I’ve been running my Google Ads Agency for around five years full-time, and I did it for probably another three years, part-time before that as well. Generated well over 200 million in Google Ads, only sales for e-commerce businesses. And along the way I’ve made plenty of mistakes. So in this video I wanted to talk to you a bit about how I would have approached things differently and the mistakes I made and how you can avoid doing them.
If you’re new here, my name is Nik Armenis I’m your friendly Google Ads guy, and as I said, I run a Google Ads Agency mainly with my family, and we help e-commerce brands scale their businesses. We’ve done so, you know, 6, 7, 8 figure businesses and I really pride myself and our team’s ability to know the ins and outs of Google Ads to make sure that you get the best bang for buck for your ad spend.
And I also try to really understand a business, and that’s actually a key part of understanding and doing well with Google. You need to understand businesses, not just the Google Ads landscape. All this content is totally free to you guys. There’s no hard sell, but I really would appreciate if you gave the video a thumbs up.
So the first mistake, and it’s quite a big one, I made it, I think everyone has made it, is not really understanding how Google ads work. How the algorithm works and how you can use that to your advantage. In short, Google wants to show people solutions or products to the person who is searching to make sure that they stay on Google, keep using Google, and that they get what they want.
We need to be providing people, whether it is lead generation or whether it is, uh, a product that we’re selling, we need to be giving people what they want. And I know it sounds simple, but a small thing could, it’s, something could be as simple as, Someone searches for a brown couch and a black couch ad comes up because the color hasn’t been marked, or you haven’t added brown into the title, and so you, you’re not presenting the person with the best possible solution to what they’re looking for.
And the way we do this is we can focus on improving our conversion rates. We can focus on improving our click through rates. And overall we just want everything to be accurate, congruent along the whole range of the funnel. So we want to be showing. Bidding on keywords that are relevant to what the person is searching for.
We don’t want to go too broad all the time. Broad can be good on Google, but all the time you don’t want to go totally broad. You wanna have a nice mix across there, but you then want to have the, the keyword matches the ad copy. So whether it’s a title for shopping or the ad copy of a search ad, and then the landing page or product page you send them to needs to be relevant to whatever they’ve searched.
Understanding this and actually understanding the psychology of someone searching is vital to do well with Google Ads, and I will release content on each of these mistakes individually as well. But this is just a broad overview for you to understand and start to do some digging. The second mistake, guys, is not understanding that Google can be used as part of a total marketing strategy.
You don’t just need to rely on Google, but you under need to understand how it’s fits into a multi-channel or omni-channel marketing strategy, right? So Google is one part, and the all the other areas work together as a sort of like a circle that can grow your business more if you understand how to use them together.
And what that means is maximizing your use of Google remarketing. Understanding and treating the different areas of the advertising funnel differently, and understanding how to use Google’s tools and different campaign types to address, you know, the top of funnel, the middle of funnel, the bottom of funnel, and how to properly do that can really change how much you can scale, and also how cheap your ads are.
And over time you can tweak this. It’s not a one size fits all sort of strategy that you can just go, bang, this is what you do for everyone. It doesn’t need to be tweaked slightly for different businesses who rely on different channels more so than others. Some might rely on entirely on Google, others less so, so that this one’s a little bit fluid, but there’s definitely things that you can do across.
Any account as well. So having covered that one off. The third one is not having patience, and I’ve seen this and I’ve been guilty of this and I see it all the time. I had a client approach us who their ad account on Facebook got totally banned, said they needed to use Google Ads to continue their business.
They were selling a product and just for some reason Facebook didn’t like it. This tends to happen, particularly for supplement stores, uh, reported them or whatever happened, their Facebook account got banned. Yeah, and you know, initially they were just very, very aggressive, had too many campaigns running, and they weren’t patient.
They were turning campaigns off too quickly, not letting them collect enough data, and also making too many changes too frequently. This will kill your ad performance, uh, quicker than anything. Google takes time to get up and running. Google takes time to get you conversions and realistically, the less changes you make, the better if you have a strategy in place and have set everything up correctly.
The fourth kind of building on that is you don’t wanna overcomplicate things, you don’t want to have too many campaign types. I would argue for most businesses you probably need one to three campaigns max particularly for using Performance Max, you more than likely can get away with using a single campaign, especially if your budget is less than say, a hundred dollars per day.
You definitely don’t want to be spreading that budget too thin across too many campaigns and and areas because you gotta remember when you are, do when you only have a $100 per day budget. That’s getting split across all the areas that you’re targeting, all the products, all the keywords, all the locations.
So when you think about it like that, you, you also need to have a decent budget. If you’re going really broad and, and actually narrowing things in sometimes can help improve you really well. But my biggest point is don’t have too many campaigns. Don’t overcomplicate things, don’t try and do too many things at once.
Focus on what’s gonna matter and make the biggest impact. And then build on that over time.
Number 5 is not having a deep understanding of how conversion tracking works, what it is an attribution. To understand this, you need to understand that Google relies on the data. We feed it. So when we go, Hey, a conversion has occurred, someone made a purchase, a.
For $500, it gets that information. If you’re using Google Analytics, it’s gonna send that to Google Analytics. It’s gonna send it to Google Ads, and it’s gonna go, Hey, a conversion occurred. Understanding how the conversion exactly is tracked, uh, particularly if you’re doing different EV events as well.
You need to be very clear on what you’re tracking. For most of you, given its purchases, you then need to understand attribution and quite often Google Analytics. And Google Ads will be using different model now with a lot of people changing to GA four at the moment. All of this is quite fluid at the moment and it is changing quite quickly.
And the longer the short is that you need to understand as well to to add even more complication to it, is that attribution will never be perfect because it’s impossible to say where a sale came from 100%. But quite often all you need is one source of the truth, to give you a baseline which you can then build on.
So say it’s Google Analytics, use that to form a baseline. Understand which attribution model it is using. Why are there differences when you are reporting in Google Ads versus Facebook ads versus Google Analytics. And just understanding that there quite often is discrepancies and differences. And coming to terms and being able to explain that really helps.
And if you, you, you need to understand this because the information being fed into the algorithm relies on that. And if you don’t know exactly what you’re tracking, why, if it is even accurate. Uh, so knowing how to troubleshoot and fix those things is super, super important. And I’d suggest that you go and brush up on Google Analytics four.
Tag manager and and tracking or get someone that really knows it. Quite often I use contractors for this because it’s not my area of expertise. Number six is getting attached to how you used to run ads or how what used to work and not adapting quick enough. So while it is a game of patience, Google Ads, you do need to try and get on quick, any new features that come out, because quite often that’s what is gonna stick.
So, you know, smart shopping fridges was not good, but if you didn’t jump on it, you probably missed out on some sales for a lot of businesses. Same with performance Max, same with, you know, the switch to broad match more so than anything at the moment. Uh, and then jumping on Google Analytics four, which has been in the pipeline for a while, but if you haven’t adapt to that and done it quickly and early, then obviously you’re gonna be at a disadvantage to others that have.
So keeping on top of things, keeping on top of the trends is very important. And sometimes we can get attached to, oh, this is how we ran Facebook ads, or how we ran Google ads. Things do change. Don’t overcomplicate it, but do try new things, particularly when they’re big features that Google is pushing, but do so cautiously because quite often they’re not necessarily good for all businesses.
So try your best, see what works, test it and see if it actually is the best thing for your business.
Number seven is focusing on vanity metrics. So a lot of the metrics in the dashboard, you can get really overwhelmed. But most of the time I want to see how much I’ve spent, how much I’ve made, how much a conversion has cost me.
My click through rate may be the number of conversions, the conversion value, cost per conversion, return on ad spend. They’re really the main ones. Click through rates, probably under those as well. We can look at our impression share metrics, things like that. Time spent on site and other things like that.
But overall you really wanna know where’s your money being spent, where are you getting the best return, where’s the worst return? And just making changes to improve that big part of this is trend analysis. You need to be able to spot trends. So focus on metrics is great, but if you can’t and don’t know how to spot trends and read and analyze and interpret data properly, it’s gonna be very hard for you to optimize ads.
So moving on to optimization is number eight, is not having an understanding. That optimization and scaling go hand in hand, and you need to understand how and what optimization is and what you can do to scale. Because moving on to that, and it kind of goes on to number nine, scaling with Google Ads is very different to social media ads.
These eight and nine go hand in hand, so with optimization, you need to have an optimization schedule. You need to have an optimization strategy, and you need to have an understanding what you need to do and how you can scale using all of Google’s available options. So scaling with Google being different, what I mean by that is you’re limited by search volume.
So it’s not an impressions game so much you YouTube display can be a little bit and even discovery. Uh, overall you’re gonna be limited by the search volume and what’s gonna happen is you’re going to eventually need to go to a broader and broader and broader kind of search term. So if you are selling.
Brown leather couches. You might then, you know, go to the level of brown couches, then couches, and then even furniture. Do you know what I mean? Like you, you, you, you’re slowly broadening that out and there’s buyers in all of ’em. But you know, as you go further out, they become more and more expensive, and that’s where lifetime value of a customer comes into play.
