Stop Wasting Money in Google Ads: Security & Optimization Guide

Access and security in Google Ads. In this video, I want to share with you some important information about access and security options inside Google Ads and highlight for you how important it is and how important to keep the limited access to your account from the outside. So this option, this menu created to give ability to share access to your account with some third parties. There are 3 ways how can you share the access. The first one is 100% wrong. Never share access to your account in this way. So this is a way when you share with somebody else, with third-party person, your email and password to your Google Ads account. I think I haven't heard about this sharing method for several years, but somebody can still share the access in this way. Please never share the access to your Google Ads account in a way when you provide to somebody else your email and your password that link to this Google Ads account. There are two another ways. So the second way is to share access with some individual by accessing the Access and Security menu inside your admin panel in Google Ads, and then you just press plus. You need to add an email of this person, and I highly recommend you to add the access expires date, the date when this user will stop receive access to your Google Ads account. It's quite important because when we work with Google Ads for years, it's quite common when we share the access with different personalities with some guy from analytics, with some guy who did an audit for you, with some potential agencies that you want to work with, and so on and so on and so on. And after several years, you have a large list of emails that have access to your account. So why it's not the best idea? I want to share with you just one simple case. Let's say that there is an agency that worked with some individual account with some individual business several years ago. Then they stopped their collaboration and existed separately, but the agency still has an access to this individual account. Inside the agency, some employee, let's say, just decided to quit from his job, but did it in bad way. He just argued with his boss and his boss said that he will not pay the salary for the last month. And Jack decided to make something bad for agency. Jack accessed through the agency account to several individual Google Ads accounts and just made a mess inside this account. He added some keywords, he increased the budgets, he deleted some ads, and so on. So in this case, the individual business had really big problems because their ads were just destroyed by some third-party person that even didn't interact with it in the future, but he destroyed their ads. So my advice to you, just several times per year, from time to time, look into access and security menu and exclude from this menu everyone who don't need to have access to your account. Also, when you share access with somebody else, always try to give the person as low access as possible. If the person wants only to audit your account, choose read-only. If the person will somehow set up your advertising, your campaigns, and so on, give him standard access. If you need full access to the account, give the person admin rights. 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. And when you inserted the email of this person, Google Ads showed you an error: "This email address isn't in an allowed domain." How can you resolve this issue? Very easy and very fast. First of all, this layer of security that Google Ads added to their system allows you to add the email addresses only from particular domains. When we say about domain, we mean the part after the symbol. So in my case, just for example, it's random domain, igor.com. So to be able to add this email, I need to first copy the domain that was allocated to this email and go to the security tab, open allowed domains, and add another domain that I need to add, in my case, igor.com, and press save. After this, I can return to my access and security users menu, insert my igor@igor.com email, and press send invitation. After this, invitation was successfully sent and the user can receive access to my account. If you are tired from a lot of emails from Google Ads, if they bombard you with some newsletters, feedback opportunities, actions, alerts, and so on, but you don't want to unsubscribe from Google Ads emails because you understand they, they actually can send you something quite important. What is the best way to reduce the number of emails that you receive from Google Ads? You can go to Admin Notification in your Google Ads account and turn of all notification topics. Regarding actually important emails like billing alerts, if you have some problem with your billing, you will still receive. You will still receive account security issues and new users who added to your account, but you can opt out from emails that actually have only marketing purpose from Google Ads. And you will save a lot of time for you to filter these emails by your hands. I highly recommend to turn all of them off because actually important and it's billing, reports, advertising verification, and account security. All other type of emails is just wasting of your time. And some advertisers would like to receive notifications on their phone, especially critical notifications about balance on their account, about issues with their ads. If you want to receive push notifications on your phone, you need to download Google Ads application for your mobile. Then go to the settings and press Turn on on notification options. After this, you can choose which notifications you want to receive in push messages on your phone, and you will receive information like budget going low, or you have some disapproved ads, or you have some problems with billing, or you can have an identity verification process finalized, or something else. 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, Professionally, it will go via a thousand of virtual machines or virtual IP addresses, and you cannot exclude in this way the professional attack. So what is negative keyword? Negative keyword is some word that blocks Google Ads from showing your ads by this search term. 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 can't 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 forget 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. 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 cheap 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. Also, I recommend you to watch this video to enrich your knowledge about Google Ads. Subscribe to my channel and see you in the next video.