The Google Ads Mistakes Nobody Tells You About

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 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— 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 recommendations. 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 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 users 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 on 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. 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. How to apply IP exclusions in Google Ads? If you want to protect your ads from fraudulent activity or from your own employees, I'll 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, professionally, it will go via a thousand of virtual machines or virtual IP addresses, and you cannot exclude 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 recommendations 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 recommendations. 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 VIPs, 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. 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. 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. If you want to enrich your Google Ads, I highly recommend you to watch this additional video. Subscribe to my channel and see you again.