❎ Why Your Google Ads Campaigns Aren't Scaling: Top Mistakes to Avoid

[@augustomoradiaz]

Hi, very interesting. I'm from Colombia and also had problem following your conversation speed and the sound quality made it more difficult. Even though is a very valuable information, thanks and keep sharing.

[@liyahsaty]

Thank you for sharing your thought process John! Great video as always! I noticed whenever we're trying to scale by increasing the budget - the CPC and CPA increase through the roof, cold traffic increases but very minimal, conversions remain flat. Like as if the system is just trying to hit the budget by increasing the bids but not generating any new users and conversions. Any reason why that would be? (We use tROAS across the board)

[@TheMillerPlanet]

Quick off-topic question: My client sells puzzles. I tried Standard Shopping Ads (first time they are doing shopping ads, products were just recently uploaded to merchant center). I optimized the product titles - they are spot on and fit very well. Now, a couple days (maybe 7) into the shopping campaigns, I get ridiculously irrelevant search terms. I didn't know Google can be so creative coming up with more and more irrelevant search terms. It seems like Google ignores the keywords in the product title and also the product categorization. First Keyword in the product title is "puzzle" it is google-categorized as a puzzle, but I get search terms like: "picture", "toy", "present" and so on. Minimum 90% of the search terms are irrelevant and I could easily put in around 600-800 negative Keywords per day. Do you have any ideas or solution to my problem? ^^

[@lateonbrakes]

John Moran - please give us more insight on how Target CPA/ROAS is a restrictive bidding strategy. Is it always the case that's it should be considered restrictive or does that label generally apply to eComm businesses?

[@GuyMartinSmalley]

I'm not John but I know the answer here. People refer to those bidding types as being "restrictive" because they have conditions that throttle (restrict) the amount of auctions you enter, whereas maximize conversions bidding does not have those conditions. Same thing for lead gen or ecommerce. Nutshell: Target CPA: "Get as many conversions as possible, as long as they stay below $X each." (restrictive) Target ROAS: "Get as many conversions as possible, as long as our ad revenue remains X% above our spend." (restrictive) Maximize conversion bidding: "Get as many conversions as possible." (non-restrictive - because there is no cost-related condition)

[@lateonbrakes]

@@GuyMartinSmalley yuup...looks like YT deleted the link I shared to John's clip about this. But your summary is correct

[@janslovnik]

I've asked this question before under the How to track conversions video, but it went unanswered, hoping you can answer: In the How to track conversions video you said that Analytics doesn't track about 20% of all purchases - this is the part that I agree with. However in the example that John showed inside the Google Ads at 3:10 the conversion value and the purchases were about 50% higher. Some of my Google Ads accounts have similar differences, but they never perform as good as the ones with about 20% difference between Analytics/Ads regarding conversion value/purchases. I've tried scaling the former ones, but the problem is that the reported conversion value does not reflect in total sales at all. I ended up just spending much more with almost the same revenue, basically the MER dropped significantly after spending more on Google. An additional caveat is that the reported conversion value on Google Ads went up, but not in Analytics or at a much slower pace. The Analytics number seemed to be much more accurate. On the other hand when I have about 20% difference between Ads and Analytics the Google Ads account is much easier to scale and it also reflects in the total revenue/MER. Is there any way to combat this? I feel like the algorithm just thinks it's doing really good in the first example when in reality it isn't if the difference is up to 100% in conversion value on some accounts. I hope I didn't complicate it too much and it makes sense. Thanks.

[@solutionseight]

Hi Jan! John Moran here. May I ask what campaigns you are scaling? It could be a reattribution to Google ads if the campaigns types include existing site traffic as part of its audiences.

[@GuyMartinSmalley]

It's not unreasonable to see a 20% difference between Google Ads and GA purchase conversions, just on account of GA being basically last-click attribution, and Google Ads being able to count view-throughs, visitors who come back later via other sources, etc. But as that "gap" increases from 20% to +50%, it might be indicative of Google getting fast and loose with their attribution. For example, they'll drop a display ad in front of a guy who already has an item in his cart and his credit card in his hand, and then they'll pat themselves on the back for it. Are you seeing that your 20% campaigns are getting most of their conversions from search and/or shopping and on a shorter time lag, whereas your 50% group has more KZbin and/or display in the mix?

[@janslovnik]

@@solutionseight I'm trying to scale PMAX, while running very little traffic from other campaigns except Brand, but a good amount of traffic from FB. On the other hand Brand is almost always within 10% of the purchases/conversion value compared to Analytics, the problem is only with PMAX. In PMAX some of the traffic is of course going to be existing, but as you scale the ratio should be getting lower I think. I've had a lot of success on one account that was within 20%, but others that report way more, even up to 100% more are really hard to scale, because Google thinks it's doing great, but in reality many times it's producing a loss. I've tried combating that with a way higher tROAS target than break-even, but even that had little success. If I left it on Max Conv or Max Conv Value it just ran away with the spend while not bringing in the results, because of the discrepancy.

[@janslovnik]

@@GuyMartinSmalley Honestly, maybe. I checked the PMAX campaigns and in the account with lower difference (below 20%) there were about 5k YT views with almost 10 times more spend than on the one with the higher difference (about 80%). The higher difference one had about 26k YT views, which still isn't that much. I also checked impressions for PMAX placements and the one with lower difference has way lower impressions on websites that I assume are among the display partners, but this doesn't confirm that the conversions are coming from those 2 channels. However, after checking the listing groups for shopping conversions data the one with higher difference had about 85% of all the conversions/conversion value from shopping and the one with lower difference about 92% so most of the conversions are supposedly coming from the shopping network and the difference between the accounts isn't massive. It's also weird, because when I look in the Insights tab under search term insights for both accounts I can count about 50% of conversions coming from those, which I believed was only search network, but it seems it shares the data with the shopping network also.

[@bgrman5610]

@@janslovnik Feed PMAX more external traffic till you hit a good ROAS. It will remarket like a ninja.

[@ZebulonGrowden]

nice video

[@irbazahsan8229]

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