Kyle Sulerud - January 2, 2020Today’s question was pulled out of my Facebook group, Google Ads Strategy.
If you’re not a member yet, go to Facebook and search for the group: Google Ads Strategy.
The question comes from Caitlin, and she asks:
What has been your biggest Google Ads Campaign mistake that you’ve learned from?
I thought this was a good question. And it’s actually not something I can make a whole episode about, so I thought it would be fun to go through the other people’s responses to this question that they posted in the group. Some of them are kind of funny. I’m sure they weren’t funny during the moment that they experienced it. But it’s good to put some of these things in perspective, and realize that even when we make mistakes, we can work through them and move past them.
But more than anything, I thought this would be just fun and informative. It’s much better to learn from someone else’s mistake than to learn from your own mistake.
So let me start with a couple of my mistakes:
The first one I’ll mention is, actually before I got into Google Ads much at all, I was just kind of using it for my junk removal business. I had been running a search campaign. At one point based on Google’s recommendation, I turned on the display network within that same campaign. Within about a week, I had burned through about $500 of the budget without even realizing it, until I saw it on my credit card bill. That was a lot of money at the time! It was a huge learning experience for me. It’s actually what really got me into Google ads.
From there, I just started learning as much as I could so I could avoid mistakes like that. And that set me down this path that I’m on now, which has landed you here with a podcast, that I’m now hosting, about Google ads.
Another mistake that I’ve made more recently was removing a remarketing audience from a display campaign. So this happened because I was editing some audiences. I actually intended to remove remarketing audiences from a number of search campaigns that they were applied to, and I accidentally removed it from this display campaign by mistake. It was supposed to be there. This was supposed to be a remarketing campaign. So when I removed that audience, it was basically targeting anyone and everyone. It took a few days to catch it. That was something that I ended up issuing a credit to the customer for, out of my own pocket, so it was definitely a good learning experience.
So let me read through some of these other people’s responses.
I may add some of my own commentaries. But for the most part, I just want to read to you what some other people have said:
Vidar says: “When your most arrogant co-worker says “duh … I got this!!” … double check … one of my former workplaces experienced this when the employee mistook total budget for daily budget, then went on vacation …”
Reese says: “For English, especially if you live in the USA. Make sure you are doing geographic targeting. I started a new campaign and did not, and my ad was running in India, Australia, UK, etc.”
Oskars says: “A stupid mistake where I was running display with pay for conversions bidding, instead of $15 CPA I placed $150 – in couple hours I burned all my client’s quarter budget…”
Isma says: “Making test campaigns (to show employees how to create campaigns) on a production account, and one of the employees activate a test campaign, burning the budget for nothing, lol.”
I’ll add my own there.
I had a similar experience where I had set up a campaign that I was using for a YouTube ads training, just to pull out some screenshots. What happened was I set up a campaign for Grammarly (using a Grammarly video as the example), and then I started the campaign. I did not pause it. So for about a week I was running ads for Grammarly directly to Grammarly’s website.
Julio says: “My biggest mistake was working on an account that I didn’t own without being paid first. Did shit tons of negative keyword research, set it all up and then got disconnected without a warning.”
Andrei says: “Changed the URL but forgot to change the destination URL in Google ads.”
Ben says: “Forgetting to hit the period button on my bid lol”
Carlos says something similar: “Accidentally putting $60/click instead of .60 on the bid on a losing keyword then not checking my stats on that specific word lol lost about $20k total over the course of a month. Gross negligence on my part. Had to hire an assistant to not mess up again seeing as I’m busy with other ventures. Lesson learned.”
I hope that was your own account, at least, and not a client account, Carlos. But yeah, those periods are important.
Alvin says: “YouTube ads putting keywords, topics, placements, affinity in 1 adgroup and wondering why I was getting 0 data. First time doing YouTube ads. It was too restricted and narrow.” 🙂
So at least that’s a mistake that doesn’t cost you any money, though. Those are much better mistakes to make than the mistakes where you’re spending 10 times more than you want to.
Nirav says: “Not checking daily budget…ended (up) spending $2500 instead of $250…that was at the start of my career..I had to bear the losses…”
Frank says: “Using exact match and phrase match only. Broad modified match helps a lot.”
Simon says: “I started running Adwords in 2007 when I’d just set up a shiny new downloadable audiobooks website. A couple of sales came in and then a competitor suddenly came onto my radar…
I decided to take this company on, some fly-by-night operation called Audible, and guess what happened? I got my arse well and truly kicked, and my little business became a forgotten entry in the annals of ecommerce history.
Lesson learned… don’t pick fights with Amazon. 🥺
Also, about 8 years ago I set up an affiliate campaign for myself for downloadable computer games. Estimated CPC was about $0.45.
I went off to lunch without having set up a daily budget and when I came back an hour later I had already burned through $400! Without a single sale. 🤬It turns out all the clicks were teenagers looking for freebies…website duly deleted.”
Rob says: “Oh no when I pressed an extra few 0s on daily budget before the days of double check.”
Hopefully, by now you’re getting something out of this blog, that you should double-check everything.
Ideally, someone else would double-check things for you. If you’re working alone, double-checking is huge. At least if your budget is small, you’re not going to waste a ton of money. Wasting a ton of money because your budget is higher than you wanted it to be is the most powerful mistake that you can probably make.
Tom says: “Mine was Facebook. Spent £2500 instead of £25.”
Vivek says: “Was testing aggressive targeting vs conservative when it was launched. Nothing happened for two days, then it blew overnight!!”
Side note on that
So you know what he’s talking about with Display Campaigns, you can target conservatively. Let’s say you’re targeting a remarketing audience, you can target conservatively, meaning you’re only going to show ads to people in that remarketing audience.
But Google also has the option to expand that targeting and target more aggressively, so it would show to people outside of that remarketing audience. Certainly, for remarketing campaigns, you want to keep those conservative or, as Vivek said, you’re going to end up blowing your budget on people outside of your targeting.
Patrick says: “Forgetting to apply the negative keyword list to new campaigns…”
Michael says: “Letting an AdWords specialist (Google employee) make adjustments.”
Andres says: “Not adding proper dynamic conversion values to upsells for info products.”
Edwin says: “Copy-pasted a YouTube campaign between accounts, forgot audiences don’t. YouTube campaign had no targeting = targeting everyone. Had to manage the client a few months for free to compensate the loss 😅”
Chris says: “Gonna get hate for this but.. ignoring the Google Ads reps because of the bad rap they get (in the group). Maybe I’m lucky, but my guy has given me some super helpful tips.”
Interesting perspective on that.
Of course, most people are saying (myself included) that ignoring Google Ads reps is usually the way to go. But if you’re like Chris, and you find some of their tips helpful, you know, go for it.
I think the biggest thing with Google reps is just not to take their advice verbatim, and to actually understand how things work yourself. Then you can filter in and out the advice that you’re getting from any Google reps.
Ben says: “Not advertising expensive enough products.”
Sergiy says: “1. Changing something in campaigns before getting enough statistics. 2. Using automatic bidding strategy for conversion optimisation and not having enough conversions per week.”
Tryggvi says: “Not noticing the new client account had different currency from all others in that market. So I rolled out with a daily-budget of $2.500 instead of $200 🙈
Fortunately I caught it later that day.”
Ezra says: “Starting with all my budget at once. 10 bucks a day is what I should have started with not 300 bucks a day.”
John says: “Spending too much time being meticulous. Putting up thousands of products and keywords. When I should have tested a few at a time.”
Alex says: “Running display ads without excluding phone apps. Kids burned through my budget on videos games that 3 year olds were playing.”
That’s the end of that little discussion.
Hopefully, you found some of that useful, and maybe you feel like some of those could use some further discussion.
If you have a question, maybe a follow-up question to something you’ve just read, go ahead and ask me.
Call the voicemail line at +1 (701) 409-4138 or email me at: kyle [at] adleg.com with the subject line “Podcast Question”.