fine-tuned – hence increasing the number of wasted clicks and eventually forcing you to increase your budget.
The old ways still work!
There was a time, before AI Recommendations, where you only had the basic statistics to rely upon to determine how good your campaign was. And obviously the end results – if you are getting regular leads or sales. Just looking at the conversion rates for each keyword can give you a better guide to how your campaign is performing. If your conversion rate is above 5%, it’s doing OK.
The other important area that should be monitored are the keyword search terms. This shows you what people are actually typing into Google when they clicked on your advert. Obviously this needs to correlate with the products or services you are selling. If you are finding search terms that aren’t really relevant to your products or services, you need to give your keywords a bit more thought, or introduce more negative keywords to restrict how your advert is shown.
Industry knowledge and common sense.
One of the biggest issues with Google Ads Recommendations is the way it suggests keywords. Nine times out of ten Google will suggest keywords that are only vaguely related to your products or services. If you also follow the general Google advice, which is to automatically “apply all recommendations”, you will soon find that your budget is out of control and you are getting clicks from any random people.
Always remember that you know more about your business than Google does. You should know what your customers are searching for. It’s often simply a case of common sense.
Keyword grey areas.
Most companies are selling products or services which are widely known about. The classic example is a shop selling doughnuts, there are no real grey areas there. Everyone knows what a doughnut is and Google could almost definitely create a very good campaign for this. But I often work with companies that are selling products or services that can be confused, especially when typing it in to a search engine.
For example, a company selling “laser hair removal treatments” is fairly easy to target. But a company selling “laser hair removal machines” needs to be highly fine-tuned to eliminate clicks for people searching for “laser hair removal treatments”, because there are far more people searching for treatments than machines. And Google will often assume that you are trying to target the largest audience, where you are actually trying to achieve the exact opposite. In these cases, the standard recommendations need to be completely ignored, otherwise you will find yourself pouring money down the drain!
Customer Match Lists.
When managing a Google Ads campaign, Google will encourage you to upload a “customer match list” to help them determine similar customers. They will increase your optimisation score a little, if you upload a comprehensive list of customer details! OK Google, I will hand over all of my customer’s personal details to you, so I can get a better optimisation score?
You really don’t need to do this to achieve a successful campaign. Google is just trying their luck, to see if any mugs will give them free data.
Ignore calls from the “Google Ads Experts”
Anyone who has set up a Google Ads campaign will surely get emails and phone calls from the “Google Ads On-boarding people” or “Google Ads Experts” who really need to be ignored. What they do is simply persuade you to apply all recommendations, they want you to widen the net to get what they call “potential customers” but I would call wasted clicks. Their only job is to make people spend more money.
I’ve seen cases where a customer has taken a call from one of these people, and allowed them to “apply all recommendations” then I’ve been notified of this a few weeks later when they complain that they are no longer getting customers. I’ve also seen cases where the customer’s budget has been increased by 300%, but they are actually getting fewer customers. Again, remember that these people know nothing about your business – they do not know what your most effective keywords are. If you want to use your budget wisely, ignore these phone calls.
Successful campaigns.
Of course there are numerous other aspects that can determine how successful a campaign is. Which bid strategy should you use? Is your optimisation score above 90%? Are your products really in demand? Are your prices as low as your competitors? Is your website designed in a way that captures the customer effectively? With experience in managing effective ads campaigns for numerous budget sizes and business styles, I help companies to determine all of the above and use their budgets wisely.