When setting up your Google Ads account, you can get your campaigns up and running with just a few clicks. The process is fairly simple, but there are several key pitfalls that we commonly see beginners make. Errors in this stage of the process can start impacting your bottom line by serving the wrong ads to the wrong people at the wrong time. If you want to avoid lighting your money on fire, here are some tips:

Poor or Inaccurate Conversion Tracking (#1 Google Ads Mistake to Avoid 2024)

This is the single biggest mistake you can make in running Google Ads. As you run your ads over time, Google starts to get a profile of what type of person is more likely to convert on your offer.

The algorithm will then start to serve ads to more and more people who fit similar parameters, and ideally increase your conversion rate over time. So if your conversion tracking isn’t set up properly, your ads fundamentally will not run as effectively as they should.

Creating the conversion tracking can be headache-inducing, between Google Tag Manager, your website, Google Analytics, and the ads platform itself. However, if you don’t get this step right at the beginning, you’ll always be fighting uphill.

But beyond that, you need to have realistic goals when measuring conversions to ensure your ROAS (return on ad spend) is positive. This requires you to know your business and the data behind your business very well.

Let’s say you have a $47 offer that you know converts at about a 20% clip when you promote it to your email list, that means each click is worth about $9.40. So would you run Google Ads to that if the average cost per click is $12? No, because you’d be losing money on those sales.

Also understand that Google Ads are mostly cold traffic, so your conversion rates will probably be lower than what you see when promoting to your audience. Good targeting and ad copy combined with a strong landing page can make a huge difference in these numbers, and these are the things that Pandas on Fire will help you with. 

Conversely, if you’re struggling to generate interest from your existing customer base, spending more on Google Ads can be very helpful.

If you have a $500 package and you know you book 50% of the clients who ask for a quote, each inbound lead to you is worth $250. Would you be willing to spend $100 per lead on Google Ads to generate more leads? Sure you’ll be taking a margin hit on each sale, but you make up for it by driving more volume than you had before. Having and understanding this data really simplifies the investment in digital advertising.

Following Google’s Recommendations

When you first navigate through the Google Ads dashboard and go to set up a campaign, you’ll notice that Google has automated so much of the process! This seems super helpful, and surely it will benefit you to do exactly what Google says, as they are the experts and have data on millions of campaigns.

Wrong. You always have to remember that the entire model for Google Ads is predicated on maximizing the amount of money that you pay for your ads.

You only pay when people click on your ads, so Google has a strong interest in maximizing the number of clicks on your ads, regardless of if these clicks are from qualified buyers. A few examples of where you need to decline Google’s recommendations:

·       Display network

You need to uncheck this in almost all instances. You know when you look at a coffee maker on Amazon and then the next day, you see weird popup ads for that coffee maker while you’re browsing college football message boards? Those are sites that are paying for Google’s Display Network.

Display can be effective for re-targeting people for specific products or time-constrained sales/discounts. But largely, if you’re a small business, there’s very little value in your ad appearing on random websites throughout the world during the day.

The benefit of a Google Search ad is that you’re running it for people who are searching for something very specific and capturing customer interest at a specific point in time.

·       Location

This will default to showing your ad across the entire world. At a minimum you’d probably want to pick countries where people speak the same language. But this is highly offer dependent.

If you’re trying to run ads to a digital product that will be beneficial for people globally, feel free to run ads to the entire world.

However, if you’re a photographer in Phoenix, it does you no good to run ads to people outside of your specific area. Within the console, you can select very specific locations, so be sure you’re targeting the right customers from the beginning.

In this, there is an option to select targeting people who have presence in a specific location or who have interest in a location. In general, local service providers will benefit more from picking people with presence, as that means people who live in a location.

As a plumber in Nashville, you only want to be serving ads to people who live in your service area. Interest refers to people who have done research about a location, so this could be people planning a trip or people considering a move. Realtors, restaurants, and tourism operators would want to include presence and interest.

·       Automatically Generated Assets

This is a hot one at the moment and refers to having Google’s AI create your ad for you. You simply give the site URL and it will generate keywords, headlines, ad copy, images, you name it.

This sounds great and I think it has potential to be useful in the coming years. But now, it’s just not where it needs to be. I’ve experimented with it a bit and too often the ad copy is clearly AI-generated, repeating weird phrases.

The keywords are often too broad and to go back to the main point here: Google makes money when people click on your ad, so the traffic is rarely as targeted as it should be. Getting a bunch of clicks with no conversions is the worst-case scenario for Google Ads, and utilizing this method tends to end up this way.

Being Impatient (#3 Google Ads Mistake to Avoid 2024)

This is another huge mistake that we see all too frequently. Running these ads and generating enough of a sample size to make informed decisions takes time. The first week or so of a new campaign is rarely going to yield anything.

There’s a reason we require our clients to commit to three months: because this is about how long it takes to really start maximizing value from your ads. That doesn’t mean it takes 3 months for them to be profitable, far from it. In fact we’ve seen clients showing positive ROI within a week or two.

You have to trust the process and let your ads run. There are things you can tweak in the background, but nothing is worse than pulling the plug on a campaign after a week because you haven’t seen the results you want. 

This also applies in the other direction. If your ads are killing it after two weeks and you decide to triple or quadruple your budget, you’re likely going to see some pain.

Traffic and clicks don’t necessarily scale linearly, and it’s important that you protect your investment. You’re going to see much better results by gradually increasing your budget and letting it stay at a level for a week or two before continuing to boost it.

Now that you’re armed with these tips, go out there and conquer your ad campaigns! If you still feel overwhelmed, or if you want a Google Ads Certified professional to help audit your existing campaigns, please contact us and we’d be more than happy to help you out!