Google Ads Pre-Launch Checklist: Settings Everyone Misses Before Running Ads

Google Ads account settings. I bet you almost never visited this tab in your Google Ads account, but I will share with you today 3 most important settings in this menu. Also, at the end of this video, I will give you one tip, one life hack that I've never heard in the internet, on YouTube videos, never. It's really hidden gem for you, how to increase effectiveness of your ads. So looking forward to share it with you.

Let's start. Igor Levitsky, Dr. Eds, 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.

You can find general account settings in the menu Admin, Accounts Settings. There are a lot of videos on YouTube with the strategies, with the campaign settings, and so on and so on and so on. But almost no videos about the most important part of Google Ads, the account settings that affect all your campaigns, all your ads, all all your budgets, all your money. In this menu, Google collected all data about your account. And I will create separate videos for each of these settings because some of them quite important. But let's discuss first 3, the most important. First one is account-level negative keywords. I'm sure you know that you can exclude some search terms for the search campaigns using negative keywords. But if we speak about Performance Max campaigns, there is a big problem. You cannot exclude any keywords. That's why Performance Max can show your ads to absolutely irrelevant search terms. Like for example, if you're selling lawyer services, Google Ads Performance Max can show your ads for somebody who is looking for, let's say, "free lawyer services" or something like this. And you cannot exclude it through the web interface of Performance Max campaign. But you can add these negative keywords at the account level. And in this case, these particular keywords will be excluded from a variety of your campaigns: from search campaign, from shopping campaign, from Performance Max campaign. So if you have some list of like general negative keywords feel free to add them to account-level negative keywords and increase efficiency of your Performance Max. Next quite important option is IP exclusions. If you ever suffered from click fraud or some bot activity, you can find on your server logs, on logs of your website, the IP addresses that quite often visited your website from ads. In this option, you can exclude all of these IP addresses. Moreover, if you have a lot of employees in your company, it's quite common for employees when they want to find a company website, they just Google the name of the company and just press the first link that they can see. And if you have a brand campaign, the first link will be your ads. So your employees waste your advertising budget. To avoid this situation, you can add IP addresses of your office or offices or branches into this IP exclusions section, and your employees will see only organic results but not your ads. Next, quite important option is auto-apply of recommendation. I will create a separate video because it's quite important topic. But in this video, I want to show you what exactly Google can manage in your account without your permission. If you have turned on Auto Apply, Google can change your budget, change your keywords, change your bids, update settings of your campaigns, change match of your keywords, and even add new keywords, change targeting of your campaigns, and so on and so on and so on. I recommend you to turn off all of these auto-applies. And the last secret option that I want to share with you, in the option Customer Match, you can turn on Conversion Based Customer List. What is this? I'm sure you know about customer list audiences inside Google Ads. You can add emails or other personal data of your customers, and Google will create audience based on this data. But Google can create this type of audience, customer list, based on conversions on your website. What's the point? You will ask. I can create just standard audience of, uh, users who interacted with some page or tag. And the point is, when you create standard audience, in this audience you add only separate devices of users. But in customer list, Google adds a user as a whole with the different devices that each particular user can use. So for example, if you have 1,000 users in standard audience, it means that you have 1,000 devices or browser fingerprints or cookies in this audience. So 1,000 unique devices, but with customer list, 1,000 users in this customer list means that you have 1,000 unique users. Each of them can have several devices: laptop, desktop, TV, mobile phone, and so on. So the value of customer list is much more higher than the value from standard audience. Just turn this option on and you will see in your Audience Manager new audience, new customer list based on conversion data. Google Ads timezone. Why it's so important and how to change it. By the way, unfortunately, you cannot change it. But I will give you 2 tips how to mitigate the timezone without changing. So, you can find timezone of your account in the admin menu. In the account settings, you can find your timezone. What this timezone means for you? First of all, all reports regarding effectiveness of your advertising during the hour of the day you will receive in this time zone. If you serve one country, in this country, in one time zone, there is no problem. But if you serve country, let's say United States, with different time zones, and for example in your account New York time, but majority of your clients, let's say, from Pacific Coast, you will have bias in your data. For example, you can see that the most active time for you is 1 AM at the night, but it can be affected by your users from Pacific Coast who actually at 10 PM very actively convert on your website. And you can imagine even different situation. Let's say you have Singaporean account, you are in Singapore, you serve United States users, and you want to determine the best day for showing ads. And you collected the data and you can see that Sunday is the best day, users convert the best at the Sunday. And you create all of your activity for the Sunday. But if your time zone is Singapore ones, but your customers from United States, it possible that actually there was a Saturday for your users. And it's possible that your users most active in Saturday, not a Sunday. So you have to always keep in mind this small nuance. And another situation. Let's say you want to set up ad schedule for your campaign, but your campaigns serve like all United States. In this case, if you, let's say, set up 8:00 AM till 6:00 PM New York time, your customers from San Francisco will see your ads from 5:00 AM till 3:00 PM. So in this case, tip number 1, Separate your campaigns by time zones if you need to use a schedule. In this case, you can set up different schedule for different time zones from different campaigns for different users. Just keep in mind that when you set up this ad schedule, you need to set up this ad schedule in your time zone. So if you want, uh, your users from San Francisco to see your ads, let's say from 8 to 6, you need to set up by New York time from 11 AM till 9 PM. And second tip, if you found out that majority of your clients from particular time zone and this time zone do not correlate with your account time zone, you can two options. First option, every time, every day, just to convert the time to another time zone. Keep in mind this nuance. Or another option, to create new Google Ads account and choose new time zone in this account. It's absolutely nothing bad to have two accounts For example, one account serves users from one time zone and another account serves users from another time zone. It's absolutely normal practice. Always keep in mind these two nuances and you will never have drops in productivity, inefficiency due to misunderstanding or making the wrong decision by the data that you receive from another time zone.

How to edit or change or rename your Google Ads account?

If you have only one Google Ads account, there is no problem at all. You can manage this account with no naming. But if you have at least two or even more Google Ads accounts, you're familiar with the problem when you receive a letter from Google like this.

Such an email indicates that you have some problem with some account.

But you don't know with which account and you have to log into your Google Ads, find for the number of the account. And moreover, it's okay if all of these accounts are yours. But if you, let's say, manage several accounts from several clients and you are driving and receive the email that there is some problem with account and you need to notify about this your client, but you don't know know which exactly client, and there are some complications to determine from which account you actually received this notification. And also in this video, I will give you a tip how to avoid situations like this when instead of the name of the account, you receive a letter with URL redacted instead of the actual name. So let's resolve this issue. If you will go to admin account settings, you will find the account name. You can choose whatever name you want. Nobody out of your customers will never see this name. It's only internal name of this account just for you. So feel free even to name your account like XYZ. The very common mistake when people use the website address like an account name. If you will put in your account name address of your website, you will receive from Google emails with URL reducted instead of actual name. If Google sees that some account name has a website inside this name, Google just replace the website with URL reducted notification. So if you want to understand actually from which account you receive this notification, just put here some name of the business, let's say name of the company without .com, .co.uk, or whatever else domain zone. 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. Life hack from me. I'm usually use this template for the account names. Company name that actually owns this account. And this account managed by me, by Vitskiy Ads Labs. And with this name, I always can understand when I receive some notification from Google. First, is this related to one of my accounts? If the name has Vitskiy Ads Lab and to which client it related. How to change language in the Google Ads preferences? Why it's important, and one issue with the languages. Let's go. So if your native language is English and you manage Google Ads accounts with English interface, there is no issue at all. But if you want to change, let's say, interface to your native language to understand more deep, I will show you how to perform these actions. And also I will show you one issue and how to resolve this issue. In the end of this video, I will give you life hack about which language you actually need to use inside your Google Ads. So to change language, you can go to Admin, Preferences, and choose Display Language and Number Format. Let's say in my case, I want to change language to Ukrainian. But when I open my preferences, it already indicates that I use Ukrainian language. But as you can see, my Google Ads account in English. So the main question, how can I change the language for, let's say, to Ukrainian, to my native language, if it's actually— if I can, if I just press save, okay, Ukrainian, save, my interface still in English. This issue happens when you have several Google Ads accounts and let's say in one of them you changed language, but in another one, the system thinks that you use new language but show you interface still in English or in language that you had before. To resolve this issue, the easiest way First, change to any other language, let's say Australian English, and only after this, change to language that you actually want to translate Google Ads interface, let's say to Ukrainian. So two steps if you have this issue. And one recommendation from me. If you want to understand Google Ads really deep, always use English. Language because the translation to another language not always perfect. And that's why you can have some misunderstandings, some missed words, some wrong translation. That's why if you want to really engage deep with Google Ads, always use the language that Google Ads was initially created. English. How to set up billing in Google Ads?

How to set up payment profile?

How to add, change, delete it, whatever you will need to do with your payment method?

So if you're just creating new account Google Ads or you're creating new payment profile, you will need to know how to properly fill all the necessary details. When you first set up Google Ads always asks you about your country and about currency in which you prefer to pay for your ads. The main idea is that the billing country and country where you plan to advertise can be absolutely different. So you can set up an account, let's say, for Indonesia, but advertise from this account all over the world or only United States. Or you can set up an account with billing address in United States and advertise to, let's say, Australia. It doesn't matter. Google asks at this stage only about country where your bank account and where your organization are based. So in our case, let's set up with United States. And Google always ask about currency in which you prefer to pay. If you want to avoid unnecessary exchange rates, always choose the currency that align with currency of your bank account. If your bank account in United States dollars, so choose United States dollars in the Google Ads. Only one small nuance. If we speak about Google Auction, you always pay per every single click the amount of money that more than your competitor by the one cent. And if we pay in United States dollars. So in this case, we will— let's say our competitor pays per click $3, we will pay $3.01. Now I ignore the quality score and another parameters that can affect. It's only for simplicity. So you will pay $3.01. But if you, let's say, set up account from country where exchange exchange rate to dollar like hundreds times different, you can save some amount of money by choosing your local currency. Because in this case, let's say your local currency exchange rate to dollar, 100 euro dollars to 1 United States dollar. In this case, you will pay by per every single click the amount of money that 1 your local currency cent bigger than your previous competitor. In this case, you will save some money for every single click, but it's not a drastic saving, but it's some saving.

So let's set up United States, United States dollar.

Then Google always asks, do you organization or individual?

In this case, I am choose individual.

My legal name. And my zip code.

Create.

Then Google Ads asks how will I pay for my ads. For the majority of us, it's easier to pay from credit or debit card. In this case, you will need the card number, like the usual details. Very important thing: your card holder name has to be absolutely letter by letter the same as your payment profile name. In case if you will have different card and payment profile, profile names, Google will just ban your account. So very carefully check whether the name and surname that you put inside payment profile align with the name and surname inside the details of your card. After this, Google will ask, do you prefer to pay upfront or do you prefer automatical charging? Google, Google prefers automatical charging when you link your card and Google just just, uh, charge your card when you spend some amount of money, some threshold of money that Google automatically set up. Next question: what if I need add another payment profile, change my, or delete mine? So there is setting in the menu, Billing Transfers, but you can change nothing inside this menu, inside this profile. So in order to change any details in your payment profile or completely change the profile, you need to write a message to the Google support team. They will ask you the same questions: what's the country, what's the currency, what's the name, what's the type of the business that you want to change. And only they able to change information inside your payment profile. Only one thing that you can change manually in the account settings. If you will go to Billing, Settings, How you pay, you will find that you can change automatic payments to manual payments. Just press this link and it gives you information that if you change, you need to put your money inside Google Ads upfront. And Google will stop your advertising when this money is not enough to cover your spending. Anytime you can return to automatic payments. Like a small advice, usually for the experienced advertisers who know how to control their budgets very precisely, I always choose automatic payments. For the new advertisers who are worried about the overspending on their cards whatsoever, I recommend to choose manual payments and put some money on Google Ads account upfront and just, uh, you will be absolutely sure that Google will advertise your business, your website only on this money and will never charge you automatically more than you decided previously. I wish you great results, a higher ROI.

See you in the next videos.