Hello, All About Digital Marketing & Data Analytics squad! Today, we’re focusing on PPC, particularly Google Ads and its mind games...

Let’s not forget that Google is a business aiming to maximise its earnings :)

As a performance marketer, I often encounter unnecessary recommendations or default settings in Google Ads, and I think it’s high time we address these :) Especially now, with a surge of AI suggestions, some are genuinely useful, while others are unnecessary.

While these settings can occasionally be beneficial, they are often redundant. Before reading this issue, please remember that these observations are general and may vary across different industries and brands.

Let's start reducing wasted budgets and clean set-ups!

1) Location Targeting

While setting up campaigns, after selecting the region or country, the default targeting option is set to 'presence or interest'. This means your ad could be shown to someone merely interested in that region or country. It's more effective to choose the 'presence' option to ensure your ads reach the intended audience.

2) Network Selection

Sometimes we might overlook this detail... If you're running both Search Ads and Display Ads in your account, there's no need to select the display network option when configuring your Search Ads campaign. However, if you haven't already, you can set up a separate display campaign. I believe this will perform better than combining it with your Search campaign.

3) Broad Match Keyword

Here's the case you might be familiar with :) Google strongly recommends using broad match keywords, which can lead to a wasted budget. If you have very specific keywords or a niche, a broad match can be useful, but most of the time it’s challenging to track every keyword. Google often shows your campaign for unrelated keywords due to the broad match option. From my experience, I primarily use broad matches in Search-brand campaigns, as they are easier to manage.

Tip: In the search term report, if you add some potential keywords to your campaign, they automatically default to broad match (a little trick from Google:)). Make sure to monitor your keywords and check their match types in your ad groups.

4) It's the Sign: Limited by budget

It's one of the classic warnings we often see in our accounts. Well, is it really limited by budget? Yes, it's limited to infinity—we can keep increasing our budget to outbid competitors and rank higher. However, before you decide to increase your budget, consider these metrics to get a clearer picture.

You can explore why you lost the top impression share or the overall impression share. As you can see, even if it says "limited by budget," sometimes you might be missing out due to your ad rank. Before increasing your budget, consider improving your ad assets and landing page experience.

5) Achieving Excellence: Ad Strength

Sometimes it can be challenging to achieve excellent ad strength. I always use various methods to improve my ad quality, and I strive to write the best headlines :D Unfortunately, that's often not enough for Google.

After numerous trials, I came across a recommendation from Google suggesting to unpin some assets. As you know, we can pin our headlines to the first, second, or third position, but Google seems to prefer otherwise! After unpinning all of my headlines, my ad strength improved from average to EXCELLENT.

That wraps up our discussion on Google's mind games :) If you know of any more, feel free to share them with me in the comments!

Remember, Google always aims for us to spend more, so we should be careful when evaluating recommendations or default settings. Despite these mind games, I still love Google Ads :)

For now, I'll see you in the next episode, where I'll talk about YouTube short ads. Continue exploring All About Digital Marketing & Data Analytics and don't forget to subscribe to stay updated on the latest information. Cheers!