STOP This Google Ads Fail ! Google Ads Mistakes That Are Killing Your Campaigns!

Speaker A: Hi Alex, welcome to the 10X Marketer podcast. Why don't you quickly introduce yourself and then let's get into the episode.

Speaker B: Thank you. So my name is Alexeius, you all can call me Alex. I'm currently living in Barcelona with my amazing wife. Uh, formerly I was a partner in an agency. Nowadays I'm working with agencies but from the other side, from the Google side, supporting and educating agencies for better work, for smart work, for the work that's going to basically save the money, bring them value and uh, just work better with their customers uh, for a long term uh, purpose.

Speaker A: Okay. So Alex, we um, before starting the recording we were talking about the need assessment. How do you understand each client's need? Distinctly. And one major aspect that most agencies miss is that they have something called best practices that they want to apply everywhere. So what is your approach to understanding the unique need of each client before they get into the Google Ads? And how do you build a roadmap that help them succeed?

Speaker B: It's uh, amazing question because to each client the approach is a little bit different, depends on what he's doing, if it's an E commerce. So a big part of the needs assessment is going to be to understand the structure, the all marketing structure, what was being done so far, the results it could be on Google Ads, email marketing, social marketing, uh, SEO and everything that could you imagine. Uh, this is the first part. The second part is also to understand their budget and the flexibility was the budget, what they can do. The third part of this needs assessment is to understand what they are ah, already planned to do. I mean for example we are coming to the Cesar, we're coming to the summit right now. So what are the plans, what has been done in previous years, what were the results? The next spot is what they basically want to achieve, where they want to be. And this is very tricky because I remember by myself in the agency I was asking our customer to onboarding process. So what do you want to do? What do you want to get? As much possible leads or as many possible as many sellers as possible. I don't like this answer because I want to have a number, so I want to have a KPI. When you have a KPI, you can build a program because if somebody is telling me, for example, let's take a very simple example, a plumber, you're on board the plumber and you ask him how many leads do you want to get? As many as possible. Okay, I'm um, right now going to give you 50 leads per day. Are you going to handle it. Are you going to be even able to answer all these calls? So you need to set yourself real and possible. KPI's not just something that you are wishing to. And the last part of these needs assessment is just to understand are they satisfied from the results or not. Uh, this is in general of course you can have some additional insp questions that you want to ask them um, during the onboarding process. So that's it.

Speaker A: Awesome. So let's say you onboard a client that is already running some level of Google Ad or PPC campaigns. So during the audit phase, what are the typical red flags that you often see that uh, yes, this is what is causing you lot of trouble. Let me start by removing that first. What are the typical red flags or mistakes that you often see in most.

Speaker B: I will take it to answer this question a little bit to the side. I'm using a lot of custom columns. One of the main custom columns that I'm using is the percentage of daily budget spent. I want to understand how basically each and every um, campaign in the account is spending money. Why is it important? Because if I see that there is a campaign that is not spending money, let's say he's using on average 30% that I straight away deep in dive to understand what is happening. What is limiting? Is it the CPC that he using CPA or the target ROAS that is limiting him? And from the other side if a identify campaign is using um around 100% more than it. Then again here we have. You still have a problem that you need more budget. This is the first thing, the second one, the second step is basically to analyze uh, two very important things. The first one is the search terms. If we're speaking about search campaigns, what are the search terms that he's getting? Are they relevant or not? Because in many cases when you're analyzing it, you will identify that something is wrong. And if you have a GTN campaign or if you have a YouTube or a PMAX, it's super important to check where this campaign appeared on which sites. Is it appearing on game apps like a Candy Crash, Sorry guys from Candy Crush, no hard feeling. But in many cases appearing on the Candy Crush, it's not the right audience for you. Especially if you have a B2B campaign for example. And the third thing that you also need to do that may raise your big big red flags is to go to change history. You need to check your shootings. This is my opinion. If the customer is changing things a lot or he doesn't changing it at all which is not good. Not this, not the second one. And also to check if you have the well known for each advertiser the auto apply recommendation which in my opinion is supposed to be shut it down in any, any case. Um, so this is, these are the red flags. Beside that we need also to understand what he's doing. If for example he is a lawyer, in many cases the CPC for a lawyer campaign is insane and he has a $10 budget daily. So what you can get from that, of course the customer will come to you and will say hey listen, I'm not getting leads, I'm not getting calls so this is a huge red flag for you.

Speaker A: Understood. So uh, let's say you have to explain this to the client. Typically uh, a client is not coming from a PPC or a hardcore marketing background. So how do you bridge the gap between what they really think they need and what the data source that they actually need? What are the offer or fixes that you need to do in across your funnels and how do you explain that to a client before getting on board?

Speaker B: Uh it is very simple. I'm not bringing him all the figures that we are getting As a PPC specialist I'm not bringing him some data from custom reports that I'm creating from the custom columns. I'm just explaining him in words like for example you're a client and I'm saying hey Giri, listen, you're spending right now on a day $20 on your search campaign but each click for you costs $15. Google can use twice your budget means you have 40 basically dollars per day but if you have $15 it means that you will get 2 clicks per day maximum and that's it. This for example about a budget but if we need to increase uh, or change uh the bidding strategy I'm bringing him this information the most simple level. Also I'm preparing like a uh working plan for the next months, for the next quarter explaining him uh like word, uh by word. What are uh the plans, what is going to be and why? Why I want to change your campaign right now from CPC let's say to Maximus conversions. Why for example conversion tracking especially for small customers who doesn't have it or it's not implemented correctly. Why is it important for your business? If it's a business in Europe, why is it important to have the content mode for example? Because we need to do a remarketing campaign. What is remarketing campaign? These people who visited your site, they know already you uh, so let's Make a remarketing campaign or retargeting campaign. Let's bring them back because this is the easy money. So you need to be as simple as possible. Your customers.

Speaker A: Understood. Now let's talk about the um, newer side of campaigns um, that you are very familiar with. Let's start with AI Max. Lot of people are talking about. This is one of the most talking about feature on LinkedIn right now. Uh, have you used it? What are the most impressive and useful aspect that you have discovered? How is it different from all the other Max campaign that Google has?

Speaker B: Well, you're speaking about the new update that you can analyze the networks, right? Yeah, this is one of the main updates, the AI Max. The AI Max. All right, so the AI Max is first of all it's very important um, to say AI Max. This is not a new campaign. This is supposed to be very very clear. The AI Max is an extension to the existing search campaign. What is an AI Max? Just in a few simple words to make it clear without dipping it to dive. Because there is a lot of topics that we want to speak about. But in general Google took the search from the pmax. They also took the broad match, they took the dsa, the dynamic search as and they took the AI. They mixed it together to one big campaign. Uh, not a campaign extension to the search campaign. Sorry. And what does it doing it basically you don't need even to uh change to broad match in order to make the AI work. Because the AI Max if you will see I don't have. If you can, you can also share my screenshot that I added to one of my posts. It basically creating you like a new um. Oh my God, I forgot a word of it. Match uh type. So it's basically creating a new match type that calls AI Max. It can generate you headlines descriptions based on the query. And here comes the AI of Google that doing it for you. From what I heard already from advertisers who are using it that they indeed see increase in conversions. However they also saw an increase on the long tail of the search terms. So from one side it brings you the results that you want. But from the other side if you're running this campaign hands on on your

Speaker A: search terms and um, does it work with existing uh campaign or only the. It has to start from scratch. So can you.

Speaker B: No. Yeah, sorry interrupting you.

Speaker A: Um, I'm saying uh. Okay, let me repeat my question. I'm saying can you use AI Max with existing campaign and all historical data as an extension or you have to set up Everything from scratch. If you want to use aimax, you

Speaker B: can create it also on an existing campaign. All what you need to do, you're going to the settings of your search campaign and you will see the AI option, a checkbox that you can turn on or turn off. When you're turning this on you will see that there is an option of allowing to Google to create new headlines and descriptions by itself and to land uh, the customer on a specific landing page. Basically this feature is already familiar from the PMAX settings.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: So they took it also and added to the search campaigns with the AI

Speaker A: Max M. So basically it's uh, just an extension of your existing PMAX features plus some level of AI into so that it can f your maybe the search queries or match types.

Speaker B: Yes, uh, it's basically an extension. That's what is important to know. Okay, and how do I see right now the way to work with that is just to make IP testings. It means that you have for example five search campaigns.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: Move one of them to the max, check what it brings to you, how it works. Because as I mentioned before, um, each campaign has its own life. What works for one campaign, not necessarily is going to work for another one.

Speaker A: Okay, understood. Okay, so and what is your thought on pmax? Because what I've seen is pmax has some regional aspect to it. When I run pmax for people in India for with Indian customers I get a lot of trash leads or leads that are not very good in quality. But when I run pmax campaign for my US customers in US the result is uh, very very different. Their pmax leads are better in quality as compared to that in India. So what are the uh, specifics that you need to understand before you start using PMAX, especially for the B2B campaign?

Speaker B: This is amazing question and thank you for mentioning the B2B because it's very crucial. There's a lot of updates on PMUX itself uh, before getting and touching the updates and what changed and how to work with PMUX and B2B. The main and important thing is to do exclusions on PMUX from day one. What do I mean today? Nowadays on PMX you can do exclusions of your search campaigns, of your search terms. Sorry, easily. Mhm. So if you're running some search campaigns, download all your negative keywords and add them to your PMIX straight away from day one. Second thing, you can exclude all apps or the gaming apps. They're not going to be appearing there. You're not going to waste money on these relevant things the when you're running already it you have an amazing report on the PMUX which calls performance max campaign placement. Download this report, analyze when your ads were showed the disadvantage of this report that you're not going to get not the clicks, not the cpc, not the conversions. You can see only the impressions that you're getting on these places. But if you're identifying that you're appearing on a gaming site and you're a B2B so the chances that somebody is going to convert from a gaming site are super low. And if you're asking me, I prefer to sacrifice the conversion that's going to come from the gaming side but to save money for my customer. This thing number one. But now let's speak also about the new updates that basically Google brought to us into PMUX and it's super relevant to B2B. If you go into the settings of the PMUX you will see two new options. Option number one is the age exclusions. You can exclude irrelevant uh, age groups from your campaign if you speak in a B2B. So maybe 18 to 24 or 65 and above are not relevant audience to you. So you don't want to be exposed to them. But what is the difference between the age exclusions from the settings of the PMX and from the age control on the audience signals? This is also important to mention and to explain. Age exclusions are exclusions and Google is using audience signals. That's not targeting. This is super important that if we are adding some demographics, age demographics on our um, audience signals, it doesn't mean that it's 100% will be shown only to these edges. That's why age exclusions is super important here. But the other update is even more important. On some of your accounts you already will see that you have device control. And you mentioned B2B. Let's make an example. You have a customer in the US who's selling. Give m me an example.

Speaker A: Let's say um, SaaS software. Software as a service.

Speaker B: SaaS. Amazing.

Speaker A: Yes. CRM product, let's say amazing.

Speaker B: So by using these devices, Device control and bmix, you can exclude everything besides the computers. Why is it important? Because let's take in a business in the United States that they want to update their SaaS or to sign a new contract or something like that. Somebody from the company probably will search it during his working hour when he's sitting in front of his computer in the office. Mhm. While somebody who's searching from phone may be just interested to understand what SaaS is, how to use it, Maybe he's looking for courses for SaaS. This audience is not relevant for us. As I mentioned also before with games in this instance I prefer to sacrifice some conversions that might come from the mobile phones, but to be more accurate and to be shown to people only to those who are searching from their computers. This is super important also for the B2B the next thing and this next super big update that everybody Also speaking on LinkedIn is the channels. So far most of us probably used microd script to understand where your PMUX were shown. Google eventually started to implement this feature in the campaigns. Nowadays it's still a beta and if you have a Google rep with your campaign, so just you can ask them to write you to this beta in a few days it will say it on your accounts. Why this is important because you can analyze exactly what your weak points, what your strong points and from there you can decide what you want to do. If you want to create for example a separate campaign to your weaker channels or you want to create an additional campaigns. For example for a search with an accurate search terms that you can get from your pmux. I will touch the search terms and PMUX in a moment. Uh, based on these search terms you can create an additional search campaign to make your impact better to target better your relevant audience. So this is also very important not only to B2B but also on B2C. And the last thing, if I mention the search terms, um, pmax has search terms in some of the accounts you already will see a button. When you go to instance reports there will be a button of a search terms exactly as you can see it once you search campaigns. However, if you don't see it yet, don't panic, you still can get it. There are two ways to do it. The one is with a script, the other one is straight away from the system. And if you're going, if you are on the PMAX level, on the campaign level then you go into insights and report and you go into the insights and if you scroll down a little bit you will see there a small window of a search term report. Make sure that you're downloading it as um, as a ah, extended report and you're working with that and from there you can exclude. This is super important, super crucial.

Speaker A: Understood. Now let's talk about something that is uh, most people are struggling, that is uh, the ups and down in terms of convergence and how do you uh, ensure that the Google um, ad campaign or the ad setup is Properly learning the seasonality part of your campaign. So most people struggle with that. I mean when there is a sale going on, you see lot of sales data, uh, a lot of conversions, lot of new people buying from you. And when you, when the sale is over, uh, Google is not able to figure out who is the converting audience for you. So how do you actually make sure that uh, the seasonal impact you are able to capture the season one and second once the season or sale is over, you are back, uh, you are able to bring yourself back to the normal without losing games.

Speaker B: Uh, this is amazing question, super important question to any advertiser and to business owners. The first thing that's important to understand about seasonality. Seasonality starts way before the day is coming. Let's take the nearest seasonality is back to school. One of the biggest worldwide. Uh, let me ask you a question. When you will start your back to school campaign?

Speaker A: Um, maybe around one month before uh the school is actually going to start. Because you need that much time to actually learn and start delivering.

Speaker B: Exactly. This is super important because I had a discussion with a customer with an agency on a Black Friday and they launched a campaign for Black Friday on the same day in the morning. And then they wondered why it's not working because Google, not only Google, also you can speak about Facebook even that's not enough time to system to learn to understand what is happening around. So you need to launch it way

Speaker A: before

Speaker B: a month before, a uh, month and a half before even with a small budget just to finish your learning period. Then step by step to increase your budget. This reason number one, the reason number two why to do it. Because right now if you even let's say we have now two months before the school and you're launching this campaign, what's happening people your target audience are not aware yet that they basically need it. And you by launching this campaign could be a PMOS campaign, it could be a GDN campaign, not necessarily supposed to be a search campaign. You're bringing them this awareness. Hey guys, we are now starting to sell our back to school products. You have now the opportunity because we have everything in stock and we have the best prices right now. So this is reason number two why you basically need to store your seasonality before and before I'm answering you also you know, I will answer your second question by another example. The season the seasonality is over. How you bringing back your sales to normal. There are a few ways to do it. If you're capturing the data of your customers, you can do Them for example email marketing or remarketing retargeting on Facebook or in Google itself. There are many ways to do it and to keep your customers still connected with you and to get information from you. However, you can continue with seasonalities with creating them by your own one day. I mean let's take an example, the simple example. In Europe it was like a month before the Champions League final football. Why not to take this event and to create a seasonality like a week even before. Yes, this is not a perfect seasonality uh, campaign but like a week or two before to create a campaign which is giving you discounts or you're selling some products because you have this or that event. So this is how you're still staying relevant to customers by creating your own seasonality. That's not necessarily supposed to be like a national holiday or a big event like a Back to school which we spoke about before.

Speaker A: Yep. Now let's understand other part which is like how do you prepare for your seasonality campaign? So do you have a seasonality preparation checklist or something that you use? If you have, do you want to share it with our audience?

Speaker B: Uh, the checklist is very simple. In this case if it's a big E commerce uh, shop. So basically I am checking uh, what products could be relevant for this seasonality. If it's summer, do you have some products that are relevant to the summer? If not so what did you do in previous year if you didn't do anything? So let's think what products you want to push. What products could be relevant right now what people are searching for from the other side. I'm using, if we're speaking about Google, I'm using Google Ads Transparency Center. Mhm. I'm coming to you and I'm saying you Giri, who are your competitors? Give me their URLs. Let's check in the Google Ads Transparency center what ads they are running. Let's get ideas from them what they're doing but let's take what they're doing and make it better. Let's make a better offer. Um, the last part of it is basically to understand from the customer itself if he can give a budget for it and to understand and to explain sorry to the customer why this is super important to run a seasonal campaign.

Speaker A: Got it. So now let's talk about something that is your expertise and maybe you can help me uh, help my audience understand how to do it properly. How do you scale a campaign without losing the control? So you don't want to increase your CPL you don't want to uh, waste, have a lot of wasted budget. You don't want to uh, leave the leads or uh, the sales behind. How do you actually scale? What are the strategies for scaling? Or if you have a checklist for scaling, please share that.

Speaker B: Also there's a lot of ways, uh, to do it. If we're speaking about budget scaling, for example, you're running a hundred dollars campaign right now and a customer is saying, you know what, take another 100 for a day. Don't increase the budget from 100 to 200 straight away because it's going to be a disaster. Because Google will try to use all the money as will be shown on irrelevant search terms or relevant placements, which is super important, uh, to avoid. Uh, if we're speaking about the deep analysis and how you're scaling, you need to understand your audience, your audience behavior. Um, let's say that you have a business that you're advertising, he's assisting you to get a loan for an apartment or for a car. Then you're just running one campaign. You want to scale it, you want to get more leads. You need to understand that audience groups that you have in Google Ads are also audience groups in real life. They're behaving differently. So the ad that works for 18 to 24 is not necessarily going to work for 65s and above. So you need maybe to create different campaigns targeting different audience groups because then you will speak the language, you will understand what they need. You need to understand what your end customer basically needs right now and to speak his language and by that to advertise to him this thing. Number two, we can speak also about geography. Let's take United States. You are running the whole campaign for the all States. It's important to understand and to analyze on which states your CPC is higher, the CPL or the CPA is higher, where the Royce is better. And from there you can create and separate campaigns, the same campaign to different locations. Why is it important? Because this is going to save you money. Because if you have a locations that, where the CPC is way higher than the others, these locations may use the budget, may take the opportunities from the other locations, and if you don't want to exclude it completely, so just duplicate your campaign, exclude this expensive location from the main campaign and target it on a separate campaign with a lower budget. That's how you're going to save money and you're going to give opportunities for the other locations. This is how you're doing scale by allocations.

Speaker A: Understood.

Speaker B: And the also super important thing about scaling just one sentence about it is a B testing Google Ads is not an accurate science. As we spoke of before the recording, it's not accurate science, it's not physics, not mathematics. Do a B testing. Understand what is working for you because and a good example for it, one of my customers that I onboarded, uh, he was a locksmith and then I saw that he's basically running on pmax. Uh, locksmith and pmax. Gary is it sounds weird for you?

Speaker A: Yeah, it does, it has.

Speaker B: But it works for him. So we didn't touch. He's basically getting leads from that.

Speaker A: Awesome.

Speaker B: So, and this is an amazing example that sometimes the most crazy things are working. So just do a B testing, don't afraid of it. And this leads me to one more sentence which is very important. I basically read it like two days ago from somebody who posted on LinkedIn. I don't remember his name, sorry for not giving credit, uh, that sometimes the biggest experts on, on, on advertising, it's ppc, social media, doesn't matter, are basically downgrading and start becoming to be on average level specialists. Why is that? Because Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and everything is evolving. We need to stay with this. We need to understand, we need to understand what are the changes and to implement it. And this is also why is it important to know it to stay on the top and to assist our customers to the best we can.

Speaker A: True. All right, Alex, so I think it was a wonderful chat. Uh, before we close, uh, do you want to have any parting remarks or anything for the audience who are trying to build PPC campaigns?

Speaker B: Uh, yeah, the main, main recommendation will be, as I mentioned before, don't be afraid to do a B testing but also don't afraid to ask questions. It could be also on LinkedIn, it could be on different WhatsApp groups. We are in the world of advertising. We are not competitors. Actually we're all colleagues. We're helping each other to be better because we always will have customers. This is the most important thing. Don't afraid to ask, question, learn, learn, implement, try things and never give up.

Speaker A: Good. That's, that's a very good, uh, nice parting advice. Thank you so much, Alex. It was a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much guys for listening to us so far. Make sure you subscribe to the 10X Marketer podcast before leaving. Thank you. Yeah, follow us on LinkedIn as well. Thank you so much. It was really nice talking to you, Alex. Thanks. Bye.

Speaker B: Thank you. Bye bye.

Speaker A: Talk to you again.