You get what you ask for in Google Ads

My grandmother used to say to me “You don’t ask, you don’t get”. In a sense, it’s the same with Google Ads in that if you don’t specify what you want well, you won’t get what your business needs. In short, you have to be careful what you ask for via the settings in the Google Ads system. Ask for the wrong things and you can unwittingly damage the performance of your marketing campaigns and consequently your business.

Over the years, the Google Ads system (formerly Google Adwords) has evolved dramatically into a highly sophisticated marketing engine that can drive your business forwards. However, like an engine it can also overheat, misfire or fail if not properly maintained. The level of complexity and sophistication also leaves plenty of scope for errors to creep in and if you are new to Google Ads the whole system can be quite overwhelmingly complicated.

Google have attempted to overcome this complexity by continuously refining and improving the Google Ads platform interface. This activity does however mean that it can be quite challenging when things change and you have to adapt to the new way of doing the same things.

Google have also employed an army of Google Ads account managers who can advise and recommend changes to your campaigns which in theory should improve performance but can sometimes be counterproductive. Our experience of account account managers is that their emphasis is on expanding your reach, getting you to spend more while trying to keep the level of business coming in (via conversion tracking) on an upward trend. The problem is that many account managers are quite inexperienced. They do generally understand the Google Ads platform well, but they can miss the bigger picture of how your business is using the platform and what your business priorities and constraints are. In short, they generally don’t know enough about your business to make decisions about your Google Ads settings.

There is almost always scope to optimise your Google Ads account to suit your business marketing needs better as often the priorities from Google’s perspective are different to yours.

So the question is, are you asking Google for the right things? To properly answer that question we need a deep understanding of your business first. Talk to us today.