10 Mistakes that make you lose money with Google Ads
More and more companies are joining the world of digital advertising. Previous years have shown that the effectiveness of positioning a business on the network to attract customers, has generated a very positive impact. If you currently have a company, it is unthinkable to miss the opportunity to make yourself known through the Internet. Every year the record of investment in digital advertising is surpassed and more and more companies are launching themselves into this business.
You can look at this chart and see for yourself:
Digital Marketing Investment Spain
In this graph we can see the surprising evolution or increase in investment in digital marketing, due to the information it provides about potential customers and based on algorithms, we can know who is willing to buy from you.
But just as the number of companies investing in digital marketing has increased, so have the problems caused by misuse of these digital media platforms, resulting in financial losses.
Digital marketing platforms are a very powerful and useful tool, which can offer incredible results, but a bad use of it, becomes a machine to destroy money.
That is why we wanted to compile the 10 most common mistakes that most companies make when starting in the world of digital advertising, oriented to Google Ads, which is the most powerful, most used and with greater reach in the world.
10 MISTAKES TO AVOID IN ORDER NOT TO LOSE YOUR MONEY WITH GOOGLE ADS
(AND HOW TO AVOID THEM)
1º Think that any campaign is good for your business model.
It is very typical in companies that do not know Google Ads, that when they access the platform and create any campaign, they think that it will offer good results. But the reality is that NO!
Digital marketing is not a branding ad on TV, it is a type of strategic marketing, and as such, you must understand how best to address your target audience. Find the campaign that works best for what you sell. Just look at what your competition is doing and what types of campaigns they are advertising with.
2º A bad configuration.
Something very obvious, if you do things wrong, they will go wrong. The real problem is believing that you are doing it right. Google Ads is a platform that allows you to make a lot of configurations regarding the campaigns you are going to launch to the market, but that can be a real mess for many advertisers. You must be careful, since every little action you do wrong on the budget, bidding, placements, segmentation, etc, can cause you a loss of opportunities. Remember that each configuration in any parameter of the Google platform is totally different to each business model and type of campaign. My recommendation is to research about best practices, you can also try trial and error (if you have money to spare) or hire an expert agency.
You must know the different types of configurations by campaign and business model, as well as know how to IDENTIFY which ones can offer the best results for your business.
3º Limited budget.
When it comes to establishing the money we are going to invest in campaigns, the vast majority make the mistake of taking the budget as an expense and not as an investment. This causes you to invest less than you really should, cutting the wings of growth to your company. Just because you spend more, you will not sell more; this is also a myth. But we must understand that when it comes to displaying our ads, we are competing with other companies just like ours, which means that if we invest less than them, we are completely in their shadow. There is no "star" budget, it will depend on the business model, competition and own needs. It is always better to do a previous research, not to invest less than the competition, a low budget or too high. Find the balance of profitability.
4º Always use Google's recommendations.
Every step we go through to create a campaign, we run into recommendations from Google to "help us improve our performance". These recommendations work based on algorithms, but they are algorithms that do NOT know your business and are based on the business of others. They are "Smart" options and you find all kinds of them: automatic targeting, improved CPC, automatic budget, automatic keywords... And you know that all of them, absolutely all of them will make you lose money. Letting Google control your campaigns will make your ads very ineffective, besides destroying your budget you will not get results. Avoid everything that is automatic and ALL Google recommendations, think that no one better than you or an expert to whom you have told your project, knows the company better. An algorithm does not know your company and does not understand your needs, do not leave your money in the hands of robots !
Also avoid all automatic recommendations as long as your Google Ads account has been running for a short time (less than 6 months), if you have been running for a longer time you can consider the use of conversion based bidding such as CPA or Enhanced CPC, as long as you have had more than 100 conversions with Google Ads. These strategies are based on your previous conversions and study your customers, but if you have never sold through Google Ads, the algorithm does not know your target customer. The fact that Google allows this type of bidding to new accounts is a way of saying that it doesn't care about your results and just wants your money.
5º Let the algorithm search for your customers.
Like the previous error, it is an automatic way to search for your potential customers. Google collects information from billions of users on the web and put us in "boxes" to show personalized ads based on our interests and habits. So when you are going to make a campaign, you can choose thousands of people's habits or interests that relate to your product or service. Sounds good, doesn't it? The margin of error of showing an ad to a person who is not interested in your company is more than 65%. So if you don't want to annoy people and lose money, avoid using Google's algorithms and segmentations (you should only use it in case you do branding). Instead, use keywords or audience lists that belong to your customers or web visitors (for remarketing, for example). If you rely on audiences (Google algorithms), remember to search by "segmentation" and not by "observation", and avoid classifying by interests or habits.
6º Expect faster results than Flash.
Very typical, I have had clients come to me, who expect that when the campaign has been created at 10 am, then (10:05) they already want to be millionaires. If it were that easy, we would all be rich. The reality is that as in other areas of life, you need patience. The longer you have been using Google Ads, the better results you will generate. In addition, Google rewards the most loyal advertisers and those who use the platform the longest with respect to the new ones. And on the other hand, it is almost impossible to run a campaign and go from 0 to 100. You should always be constantly working on the campaign you have created, improving it and optimizing it so that little by little you generate more results, until you reach a climax. But for that, in less than 4 months using Google Ads campaigns, it is impossible. Patience is the virtue of the successful.
7º Pause and reactivate campaigns constantly.
Avoid this and NEVER do it. What you will cause is that Google will blacklist you and cut your visibility. We tend to think that by doing this, we will save money, but we only extend the problem. You can pause a campaign and reactivate it, as long as it is not frequent and a margin of time (1 week) passes before reactivating the ad.
8º Use the platform without experience or training.
We think it's easy, that with 4 videos you can do it, that Google recommendations and the Algorithm will make me rich and the truth is very different. Educate yourself, this world is more difficult than it seems. The platform is accessible to anyone, but managing it is within the reach of very few. That is why most companies (95%) either fail to sell or generate losses.
Invest in learning or in a company that will manage your campaigns, in the long run you will be grateful for it. Do not think that you learn the training in 2 weeks, you need at least 1 year of constant work to understand how digital marketing works.
9º Run a campaign and think the job is done.
The work is to create a campaign from 0 and then continues. We must constantly work on our campaigns, optimizing, analyzing results, positioning over the competition and much more. We have to make changes and improvements as time goes by depending on the market situation.
10º Search for the cheapest way of marketing services.
There are freelancers that offer digital advertising services at very low prices or "all-knowledgeable" companies that offer millions of services, knowing a little of each one of them, but without being experts in absolutely nothing. Be careful with whom you invest your money, at least identify if they are people with official Google Ads certification. Cheap is expensive and bad campaigns can make you lose a lot of money.
If you manage to avoid these 10 mistakes, you are very close to achieving better results than 95% of companies.
