• by Tyler Jordan , November 27, 2024

I’ve worked with Google ads for almost 15 years. When I started working in search engine marketing, Google was a great partner that cared about helping brands succeed.

Those were the good old days.

Today, there are countless stories of reps pushing irrelevant features, formerly helpful reps being laid off in the shift to AI-based “service,” and Google Ads campaigns that essentially encourage advertisers to set a budget and leave the rest to Google. The upshot is that Google reps are now prioritizing revenue for Google above all else, brands be damned. (If you don’t believe me, check out Sundar Pichai’s commentary on Google’s Q1 earnings call.)

Unless you’re marketing for a huge brand and have a dedicated rep whose main goal is to retain your business, your brand is vulnerable to all of this. Here’s a list of recommendations for making sure your budget is working for you -- and not for Google’s bottom line.

First and foremost, check your default settings. Multiple brands have come to us with default settings that shove the majority of the brand’s budget to Google Display Network and Search Partners, with nothing going to search (which is an exponentially higher-performing channel). Last month, we did an audit for a brand that had just spent many thousands of dollars on the GDN and Search Partners – with zero conversions to show for it.

Take every recommendation you hear from a rep with a grain of salt. Remember that their goal now is to make money for Google’s shareholders, not your brand. Even if it’s a cool-sounding beta that might offer early adoption advantages, think critically about whether it’s the right strategic move for your brand before signing up.

Make sure you’re controlling what you can control in your campaigns. Let’s say you’re an ecommerce brand and you have to use PerformanceMax campaigns, and you’re telling the campaigns to optimize for conversion goals. If you leave the rest to Google, it will optimize for the easiest conversions -- which will probably be your lowest-cost products.

You can mitigate this by optimizing for revenue and using target ROAS. For B2B, instead of focusing on leads, make sure that you are segmenting and integrating your back-end CRM data as offline conversions to tell Google what kind of customers to look for – specifically, the customers who buy the kinds of products or services you want to sell.

If you have a helpful rep, do your best to keep them. If you don’t, ask for a new one. Eventually AI “support” will probably be your only option, but if you don’t speak up before that happens, you’ll be stuck with whatever Google gives you.

When in doubt, ask an expert to check your campaigns to see if there are any red flags. This could be an agency or a consultant if you don’t have anyone in-house, but the right party will justify your investment several times over.

It’s also helpful to learn as much as you can about Google Ads and to keep up with its releases and their effectiveness. Overall, make sure there’s someone on your team who can recognize and call BS -- and keep your accounts optimized for your growth, not Google’s.

This post was previously published in an earlier edition of Marketing Insider.