Google Ads Beginners: Do This or Stay Broke

In this video, I'm going to give you the number one tips I have for Google Ads beginners. And these are not the basic tips you're going to see on ChatGPT or a Google search on some blog. These are the harsh realities, the real true tips for people to have success on Google Ads. I've been managing ads for over 10 years. For those who don't know me, my name is Austin LeClaire. I'm co founder of Grow My Ads. We are an agency that manages millions per month in ad spend. So I have seen companies start from nothing to generating millions with Google Ads. And I've seen companies start and absolutely fail and waste thousands of dollars because they didn't understand some of the tips that I'm about to share in this video. Let's dive in. Okay, tip number one, and this is where I see a lot of companies fail. They don't have enough budget to make Google Ads even work for their company or the industry they're in. Target metric, you want 10 clicks per day, bare minimum. The more clicks the better. And you want to eventually get to 30 plus conversions in a month. The more conversions per month the better. But eventually that's going to unlock the ability to really dial in the efficiency of smart bidding. For example, if you're a personal injury lawyer and you're going into Google Ads with a budget of $1,000 per month, you're essentially donating that money to Google. You will not see a positive ROI from that. Why is that? A cost per click for a personal injury lawyer is going to usually be 1, 2, $300 per click. Right? So with a thousand dollars per month, there's no way you're going to come close to even getting 10 clicks per day. You're gonna end up with just a few clicks for the month and have nothing to work with. And you're gonna just look at this and be like, Google Ads doesn't work. No, Google Ads does work. You just didn't have the data to actually make it work because you set yourself up for failure with the incorrect budget for the market that you are in. So why does this matter? Because Google Ads has become a game of feeding the machine quality data. Data, but lots of quality data if possible. Without that quality and without the volume of conversions, the smart bidding, the machine learning, they struggle. And so the, the, the accounts today that are absolutely minting money. There's one thing that they all have in common. They started with the correct budget within their market, and they've got lots of volume to work with now and today. They've been able to scale because they continue to have really good quality data, lots of that quality data. And that's what them to make smart optimizations within their account. So what do you do? Well, it's very simple. Go inside the keyword tool planner inside of Google Ads. Go enter keywords that you would be targeting within your industry. So if you're a personal injury lawyer, you're literally going to be putting in personal injury lawyer and go see what CPCS Google is showing within the keyword planner tool. Are you able to spend at least enough Money to generate 10 of those clicks for whatever the average CPCs are for the keywords you'll be targeting? Tip 2 the 90 day rule. Patience wins. You need to set proper expectations. You're not going to start a new Google Ads account and 10x your money in week 1, 2, 3 or even 30 days from now. You need to have patience for at least 90 days in order to get enough data coming in. And if you followed step number one or tip number one, you know the budget that's needed for you in order to make that data possible, the amount of data that you need. But now you're in this data collection phase and usually 90 days is a good time frame to work with, knowing, hey, I'm going to have to invest in this for at least about 90 days in order to get enough data to figure out can this even work for me. Now there are companies that will make Google Ads profitable from the first month. That's just very rare. And so you need to have the correct timeframe and are you willing to invest in at least 90 days of data collection before seeing a profit? Again, I'm not saying it's impossible to make a profit sooner. It is. It's just usually those companies who come at it where they a scarcity mindset, where they absolutely need profit from day one. Good luck. Do something else. I don't know, buy a billboard or a radio ad. Maybe they can provide profit day one? Probably not. This is something that you're building towards. You do kind of have to invest in this data phase. If you're unwilling to do that, then Google Ads is just not right for you. So here's a visual I've done in previous trainings where I talk about some of these phases. You are in this quality data collection phase when you're just starting out. So this is absolutely within that sort of first 90 days. You want the clicks like we talked about in tip one where you need the budget to get enough clicks. Then eventually you want to start getting the conversion volume ramp up. That's going to hopefully be happening within days 30 to 90. And this will eventually allow you to start getting into the efficiency of smart bidding dialing in. But you have to start with usually these phases before you get to this phase three of actually dialing in smart bidding and working on potentially then the profitability aspect of it all. So these are very crucial phases and you just have to have the patience to go through those if you want to make success happen within your Google Ads account. Tip 3 if your offer is crap, so will your results. Google Ads cannot fix a broken business model. It's crazy to see how many people who will come to us and still think like we can just make magic happen and they want to start ads up and like, hold on a second. Your website's terrible, your pricing's 20% more than all the competitors in the auctions. So where do you think you're going to just magically find some success here? You won't. You have to have the fundamentals of a true business already dialed in if you're going to have any success on the ad side. So you need a great offer. Number one, you need competitive pricing. You can't be 20% more than your competitors if you're selling the same product and expect to have high conversion rates. Won't happen. People aren't that dumb. They will do their due diligence. They'll click around and then find the best deal. You need to have a high converting website. If your website's garbage, you know it's garbage. Don't throw ads at it. Go fix the site first. Be throwing before throwing traffic to it. And you need a strong funnel whether you're E Commerce or or Legion. Obviously that will differ, but with Legion I see it all the time. They get these leads, they do nothing with it. Like they just expect to run ads, get leads and then those leads will sell themselves. It's crazy. That won't happen. The work begins when the lead comes in. And those that actually kill on the ad standpoint from lead generation, it's because they have the back end of their funnel completely dialed in to nurture and sell those leads. Same with E Commerce. If your checkout process has a bunch of friction to it, you will not do as well as your competitor who has a very fine tuned checkout process. So you know, if your website's not good, go do some competitor research. But don't think by just running ads to a subpar or Terrible website experience that you'll be able to magically make profit. You, you have to have these fundamentals down first. You have to have a great offer. Ads just fuel good businesses with good offers already. Tip 4. You need to know your numbers or you're going to operate this blind and end up nowhere. So you need to define what do you actually want and your answer can't be, well, I want more sales for less. That's not an acceptable answer. We all want that, right? What is the reality? What are you actually looking to achieve? Is, is it profit or is it growth? Because usually you have to choose a path. By the way, if you're just starting and you're a beginner, don't tell me it's 10x profit because that won't work. What you need first is the data which we've talked about. So you really need to work on growth first. Then at a certain point you can start deciding do you need more profit now to, to get this to actually work and that that's something you're willing to continue to invest in or are you happy to generating as many new customers right now as possible, even if it's at break even? Because you play the LTV game. But you have to know your numbers in your business and what are the unit economics that will allow you to invest in the goal that you set with inside of your Google Ads account. If you don't know these numbers, then you're set for failure. So some of these numbers you need to know, right? What's the lifetime value of a customer to you? What is the lead to close? Conversion rate. So if a lead comes in, how long, if it's qualified, how long does it take for your sales team to close that that allows you to understand then okay, what are we able to pay on the ad side for a lead or if you're E commerce, are you able to afford a new customer acquisition not just like roas, right, but bringing in new customers to your business. Is there that LTV component to it or do you need a lot of profit on that first order? This will allow you, once you understand the unit economics of your business, to go back to the ad strategy and be able to understand where you're trying to steer the ship. So many businesses just are putting money into ads, they're putting money into tactics and then they don't ultimately know what they're trying to achieve on the back end from that other than they're just trying to get more. Right? Everyone just wants more. But what does more mean when it comes to your business, you just need to know those numbers. Once companies know these numbers, man, it makes the game so much easier because then strategically you can then steer the tactics of the campaigns to serve your goals, not the other way around of you're just doing what Google's telling you to do with these campaigns for more roas or more conversion volume. But ultimately that might not be serving the goals of the business on the back end based off of your numbers. So you absolutely have to know the numbers of your business in order to steer the strategy of the tactics you're going to be deploying inside of your Google Ads account. Now remember, if you try to get too much profit in the beginning, you're going to stipend growth and then if you go too aggressive on growth, you're probably going to have zero profit. A lot of companies I'll see they'll, they'll find a sweet spot when they're beginning so they'll, they'll play around with this. But you've got to go through that 90 day period of volume ramp up before you can even get to this stage. But once you're at this stage you'll probably kind of bounce back and forth and playing around with numbers to understand the sweet spot for your business. So you, you won't have this perfect from you know, day one but, but this is something you need to be thinking about and then you'll be deploying these tests within your ad account understanding are we too profitable? Cause now we're not growing or are we growing too fast and it's actually hurting profitability or whether losing money and it doesn't make sense for our CACT LTV within our business. Tip 5 this one's very short. Don't blindly trust Google's recommendations. I have an older video that I did about, you know, all the Google recommendations they have inside of the account and what, which ones you should, you know, listen to or not. So I'll have that in the description of the this video below. Go check that out after this if you want. But remember Google is operating for maximum shareholder value and so they're trying to maximize their revenue, not yours. You would think though, hey, if all of our, our advertisers are more successful, we will be too. I'm sure they do think about that in some fashion, but it doesn't translate or execute from the day to day of what working within Google recommendations in their platform from what I'm see. So use Google's tools, use the insights and data you can gather from that. But be very cautious of the recommendations Google gives to you. Usually it serves them in most cases and not you. My final tip is correct conversion tracking. You must have correct conversion tracking set up. Don't launch ads without correct conversion tracking. So if you're E commerce that means you're actually correctly tracking the purchases from the ad clicks that you get. And if you're legion, you're getting phone call tracking since phone calls will be important to you as well as form fills. Now that can get kind of complex. Just a basic setup usually in the beginning is fine. Just to get going. You'll probably hear other videos of me on this channel where I talk about the complexities of training the algorithms with better high quality data and not just simple form fills and things like that. Forget all of that right now. Just have correct tracking to be able to get the purchases right now and form fills and phone calls. If you're lead generation start basic but correct tracking. Tracking is its own rabbit hole with lots of complexities and it won't be perfect, but you need it. You need something in place right in order to actually get that data. So remember the most important part of that 90 day period that I've discussed is clicks and then conversion volume ramp up. Well, how can you get conversion volume ramp up if you have incorrect conversion data? And I'm not kidding, I've talked to so many businesses throughout my career, they come to us, they've been running ads for months, sometimes years and the entire account has to be absolutely sledgehammered because they never had correct conversion tracking set up or they had double tracking or incorrect conversions were set up. So then the machine learning started learning off of essentially conversions that made absolutely no sense to their business or their goals. Well, you have to go back to square one then in those cases because you've just trained the smart bidding algorithms on data points that mean nothing to the business. So you have to have correct conversion tracking set up from the beginning. It's the foundation to everything in regards to having enough clicks and then getting the volume ramp up period through that 90 days and then all the unit economics of understanding your business and what that will mean to the goals that you're able to achieve within your Google Ads account. Your you can't tactically do any of that without conversion tracking set up. So make sure you have sound correct conversion tracking before you launch money and traffic into your Google Ads account. There you go. Those are my top tips. And I get those are harsh tips. But that's the harsh is what you need in order for success. Those are my top tips for Google Ads beginners. It's not about tactics, it's about setting the right foundations for from the beginning for you to ultimately turn your Google Ads machine into a money printer in the future. Hey, if you want to learn more about Google Ads or upskill your knowledge on Google Ads, I have a group called PPC Copilot. There'll be a link in the description below. We do Q&As. I have my courses in there, ongoing training, and it's a really cool group of people and other advertisers all learning from each other. So if that is you, you want to learn more, go check that group out. I'd love to see you inside. If not, no worries. I'll see you on the next video.