Google Ads Mistakes Killing Your Campaigns Fix Them!

Account-level negative keywords. Why they are so important and how to use them without any problems. So what is negative keyword? Negative keyword is some word that blocks Google Ads from showing your ads by this search term. For example, you offer the cleaning service. I think somebody who are searching for "free cleaning" is not your dream client and you want to exclude this user from your ads. In this case, you can add negative keyword "free" and Google will stop showing, stop serving your ads to everybody who uses word "free" in their search term.

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.

It works extremely good for search ads, for shopping ads, but the problem is with Performance Max ads. In Performance Max, you cannot exclude the search terms, you cannot add negative keywords, But Performance Max can still serve your clients in the Google search. So even if you excluded negative keywords "free" and so on from search campaign, from shopping campaign, Performance Max will still show your ads to somebody who are looking for the "free cleaning." How completely exclude and completely block some negative keywords for any campaign in your account? You can follow to admin account settings, find negative keywords, and press this plus. In this field, you can add line by line your negative keywords. For example, free, video, how-to, and so on, and press save. After this, these negative keywords will apply to every single campaign in your Google Ads. My recommendation, never use at the account level. Negative keywords that are not completely wrong to your business. If you have some negative keywords, let's say, now you serve just New York, but in the future, nobody knows. But now you want to exclude any other states, any other cities from your ads. So somebody who are looking for, let's say, New Jersey cleaning service will not see your ads. You can add New Jersey at account level. But if in the future you will decide to serve New Jersey as well, I bet you will forgot to delete this negative keyword from this list. So use the account-level negative keywords only for general keywords that are not applicable to your business at all. Never put here the names of the cities, of the states, or services that you are not serving now but can in the future. If you are now selling only phones but not laptops, You can add the negative keywords laptop at the campaign level. And when you will create new campaign, for example, when you will start to sell laptops, you will not include these negative keywords. But I bet if you put the laptop negative keywords at the account level, you will forget to exclude this word after you will launch campaign for laptop selling. So you can use negative keywords at the account level, at the campaign level, at the ad group level. Always use this level, smart, to avoid situation when you will block your actual users from seeing your ads. 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 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. So 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, it will go via a thousand of virtual machines or virtual IP addresses, and you cannot include in this way the professional attack. In this case, I recommend you to look into some click fraud prevention and click fraud protection providers as Lunio.ai, for example. How to manage auto-apply recommendation? 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 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. And 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. 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 mistake, some 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 1,000 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 a name to this exclusion. 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, uh, 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, uh, 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. 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 this proven methods too. Click the link in the description and make your ads more effective. 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. If you want to turn off this feature, if you want to your users 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 high probability that the user will call to absolutely another business. Hi guys, in this video I'm going to show you 3 the most 3 most important secrets in demand gen campaigns. After Google discontinued support of Video Action Campaigns and offered for us demand gen campaigns, a lot of advertisers were struggling with setting, with launching demand gen campaigns because they just wasting your money without any results. I've played with DemandGen campaigns a lot, and in this video I want to show you 3 of the most important things that will help you to avoid wasting money with your advertising. Also, in the end of this video, I will give you one bonus thing, one bonus secret that will help you to show your ads more efficiently. So let's go. First secret: when you set up new demand gen campaign, always at the bottom of settings menu, you have to uncheck checkbox "Enable Google Display Network." Google Display Network is the best invention for Google because Google have the highest marginality from Google Display Network. That's why Google trying and forcing and pushing advertisers to show as many advertising as they can in the Google Display Network because Google has the most money from this network out of all display advertising. So always uncheck Google Display Network. Second secret, when you set up ad group inside Demand Gen campaign, always instead of all Google channels, always choose let me choose. And when you start your ads, always start with YouTube in-stream. Uncheck all the rest options. When you will have solid results with YouTube in-stream, you can try also separately Discovery and separately YouTube Shorts. But I recommend to start always with YouTube in-stream. Third secret, third option: always add into your ads two variants of your video—vertical and Horizontal. And always uncheck two options that allow Google to cut your video. So first option, Google can get vertical and square versions of your video, so cut your video. And second one, Google can shorter your video, cutting out some elements from this video. So always uncheck this button. So these three recommendations will help you to avoid wasting of your or your client's money. And the fourth bonus option. If you will go to Tools, Content Suitability, you will find Excluded Sensitive Content. By default, all of these options are unchecked. You have to check them in order to prevent showing your ads under tragedy, sensational, and shocking, and everything of this. If you work in some, let's say, sensitive areas, sensitive niches, sometimes these options can give you actually good results. But if you work with white hat, usual conventional business, I would recommend always exclude this sensitive content in order to increase efficiency of your ads and decrease Cost per acquisition. So that's it. Let me know in the comments if this content was helpful for you, and see you in the next videos.