Amalia Fowler: The most common Google Ads errors and how to avoid them

Transcript: The most common Google Ads errors and how to avoid them

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Thank you so much Jyll,  I'm so excited to be here and share some of this information with all of you today. So the theme for this month's PPC zone is what is working well.

And I kind of flipped it around and wanted to talk about what still isn't working. My name is Amalia Fowler, as Jyll mentioned, and I do a lot of ad audits. And therefore I see a lot of common errors that happen and. Yes. You know, there's some that we're very familiar with the lack of conversion tracking or not, you know, adding negative keywords, but I wanna kind of go on beyond those today to talk to you about the top three mistakes that I think we are still making or really things that we should be considering when we're doing stuff in our ad account when we're building out our campaigns.

So, this is though one of the common ones that I hear talked about a lot. The very first mistake is that tricky location setting within Google Ads. So, the default setting, when you build a campaign, Is the presence or interest setting, meaning that it doesn't matter if you have set a radius of one kilometer or sorry, I'm Canadian, one mile around your business.

Google is going to expand that if it feels like someone is interested in where you are. And this is something that we all think we know or that we consider to look out for. But I have audited agency accounts and really big brand accounts. And what happens when we build out so many campaigns is we forget to double check, but you're also not going to manually go through the 40, 50, 60 campaigns you might have running.

So my favorite trick is to pull a report. You go to reports, you hit report again, you hit custom report and table, and you can create a user location report for yourself and save it. That will show you which cities and countries your campaigns are spending in. And then also, I like to include in the column section impressions, clicks, and cost so I can see how much of my money or the person I'm auditing is money usually has been wasted to places that they actually didn't mean to target.

The second point I wanna talk about, or the second mistake is about structure. So often accounts are built too deep or too wide for the budget that they have a deep account has few campaigns, but with tons of ad groups in those campaigns and a wide account can have few ad groups, but tons of campaigns now.

Too often people don't actually do the math of it all. If you have a very small daily budget and a very high average cost per click, and you have a very deep campaign with a ton of ad group,s you're probably not maximizing your potential. And so that is one of the big questions that I like to ask when I'm doing an audit, how many keywords are actually getting traction? What percentage of those keywords are actually responsible for the conversions and is your existing budget being used as effectively as it can be?

Now I'll stop and give the context disclaimer, right now, the tips I'm giving are not for everyone. You could be making an opposite decision for a very good reason for your business, but I do want to suggest that everybody take these steps: download your keyword data, but only from existing campaigns and ad groups that are enabled, organize that data in Excel and get rid of any headings that you don't really need. Delete the summary information at the bottom and then pivot.

You want to have a pivot table that can tell you how many clicks you're getting or how many keywords are getting clicks and how many keywords are getting impressions. In this account I looked at there were 140 keywords total, but 35.7% of those keywords had never had an impression in the life of the account. And 65% of them had never had a click. Typically to me, this means that we need to look at restructuring. Either eliminating keywords that aren't getting traction for ease of management, moving them to a new campaign and assigning them a specific budget, or really considering if we're cannibalizing, when we shouldn't be.  

As an industry, I personally think we need to move away from the number of keywords, being a determination of an account that is well built. And I will add this disclaimer, in terms of eliminating keywords, if you're running Performance Max, be careful with that because there's that whole situation with how negative keywords work there that you don't necessarily want to accidentally trip something up.

Now, the third thing that I wanted to talk about today is mindset. And you may be thinking to yourself, how can the way we think be an error in Google Ads. Well, a lot of the time we talk about platform when we're talking about Google Ads and I wanna talk also about the people part of it. And here's what I mean by mindset.

There is not only one single right way to manage an account and we can get so caught up in our way that we forget that we need to be learning from each other. You want to be challenging yourself, ask what longstanding biases that you have that may be holding you back, actively seek out alternative points of view from other people. Find someone who thinks differently than you and ask how they manage their accounts. I am squarely in the Google skeptic camp. And by getting to know Jyll, who has, we've had a debate before, who's a who's on the other side a little bit, I've been able to expand my definition of what a good account is. And I have become a better PPC marketer because I know her.

So those are my three tips for you as you explore your ad account and the biggest things. I think that trip people up the locations, the structure, and honestly the lack of really challenging our own insights as things develop in the PPC world.

So thank you so much for joining me and I would love to hand it back to Jyll.