Stop Burning Your Google Ads Budget! Protect Your PPC Account From These 9 Budget Leaks

If you've been advertising in Google a long time, you've probably seen your costs go up. Now, some of this, and what Google wants you to think is causing this is increased competition, more people piling in trying to get those clicks that lead to sales and customers and conversions. However, a lot of the additional spend that Google is siphoning off every single year from advertisers is coming from sneaky tactics that they implement inside of Google Ads to surreptitiously grab dollars from all over your account so that they can put more money in their pocket and add to their bottom line. Hey, this is Luke from Grow My Ads. And in today's video, we're going to be talking about all of the ways that Google tries to steal money from your account. Now, Google is always trying to increase their quarterly revenue numbers every single year. They're trying to grow the amount of money that they squeeze from advertisers. And some of that, of course, is new businesses signing up. Some of it is people spending more because they're profitable. But a hell of a lot of that additional revenue comes from unsuspecting advertisers who really have a game played against them where Google is constantly trying to grab nickels and dimes and much more than that, as you'll see, from their account to squeeze more money from them, even though the performance of their account is actually going to either stay the same or get a lot worse. So Google is always trying to get as much revenue from every advertiser. What we're going to talk about today is exactly how you can protect your account against those different types of attempts to grab money. So before we get into the 10 biggest and most sneaky ways that Google stealing budget from your account, I want to talk about one of the things that is meant to solve this that really does absolutely nothing, and that is tools like Clicksys and other fraud reduction tactics that people are promoting out there in order to get you to sign up to a piece of software. We've done a lot of testing with tools like Clicksys. We've seen accounts with it on and then we've seen account the same account with that piece of software off. We've never actually seen a difference in performance. The problem is, is you can't actually verify that they're really improving the performance of your account because there's no way to check what IP addresses they're excluding and whether or not those IP addresses really did try to siphon budget from your campaign. If you want to cancel your click C subscription, that's totally up to you, but I would say from our point of view, really hasn't made much of a difference in any account that we've tested it on. So without further ado, let's get into the 10 ways that Google's stealing budget from your account and how you can avoid these mistakes going forwards. So number one actually is not a setting inside the account itself, but it's something that you're constantly going to be bombarded with, certainly when you're new, but even more so once you have a significant amount of spend in your account each month, and that is Google representatives hitting you up, trying to get on a call with you and tell you that they've got secrets that can help you unlock extra performance in your account that you just need to implement that will immediately improve performance. Well, the fact is, even when you're dealing with high level reps and you're spending, you know, which you only really get to if you're spending hundreds of thousands a month, but especially if you're dealing with a lower level representative because you're only spending, let's say, less than 50,000amonth or 25,000amonth, the reps that you're dealing with from Google typically don't have experience running ads and really are no more than glorified salespeople or promoters for new features that are going to add money to Google's coffers. So normally they'll reach out and they'll tell you to, hey, you know, add these extra keywords and they'll tell you to change the bid strategy so it can open up spend. They'll tell you straight up just to increase budget. Uh, they'll tell you to add additional campaigns that just don't really make sense for your offer and they'll keep bombarding you until eventually you go, well, I mean, there must be something to this. And you can go to Reddit, you can see all of the times that people have fallen for these recommendations. And literally 8 or 9 times out of 10, these suggestions either do nothing or much more likely result in a huge increase in cost and very little additional conversions coming through your account. Don't just blanket implement what Google representatives are telling you to because you will regret it. And typically you'll have to undo those changes at best, or worst case, completely restructure account and rebuild because the costs will get so out of control because of the incentive that they have simply to increase spend in your account. So the second way that Google tries to get more money from you, especially for people that are newer that are simply trying to get their account live is by encouraging you to create what are called smart campaigns. Now, smart campaigns sound amazing on paper, right? One click, you don't have to add keywords, you just input some themes, some general ideas, and you just trust Google to do the rest and hopefully deliver customers to your door. But the problem with this is is that A, a lot of that budget is not spent on what you think it is, and B, there's no way to actually improve performance with these campaigns because the most crucial data, I.e. the conversion data, is concealed from you and you're not able to see what's working and what's not working. And the only lever you have is to basically increase spend or try to vaguely exclude some terms within the typically does not perform well, but it will tell you that it's producing lots of conversions. However, often those conversions are not really verifiable at your end when it comes to real leads and sales coming through your business. So let me show you an example here. This is a smart campaign set up inside this account for phishing charters. And if you go into the smart campaign, one of the issues you're going to find quickly is that you simply see some of the terms that you're showing for, but that doesn't account for a lot of the budgets that's being spent. So in this case here, we had a certain number of impressions, we spent, you know, $150 and we had 150 clicks. And it seems like the clicks are extremely cheap. But when it comes down to what we're really spending on, we're only getting a small fraction of the data that Google's really pushing these ads towards. So if I go edit in this, the other crucial part here is we can see the search term, one of the search terms that we showed for status, click spend. But what we don't see here is conversions. And in fact, Google won't tell you what's converted in a smart campaign. And really the only thing you can do from that point is simply to either increase your spend or switch the thing off. And because you don't really know how well it's working or whether or not it's really producing conversions, you might be tempted just to leave it on and not really further investigate. But in our experience, a lot of the times smart campaigns are producing more either extremely low quality leads or just outright junk to your business. And on top of that, because they can't be optimized, there's nothing you can really do to improve the situation unless you move towards a proper campaign, like a standard search campaign or something else. So a lot of the time new advertisers will just leave it running and hope for the best and assume it's producing something. We would strongly advise against this. We would advise against running smart search campaigns. You really do not have a lot of control. You can see there really aren't any settings here other than okay, we can look at keyword themes and negative keyword themes, but we can't target specific terms. We can't hone into specific searches that are producing good quality leads for us or that are producing profitable revenue from us. And a lot of the conversions that Google ends up reporting simply don't really track to what you're going to see at your back end inside your business. So we would really recommend avoiding these entirely, saving your budget and putting your budget into things like standard search campaigns where you can target specific searches. And we can really track and hone into your best conversions and your most profitable conversions. So if you do decide to build out a proper search campaign, you're going to probably run into the next most common way that Google tries to steal money from your account, and that is Broad Match keywords. Now, yes, I know there are some ways to use Broad Match keywords, but in 99% of cases, especially for newer accounts, it is not the right strategy pursue and let me show you exactly why. So in this particular account, I'm going to go into this campaign and inside of this campaign we have a whole bunch of Broad Match keywords and in fact all of them are Broad Match and we have 59 of them in this one ad group. Now, first of all, Broad Match, what is it? Well, Broad Match is basically allowing Google to show an ad for not just closely but related terms, not just more broadly related terms, but pretty much anything and everything that's even extremely widely or loosely related to the not just the keyword, but the topic that you've input into your account as a Broad Match keyword. So in other words, it's extremely loose in its targeting and more often than not it will show for lower quality searches or even completely irrelevant searches that you just would not want to spend money on in a million years. So let me show you an example of this. So if I look at these keywords in general for this particular service, which is to do with psychiatry and mental health and therapy, these seem to be okay, these are, this is the keyword level, remember where. Well, if I go into insights and reports and go to search terms we're going to see that we do start showing for a few terms that we may not want to. So for example, I'm going to go to the psychiatrist keyword. I'm going to click on search terms and while many of these do include psychiatrist, if I do a filter and go term and does not contain psychiatrist. So this would be, this would be terms that do not include psychiatrist. Even though we're running a psychiatrist keyword, we're going to see a lot of searches that are a bit too broad for this campaign to really perform well. So for example, we're going to see ADD doctors, we're going to see behavioral health, we're going to see autism specialist, we're going to see. Let's just go further down. We're going to see a specific name of a particular doctor. We're going to see mental health for teens. We're going to see different brands, mental doctors. A lot of this stuff, while it's kind of related, it's generally not going to be as targeted and relevant and it's not going to lead to good quality conversions, even if these people do contact you, which they're less likely to because they're not looking for exactly what you have to offer. So broad match keywords in general don't really produce a great quality result and often you'll end up spending across lots of terms that really aren't going to drive the conversions you want and certainly won't do so at a cost per conversion that will make sense for you generally speaking, when it comes to search campaigns. While you free to test broad match down the track, you absolutely want to start with a hot fit, focused, concentrated effort on your core terms using phrase or exact match types, which are much more targeted and going to stick to more closely the theme or at least the searches that you want to go after and will ultimately result in better quality leads, typically better cost per conversion. If you are trying to drive conversions and they're going to result in overall better results from your campaign so that you're able to scale it up successfully. So generally speaking, if you're a new account or if you're not spending super aggressively and you're trying to get product profitability, we would recommend either eliminating broad match keywords or severely limiting and restricting the amount they can spend in your account so they don't take over all of your budget and take spend away from your core focus terms, which should be running in exact and phrase match. So the next sneaky way that Google tries to take budget from your ad account is with a secret setting inside of search campaigns that by default is switched on to waste your money. And that basically is the display option inside of search campaigns. So by default, if you set up a brand new search campaign, Google is going to have this option checked and you're really going to want to know where this setting is in your campaign so you can switch it off in case it's running right now. So just to show you, normally a search campaign is going to have an icon like this and it's going to look like a magnifying glass with a box. And that basically means it's just running in search network. However, what Google will do by default unless you uncheck this is they will run your search campaign also on display networks. And this is what the icon looks like when you're running with search with display select. Now if I click into this campaign, I'm going to go to settings and you're going to be able to see where this box is checked and how to uncheck it if you need to. So here under networks, you can see here that display network is on and that basically means that this campaign is wasting budget on display. Now, search ads are targeting people looking for something, right? Typically high intent people. They're off to something specific and they're in Google researching and trying to find whatever it is that they want. Display ads are kind of showered all over different websites hoping to attract people, but the intent is completely different. They're not able to get in front of people necessarily who are actively looking for something. They're more going to be on websites hoping to catch the attention of someone. But the two really don't go together. And this is simply a play by Google to squeeze additional spend and budget from advertisers because whatever budget can't be spent on keywords and searches in a campaign. It'll simply blow that additional spend on display and hope that you don't notice when in fact display is pretty much guaranteed to deliver next to no results. So you definitely want to uncheck this box. And if you're running display inside your campaigns, go ahead and take a look at the icons and make sure it looks like this and it doesn't look like this inside your account. And just to show you how bad it can get if you do allow Google to run display inside a search campaign, here I'm going to show you. So in this particular case, I click on columns, I'm enabling all my conversion columns because I want to see what's actually converting and then I'LL do a segment and I'll select network. So I'm going to be able to see the different networks that Google is running this campaign on. And you can see that in this particular campaign, which spent $1200, $1000 of that 1200 was spent on display and basically wasted. And that is a huge waste in this campaign. It's pretty much impossible for a campaign like this to do anything if most of the budget is being spent on display network ads that are basically just hitting people at random and not driving conversions or getting in front of high intent potential customers. Now if you are going to run display ads, and in some cases they really do make sense, you need to make sure that you're hitting the audiences that you intend to be hitting. So usually the best use of display with Google Ads is remarketing people who've come to your site from a high intent term in order to bring them back after they've left your website if they have not converted. And this is a great thing that you can set up in your account, but you need to make sure that your remarketing campaigns are actually hitting remarketing audiences and not hitting a whole bunch of other junk that's simply going to waste budget that Google's kind of slipping into your campaign without your notice. So we're going to talk about two major ways that Google wastes budget when it comes to display campaigns in general and even specifically remarketing campaigns. So the first one is the audiences that Google spends your budget on. Now if you're running remarketing, you would want to spend on audiences of people that have already visited your website. So in this case here, in this campaign we have an AdWords optimized list and it has a decent size to it. We've got a visitors list, Google Ads, and we've got product page visitors. But a strange thing you'll notice here is that while these audiences are eligible and they are enabled in this campaign, you'll see that that we actually haven't really spent much budget on on any of these audiences and we've had zero impressions on all three of them. So this campaign spent budget. Whereabouts to this campaign spend? Well, you're going to see that here total expansion and optimized targeting. And this is essentially people that Google thinks are similar to those in your remarketing audiences. But they're importantly, they're not in your remarketing audience. And in this case here you can see that Google spent literally the entire budget in this campaign on non remarketing audiences in a campaign that we actually assumed was designed for remarketing. They simply targeted the expanded audiences, not our remarketing audiences, which got actually zero impressions and clicks. So how the heck do you turn this off? Well, it's hidden in the depths of not just the campaign settings, but actually the ad group settings inside your display campaign. So what you need to do is you need to go into the ad group inside your campaign, you need to go to settings and here you need to click Edit ad group targeting. And once this pops up, this is actually where you can turn off the expanded audience targeting. So you can see here it says optimized targeting helps you get more conversions within your budget. Google may find people beyond your targeting signals. You need to uncheck this box to find force Google to spend on the audiences that you actually want to be hitting, rather than basically giving Google free reign to spend your entire budget on anyone, pretty much anything out there that most likely is not going to produce whatsoever for your business and is just going to waste that spend. So make sure you uncheck this box. Check your display campaigns right now to ensure you're not wasting money here. But we're not done with how much Google loves to waste budget inside of display campaigns in Google Ads yet. We've done the first one which is having display running as a secret checkbox inside of a search campaign, which doesn't make any sense. We've done the second one which is expanded targeting hitting pretty much anyone out there, regardless of how relevant they are to you. And now we're onto the third one which is where Google actually shows the ads, even if you do have the right audiences set in your campaigns, because it loves to waste budget here as well on that low quality traffic and ad space that simply doesn't produce for 99% of businesses. Basically, Google has a lot of ad inventory out there on mobile devices, a lot of which is extremely low quality, but they want to sell it and they want to sell it to you and they want to make money from it. And so they normally try to slip it into campaigns so that they're able to kind of offload that that ad space that they need to get rid of. And this is specifically for mobile devices on games and apps in general, which don't convert for most businesses who are going to show there. So you can see this here. I'm actually going to go in this same campaign which had both issues. You can find out where your ads are actually being shown by going to Insights and reports and clicking on when and where ads showed and then clicking on where ads showed. And if you see the word mobile app written anywhere here, you know that Google is wasting your budget on junk. Here. We're seeing, we showed for, you know, Snap games, we showed for PDF reader, we showed for a sport hub. I've seen clients that were running ads to drive B2B leads spending thousands of dollars on Tinder ads on an app, which clearly is probably not going to be the most, the, the most ideal spot to be showing for their customers. Customers. It's definitely one of the things that Google loves to slip into an account. The second thing they love to do is to show on games. So if you see a game or a mobile app anywhere inside of where ads showed, you want to exclude that pretty much straight away. You also want to take a look at if I click on network and I just select YouTube, you want to look at where your ads are showing on YouTube as well. Because often Google will either show them on kids Networks or kids YouTube channels or YouTube channels that you really don't want to be showing on and you definitely maybe even don't want to be seen on. So in this case here, you can see this particular B2B business is showing on this particular YouTube topic. We've got movies, we've got Daily Trend, Africa. It's just all kinds of random stuff that's just not going to produce for them that needs to be excluded from their campaigns. So make sure that if you do check where I showed you, exclude, exclude mobile apps inside of your display campaigns and make sure that you're excluding on a regular basis YouTube channels you're showing on that are just completely irrelevant to your offer. So just to show you really quickly how you can do it inside here manually, you can select these YouTube channels. For example, you can click edit and you can click exclude from campaign. And if you use the Google Ads editor, you're actually able to exclude all mobile apps and games so that those fat fingers aren't eating up your budget at Google's profit. So since we're talking about devices and where ads are out showing for you, you need to be aware of the different devices that Google can show your standard text or shopping ads on and how they differ in performance. So there are really three. And then maybe a fourth device that Google can show your ads on. Number one is obviously desktop. That's typically going to be the best quality. However, you're going to normally pay a premium for clicks. Number two is mobile, which is typically going to be separate cell phones. That's normally going to Be cheaper in terms of cost per click, but generally lower intent and convert at a lower rate. But it makes up for that because it's huge volume and typically you need to be able to make that profitable or you're not going to get a lot of volume from desktop alone. Then we have tablets and TV screens. So these are normally not devices that people are doing particularly productive activities on. And that means that they're probably not going to click and convert or buy stuff from you if they're new brand browsing on their tablets, swiping between Netflix and YouTube. So you usually want to exclude tablets and TV screens from your devices in your device settings inside of your campaigns in Google Ads. So let me just show you one example and you know, I could show you probably 10, 20 more examples, but this is just one very typical case. You can see here. What you can do is click on segment and click on device so you can split out how things apply, performing by device. And this is significant amount of time, right? This is about three months. And you can see consistently across every single campaign. While tablets don't really spend a lot, they typically perform really badly. So this campaign, right average for this campaign for in terms of return on ad spend is about a 3.5. Tablets are producing a 1.86. We spent nearly $200 there here, tablets spent another $200 and the average for this campaign is a 10, almost an 11x return on ad spend. Tablets did about half as well as that. We can keep going down here. Tablets only spent $80, but it produced barely a 1x return, which means this lost money even if we had 100% margins. So we can go all the way through. And the summary of the account is in total, over the last couple months we spent over $500 on tablets and we produced not even a break even return on ads spend for this account. So tablets are pretty much a device that you want to completely exclude when you launch new campaigns. You want to make sure you dial things in for desktop, for mobile and just make sure tablets is out of the mix and TV screens the same thing until you've really got those two core devices dialed in. And really quickly, here's how you exclude tablets in devices. So you go into a campaign, then you go to insights and reports, then you go to where and when ads showed and then you click on devices. And the way you actually exclude tablets is you edit the bid adjustment to be decreased by 100. So that's basically how you would exclude it here. So you basically put it like this and hit save and that way you're excluding the device, even if you're using smart bidding. And you're going to be focusing your budget on the devices that are more likely to perform well for you. All right, so hopefully by now you've already saved yourself hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a month in wasted ad spend. Well, we've got a couple more. Bear with me. We're going to get through the rest and you're going to be able to do a clean sweep through your entire account. So the next one we need to talk about is something that we actually put together an entire video on recently, which I'm going to link above in this video and that's basically on the auto applied recommendations that Google inputs into your account that basically switches on features that immediately start to waste budget inside your campaigns. So one thing you can do is you can go into the change history in your campaigns and scroll through what changes are actually being made in there. And what you're probably going to find, as I did in this case, is auto applied recommendations, where Google's going in and sometimes adding super broad keywords, irrelevant keywords, and even in some cases deleting keywords that you've chosen to add previously that Google just arbitrarily decided it wants to remove. And actually here is a perfect example. Oh look, it's suggesting add broad match keywords, get more conversions at a similar or better ROI by adding broad match versions of existing keywords. Well, I think I'm going to decline that for now. But what you need to be careful of is that Google doesn't just go ahead and do this for you. So I still recommend watching our entire video reviewing all of the auto applied recommendations. But for a quick fix, what you can do is you can go to recommendations and you can click on auto Apply to review which ones Google has enabled and you can scroll through the auto apply recommendations and make sure that you switch the ones off that you, you don't want to have happen. Namely ones that are, for example, removing keywords, expanding your reach with Google search partners, you know, using optimized targeting, most of these you'd actually want to remove and you only really want to have a couple actually enabled, otherwise the rest really are going to be interrupting what you're trying to work on at best. And at worst, they're actually going to be sabotaging your performance and wasting your budget. So the final recommendation on where Google is wasting your ad budget and how you can save money is to do with performance max, which is one of Google's newest campaign campaign types, it has pretty much completely replaced smart shopping now and even shopping in general. There are only few circumstances where a standard shopping campaign now makes sense. However, it's still really easy to waste budget inside the Performance Max. So I'm going to talk about two ways that Google is wasting your spend inside of pmax campaigns. I'm going to show you right now inside of one. So let's jump into this one. Now, if I jump into this campaign. So this is an E commerce campaign. Now the first thing I have to say say about Performance Max is that if you're running it for lead generation, you are probably driving a lot of junk conversions. We've tested this extremely thoroughly. We've run tests in maybe 20 to 30 accounts in the last couple of months. And Performance Max consistently produces either low quality leads or complete junk when it comes to driving conversions for B2B or B2C service businesses. So first recommendation on saving money in this campaign type is if you are trying to drive leads, be extremely careful with Performance Max. And my recommendation would actually be to completely avoid it for now until you have your search campaigns dialed in. If you're just running Performance Max, you're not running search campaigns for your lead generation efforts. Scrap Performance Max completely and put your focus on search campaigns. You're going to get better quality results. The other way that pmax is going to waste budget is as part of its intended purpose when it comes to shopping. So the majority of the use cases for P Max campaigns are to drive E commerce revenue and to drive direct purchases through your website because that's where it kind of shines. It's hard to create a low quality purchase because it's at the end of the day a purchase and it's either profitable or not profitable. And it can be optimized on that basis. But a lot of the time what Performance Max will do if you actually dive into the products is it will spend budget continuously on products that clearly do not perform in the campaign. So this date range here is set to the last three months or so. And we have a lot of products in this campaign. We have nearly 160,000 products. And you can see that each of these products over the last couple months, yes, some have spent several hundred dollars. A lot of them have only spent maybe 20, 30, $50. But if you've got more than a hundred thousand SKUs, you're going to be spending across everything. That's a lot of budget. That's going to a lot of different places. Now when we look at the actual performance. So let's look at our conversions column. So some products, you know, 80 clicks, no conversions, 114 clicks. This one's produced a 0.7 of a conversion. So not even an entire conversion. This one's at 173 clicks, zero conversion. So this is a perfect example of death by a thousand cuts when you have so many different products running a performance max. Google is continuing to spend across pretty much all of them, or certainly many of them. But you only have a handful that are actually producing profitable revenue. So what do we want to do? We actually want to start to filter out products that are not performing well or that are simply chewing up budget and not really producing conversions and move those to a secondary campaign where we can test separately. So in this case here, if I was to add a filter and I was to show products that that have had at least one conversion in the last 90 days, we're down to out of 157,000 SKUs, only 236 actually produced a conversion in the last 90 days. So these would be the products that should continue to run in this campaign so that Google and the algorithm inside of pmax is forced to spend on your top performing products. And the rest of the products that are running in here, they should be excluded. They should either be left to the side for now or maybe tested with a very tightly controlled budget in a separate campaign. But right now Google is just spending budget across everything. And the smart bidding, which is good in some cases isn't smart enough to stop spending on things that are not doing well or that are proven to not convert. And obviously it is a bit of a question because it is in Google's favor to continue to spend across thousands and thousands of of products that you may have sitting in your campaigns that have never shown any traction because obviously it's putting money in their pockets and it's increasing their bottom line. My recommendation is go ahead, create listing groups inside of pmax and exclude products that do not perform or that are not getting traction over the last 30 or 60 or 90 days or even six months. Move those products out and focus your spend on products that do do well that you're really going to get traction with. It's going to allow you to spend more on those products that are doing well because you're forcing Google to spend on them and it's going to allow you to increase the return on ad spend that you're getting so that you're squeezing more from your budget and you're driving a more profitable return from your ads campaigns. Okay, that's it. Wow. That was a lot of different ways that Google can steal budget from your campaigns. Now that's probably most of the top 10 or so that you're going to see in your account. Obviously there are plenty of other angles that Google is going to try and create creep under in order to try to get more spend from you. But if you can avoid most of these, you're going to be in a much better position than you probably are right now and you're going to be well ahead of many competitors that are out there. So go ahead re watch this video, go through each of the different areas that I outlined in the last 20 minutes or so and make sure that you turn off those settings, that you exclude those placements, and that you start to refine and focus your spend in the areas of the account account that are producing sales, conversions and revenue for you. That is how you get 8020 results and performance from Google Ads. That's a major part of how you improve the profitability of your account and that's really how you can start to scale the results you're getting from your campaigns and grow your business. So let me know if you have any questions in the comments below. We're going to be continuing to expand on some of these topics in future, but I want to know how much do you think you are wasting your account to this point and how much are you going to save going forward over the next one month, three months, or even 12 months in the future? I want to make sure that you guys are getting the best possible results from Google Ads and cleaning out some of this stuff in the hidden parts of the account is what is a great way to start doing that. So let me know if you have any questions or comments on this video and looking forward to seeing you in the next one.