7 Budget Drains in Google Ads You Can Eliminate in 30 Minutes

Have you heard about new feature inside Google Ads? Solutions. If you're familiar with Google Ads scripts, you know that you can enrich, enhance Google Ads optimization and reporting thanks to the special scripts. But if you're not a developer and if you don't have ability to rewrite or adjust programming code, in this case, usually using scripts is quite complicated for average advertiser, for average marketer. Igor Levitsky, Dr. Edds, PhD, the Young Scientist of the Year in Ukraine. Since 2006, he has been applying mathematics to optimize Google Ads. Named Europe's Best PPC Speaker by Ads World Experience. One of the leading Google Ads experts in the world. A professional educator. Over 4,000 entrepreneurs have increased their sales after taking his courses. A practicing expert. Igor's clients generate $50 million in profit from Google Ads each month. But Google took some scripts that were the most popular among users and create separate menu with Google-approved scripts that you can use without any knowledge in programming, in developing. So in your Google Ads account, you can go to the Tools, Bulk Actions, Solutions, and you will find this new menu tab. If you check the plus button, you will find— now it's only 6— based on Google Scripts, ready-made solutions that you can use from the box without without any knowledge, without any skills in programming. So I will share with you how it works. For example, if you want to have in one place in Google Spreadsheets all information about your account, where you can see day by day how it behaves, how many clicks you had, impressions, and so on, you can create account summary solution. If you need to receive this data also on your email, you can indicate here your email address and frequency of data analysis. Let's say daily. And you can choose even the time slot where Google will perform this analysis. After this, you need to authorize Google because it's, again, it's script, but it's script approved and written by Google. So no worries at all regarding some, Data and security issues. If you are using third-party Excel script that was written by some guy, by some programmer, you can have some issues with privacy, with your data sharing and so on. But in this case, these are scripts written by Google, so no worries at all about data leaks and so on. So you can without any doubts authorize activity of this script. Script. After you will press save, you will receive with your frequency such report where you can find day by day exact cost, average CPC, CTR, search impressions, share impressions, and clicks for chosen account. You can see also the graph, so you can compare how it visually works. So it's the source of general data that can be easily accessible from your email or from your Google spreadsheet. Another solution is Ad Performance. The same set of settings: email address, frequency, authorize, save. But in this case, I would recommend to launch this solution at least weekly because usually during the day, the fluctuation of your ads efficiency not so significant. But if you will choose weekly, let's say every Monday, at the morning, you will receive a report like this with a lot of tabs. Headline, final URL, headline CTR, number of ads, and so on, where you can compare how different parts of your ads performed in the past period. Next solution is Account Anomaly Detector. So you can set a threshold for every parameter, let's say, for clicks, for cost, for impressions, for conversion. Let's say, if Google spent more money than it used to spend in the past, please notify me. You can indicate your email address. Of course, these thresholds have to be chosen based on your personal understanding of project, of this business, of this account. Because for one advertiser, 25% fluctuation in conversions, it's nothing. For another one, it's critical. So it has to be adjusted based on the performance of the requirements of this particular business. So if you will set up this Account Anomaly Detector with, let's say, daily checks. You will never miss the situation where account went out of control and you spent some money or you wasted some budget because it started to show, let's say, to Google Display Network, to some garbage placements when you receive a lot of impressions but low amount of conversions. This script will notify you about anomalies. Next solution: Link Link checker. If you familiar with situation when you receive a disapproval of your ads because your landing page doesn't work, you can prevent this situation by enabling link checker. This link checker can check ad URLs, keyword URLs, and sitelinks URLs. Let's say every single day. And if this script will find some URL, some landing page that doesn't work on your website, it will notify you and you can very fast change it to the working one. Next solution, to be honest, I even don't know if I will feel comfortable using it. It's flexible budgets. So let's say you have $2,000 for some period of time and you want to ask Google Ads to spend this money on the particular campaign or with equal weight when the equal part of your budget that you dedicated for this period will set up for particular campaign. Or with weighted strategy, when the script will start from the small budget and increase it day by day, step by step. So for my case, I would never use this script because I feel much more secure when I set up budget, when I set up something that extremely related to money, when I set up it by myself, but not by some scripts. And last solution, Common Negative List. If you create a lot of campaigns and you have some negative keywords list and some negative placements list, instead of adding this list to every single campaign, you can create the solution, indicate here the particular negative keywords list that you want to apply to campaigns and negative placements list. After you will set up particular label, let's say, label "New," When you will create another campaign and add to this campaign label "New," this solution will automatically add to this new campaign lists from these settings. To be honest, from my perspective, it's much easier to exclude negative lists in the campaign settings instead of creating some campaign label. So I don't use this solution. Seasonality Adjustments. In this video, we will speak about feature inside Google Ads that very small amount of advertisers actually aware of and use it. Let's say you have the situation when next month you will have a really big sale with a huge price drop, with a huge amount of clicks. And during this sale during this discounting, you want to increase your campaign budgets. But your experience says you that if you will dramatically increase your budget, let's say in 2 or 3 times, Google will start learning phase again and at least several days and possibly even week you will have very fluctuate results in inefficiency of your ads. So what if you want to increase your budget for a week, but you don't want to send algorithm back to learning phase? You want to save the stability of your ads. In this case, you can use Seasonality Adjustments. You can go to the Tools, Adjustments, and you will find Seasonality Adjustments. I'm going to show you an example. Let's say you want, during this week, you want to increase your budgets by $100. It was, let's say, $200 per day. You want to increase it to $300 per day. So, add additional $100. You choose adjustment type, budget. You can give the name to these adjustments. Let's say, the biggest discount. Then you need to choose the start time and end time. Start time, the day and time when your budgets will increase by amounts that you set up. And end time, when your budgets will return to its normal state. You need to choose the campaigns that will participate in this adjustment and particular adjustments. Let's say, in the currency of your account. In my case, let's say $100. After I will save it, Google, for the campaign that I have chosen, starting from this date, will increase the daily budget by $100. And after the end time, Google will revert to the value immediately before the adjustment was active. So Google will return it to the initial state. You can create these adjustments for different events in your business. I'm taking 32 seconds to share something important with you so you can stop wasting your ad budget. I've managed over $700 million in Google Ads, so all my insights are tested and proven. I regularly talk to senior leaders at Google, and I'm an official Google partner. My students, entrepreneurs all over the world, have already optimized their ad campaigns, cut costs, and boosted sales using my methods. These strategies work for any budget, whether it's $500 or $5 million. I invite you to use these proven methods too. Click the link in the description and make your ads more effective. Also, you have another type of adjustment—the conversion rate. How it works? Let's say you plan to decrease your prices by 10%.. And you know from the past experience that usually when you decrease the prices so dramatically, users start to buy your products twice more effectively. So previously only 5 users out of 100 bought some products. Now you know that 10 users out of 100 will buy these products. So you can increase the conversion rate that you expect to change. Let's say by 100% twice. So previously, for example, it was 5% conversion rate. Now it will be 10% conversion rate for when this sale or when this discount window works. But to be honest, I can't imagine that small or medium business can predict the exact conversion rate changing after some actions. Of course, for companies like Amazon, like Disney, and so on, they have mathematical models based on which they can predict exact conversion rate changes. But for us, for small-medium businesses, it's not so obvious that some of our actions will change the conversion rate in exact percent. So to be honest, I've never used this particular type of adjustment, but if you will find the application to the conversion rate adjustment in your account, let me know how you use it in the comment sections. It'll be really interesting for me. But of course you can use the budget adjustments for any date-based events in your business in order to preventing Google Ads algorithms going again to the learning phase for your campaigns. Data exclusions inside Google Ads. Why you need to exclude some data from Google Ads? Let's imagine the situation: your programmer or your webmaster doing some renovation on your website, and during this renovation, he plays with scripts, he plays with Google Tag Manager, and after this, when he did some mistakes, error with data, you see inside your Google Ads a thousand of conversions from nowhere. And this thousand of conversions completely pollute your data because let's say you previously had 10 conversions per day. Now you have this spike with a thousand of conversions and then again 10 conversions per day. So if you will check like a monthly or annual report in Google Ads, this 1,000 conversions will affect all of your data. It will artificially decrease your cost per action. It will artificially increase your conversion rate. So it will pollute your data. Or let's say you had some attack of bots, of spam, of fake leads. And usually you had like 10, 20 leads per day, but yesterday you received 500 Bots, 500 forms filled by nonexistent customers, and Google Ads thinks that Google Ads brought you 500 conversions. And again, it will pollute your data, it will pollute the algorithm data, because algorithm will think that, whoa, really good source of conversion, I brought to this user 500 conversions, this user did nothing. So it means that I can find another conversions like this from another fake leads, from another bots, from another click fraud traffic. If you had this situation, you can go to the Tools, Adjustments, Exclusions, and create new data exclusions. You need to give name to this exclusion, like let's say "Bot Attack." You need to indicate start date and time when you First observed it, better like an hour before first lead or first fake conversions. And end time, an hour after last fake lead or last fake conversion was indicated in your Google Ads. Now you can choose, is it affects all campaigns or some particular campaigns? Let's say only like one search campaign. Usually I don't use the changes for devices. Usually I exclude all data and you press Save. After this, Google will extract this particular data about conversions from start time to end time. And when next time you will check your data for the previous period, the data will be not polluted by the fake conversions, fake leads, or wrong mistaken conversions. But more important, Google also excludes this data from the algorithm, so it will no more optimize your ads by the wrong data. How to apply IP exclusions in Google Ads? If you want to protect your ads from fraudulent activity or from your own employees, I will show you step-by-step technique how to determine the exact IP IPs and how to exclude them from serving your ads. So, first question: why should we exclude somebody from our ads? There are two answers. First answer: there are some lazy employees for whom the easiest way to find some product or service in their own company is to Google it. When they just need to find some page on their website, they just usually put the search term in Google Ads and click on the first link. And very often the first link is your search ad from your brand or DCA campaign. In some cases, there are more clicks from the employees, from the team, from the branches than from actual users. And of course, you don't want to waste your advertising budget on your team because they already aware about services that you serve. So how to exclude your employees, your team, your branches, your home from Google Ads? The easiest step is to go to whatismyip.com website and this website just shows your actual IP, my public IPv4. Just copy this IP and paste it in IP exclusions and press save. That's it. Next, send this link via Messenger, WhatsApp, or whatever to your employees, to your branches, to your partners, and ask them to share with you their IP addresses. Put all of these IP addresses into IP exclusions panel and press save. After this, you will never waste your advertising budget on your employees or your partners. Next question is more complicated. What if somebody wants to click fraud me? What if my competitor just click on my ads from different devices, from different laptops, from different users and waste my budget on these clicks. I will show you how to determine exact IP addresses. This is admin panel of my hosting provider. I'm sure you have another hosting provider, but try to find in the dashboard IP statistics link or something like this. Ask technical support if you need. Where can I find the statistics about IPs? For example, this is my statistics. And I can see that some IP address did almost 1,000 requests to my website. First of all, I can learn about what is this IP. Okay, some general information. In my case, I also can look at the log file and try to find what exactly this user with this IP address did on my website. And in my case, this user visited admin panel. So I'm sure that this is my technical guy, my technical expert who just set up my website for new landing page. So in my case, of course, I will exclude him because I don't want to show— to spend my money to show my ads to the guy who is actually my employee. In your case, if you will find in this statistic some IP addresses that visit your website a lot of times or from unexpected countries, unexpected locations, just feel free to exclude them and eliminate the click fraud from your website. But with this technique, you can exclude only amateur-level click fraud. If somebody will decide to click fraud you professionally, professionally, it will go via a thousand of virtual machines or virtual IP addresses, and you cannot exclude in this way the professional attack. How to manage auto-apply recommendation and why it's necessary to turn them off? So first of all, let's find where you can set up the auto-apply of recommendation. You can go to Admin, Account Settings, Auto-Apply, and press to go to Auto-Apply Settings, Or you can go to Campaigns, Recommendations, and choose Auto Apply. If you will open these two tabs, Maintain Your Ads and Grow Your Business, you will find a lot of interesting things inside this. By default, all of these checkboxes are turned on. And Google can change your targeting, change your rotation, change your ads. Just imagine that you serve VIP clients For example, you sell some incredible expensive things. And in your ads, you intentionally mention that it's only for VIP, it's high price offer, and so on. But Google will decide that your ads will have higher CTR if Google will change your search ad with tags like a cheap thing, cheap products, big sales, and so on. A lot of users who are looking for something cheap will go to your website and will ask questions, "Why is this— why it is so expensive?" But your actual targeting audience will just ignore your ads because they are not interested in something cheap. So I'm sure you don't want to give Google ability to change your ads. So turn it off, all of these settings, all of these checkboxes. As you can see, Google can turn on optimized targeting. Google can add new keywords. Let's say you waste not enough money on Google Ads and Google can add new keywords and help you to waste more without, of course, any value for you. Just add new keywords that Google can show your ads and charge you more. By default, Google can add broad match keywords. Use display expansion, even change your bids. For example, change your target CPA. Google will decide that you spend not so many as Google wish for Google Ads and will just increase your target CPA. To avoid all of this situation, to avoid wasting of your money, just go to this setting Auto-apply and turn all of them off. After this, you can be sure that only you manage your Google Ads Settings. Call reporting and its hidden threat. Just imagine the situation. You are using the Call asset in your Google Ads or you are using Call Only Ads. So user can just click on your ads or on asset on your ads and call you. You launched your Google Ads. It works quite good. Users call you, ask questions. Pay you money in the end. But if user will save this number and try to call you again, let's say in a month, he will call to absolutely other business. Why? Because if call reporting is turned on on your account, Google, instead of your numbers, substitute into the ads Google own redirected numbers. And when somebody calls to this number, Google redirects it to you or to another advertiser in the future. So let's see where you can change or choose the option for you. In the Admin Account Settings menu, you can find Call Reporting. If you will read the Google Ads Help, you can see that Call Reporting, which runs on Google forwarding numbers, and you can also see nice explanation how this forwarding works. Customers get routed through a Google forwarding number, which allows you to gather this data about the call. So, it works like a free call tracking. But in case of another call tracking tools, you can buy separate pool of phone numbers and work only with these phone numbers. So, in case if user will decide to call you again in a month with a separate call tracking tool, this user will still call to you. But in case of Google forwarding numbers, nobody knows who will answer the call. I'm taking 32 seconds to share something important with you so you can stop wasting your ad budget. I've managed over $700 million in Google Ads, so all my insights are tested and proven. I regularly talk to senior leaders at Google, and I'm an official Google Partner. My students, entrepreneurs all over the world, have already optimized their ad campaigns cut costs, and boosted sales using my methods. These strategies work for any budget, whether it's $500 or $5 million. I invite you to use these proven methods too. Click the link in the description and make your ads more effective. If you want to turn off this feature, if you want your users to call directly to you without any substitutes, without any forwarding numbers, just turn on this option and press Save. In case if you will decide to enrich your data with the information about call duration, about number of calls and so on, you can turn on this option and even choose to save calls for 30 days. And if you have third-party provider for call analytics, you can send this data to the third-party provider. But in this case, you should be aware if user will save this number and will try to call you even tomorrow? It's a high probability that the user will call to absolutely another business. Myth about parallel tracking. You can find a lot of videos and articles on the internet when authors advise you to turn on parallel tracking. They say that you have to enable parallel tracking in order to increase the speed of loading of your landing page in order to increase the overall efficiency of your ads. So what is parallel tracking? Without this option, Google Ads, when user clicks on your ads, will send the click first to special tracking URL where Google collects data about this user. And only after this, Google will redirect this user to your website. Yes, it's very fast. It's faster than 1 second, but still it's some type of delay. With parallel tracking, Google sends user immediately on your landing page and track all the details about this user on the backend. In this case, immediately after click, user lands to your website without any delays, without any lags. So in general, sounds very good. And you can find a lot of videos on YouTube or articles where they advise you to turn on the parallel tracking manually in the settings of your account. But let's look to this setting together. You can find it in Admin Account Settings. Here is the Tracking tab and Parallel Tracking option. You can turn on or turn off this option. And the first question that I can ask: it's only for hotel campaigns, isn't it? Yes, exactly. If you will press on this question mark and learn more, you will find that parallel tracking is default option for Search, Shopping, Display, and Video campaigns. For all of these types of campaigns, parallel tracking works by default without any interaction from your side. You don't need to Enable this option if you, like 99% of marketers, use only Search, Shopping Display, and Video campaigns. Only if you are using Hotel campaigns, specific Hotel campaigns that allow users to book the hotel immediately from the search results page, in this case, you can turn it on. As you can see, this option is applicable only for Hotel campaigns. For all different types of campaigns, is default option. You need to touch nothing. So if you will see in the future advices about enabling of parallel tracking, just be aware that these advices are outdated at least for 6 years. Also, I recommend you to watch these videos to know a little bit more about Google Ads and Google Ads tracking. Subscribe to my channel and see you in the next videos. Hihihi!