#198 Is Google Ads Dead? How to Keep Your Google Ads Profitable in 2025

Some people might say, oh, Google Ads is dead because of things like ChatGPT and things coming out. Those things are definitely having an impact on advertising, but it is far from dead. Google is still the primary place that people go to find information, to find services, products, et cetera. And ads are the most visible place that you find those things on Google. And so we're still seeing Google Ads work very, very well for every type of business that you can imagine. With the caveat that it is not easy these days to make it work well.

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Hey guys, welcome back to the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast. We have a new episode here today with John Horn. We're gonna be talking about Google Ads. Tracking, management, conversions, what it means in 2025 and beyond to be able to take this platform and really see it become an opportunity in your business. I've used it in the past to grow software companies and physical product companies and lead gen for consulting. And it's been a great platform. It's adapted and changed dramatically. I'm sure he'll speak to some of that today. So tell us, what is the, what's the scoop, man? What's the 411 on Google Ads today as we're recording in September here?

Yeah.

So first of all, thank you so much for having me on the pod.

A pleasure.

And, uh, yeah, so Google Ads, yes, some people might say, oh, Google Ads is dead because of things like ChatGPT and things coming out. Those things are definitely having an impact on advertising, but it is far from dead. Google is still the primary place that people go to find information, to find services, products, et cetera. And ads are the most visible place that you find those things on, on Google. And so we're still seeing Google Ads work very, very well for every type of business you can imagine, with the caveat that it is not easy these days to make it work well. You know, back in the day, back in the Wild West days, when it was not a mature platform yet, you could, you know, just kind of throw something out there and kind of print money, as they say. And that doesn't happen anymore. You have to be very, very smart, sophisticated in how you approach things because it is so mature. There's so much competition. And Google likes extracting every dollar possible from advertisers.

That's how these platforms work, right? What is causing that, the barrier of entry to change? Why is it becoming more complex?

Yeah, several factors, I'd say. So first of all, it's a very mature platform that everybody knows, this is where people go for information. And so everyone who wants that traffic is on Google. And so you're competing with, with local competitors, with national competitors, everyone who wants a bite of that pie. So it's a very competitive space. And then Google, while they like to call it an auction, while they like to say you're entering an auction with people, and you just have to bid a little bit more than someone else to get the click and make sure you have the most relevant ad, etc., they definitely have, you know, thresholds and things where they are trying to get as much money as possible. And if you're not bidding aggressively enough, well, you're not going to show up, or you might— they might show no ads on the page until you're bidding a certain amount. And so Google is definitely, I would say, artificially pushed costs up over time, like the cost that you pay on average for a click. And those are probably the 2 primary market factors over time that have caused—

So they're kind of taking advantage of the new people because the flood of traffic and the ignorance is kind of just their opportunity, right? Yeah, to take money. We've experienced that on the Amazon ad side with the amount of money they can take from beginners who are really unaware of how they're sucking down dollars and becoming advertising behemoths because of it, right? What, in your experience, where are you seeing the best businesses deploying this? Like what kind of products or niches or services are you seeing within your sphere that are doing the best?

Yeah, I would say there's a lot of them. It's probably easier to say some of the ones that are harder to be successful. Where it can be harder to be successful is just where you have very low average order value if you're in the e-commerce space, or just very, you know, low value coming from a click because you're no longer going to get clicks for 10 cents, 20 cents. So if you're selling a $5 widget, It's going to be incredibly hard to get Google Ads to work profitably for you, unless you have some way of then getting lifetime value from that customer and selling them other things over time. So you need to have enough kind of margin, a high enough price point for your product or your service to make it, to make it successful. Again, like in the service space, you know, if you're a plumber, and you charge, you know, $50 for a visit, I don't know if there are any plumbers who still do that anymore. But let's just say you do. You know, it's gonna be almost impossible to get profitable leads from Google Ads because of how much it costs for those clicks to get to you. So you have to have enough margin built in to really be competitive.

Yeah.

One thing I would say is working really well from a, just an approach standpoint, is being really smart about how you feed conversion data back to Google, and then use that in your campaigns. So in other words, You need to tell Google, okay, these are where the leads are coming from, the orders, whatever it is, and ideally work your way down the pipeline. So not just, here's all the forms.

Deep funnel conversion tracking in order to really help to optimize.

Exactly. This is what became a customer. And then bidding and optimizing towards those things can have a really dramatic impact on how efficient your campaigns are.

Yeah. How much smarter has it gotten with the AI, the toolsets? I know they just launched MNI 2.5 Flash. I mean, they're doing significantly fast advancements in the AI space. Is that keeping pace with the ad side too?

I would say yes and no. You know, if I compare like where we are to 5 years ago, way smarter, much more intelligent matching of things. At the same time though, there's a little bit of an overreliance right now on AI where, you know, for example, you look at your search terms reports. So those are the actual words that people typed in to match to your keywords that you're targeting. And you'll still see just patently bad matches where it's like, okay, The AI got that very, very wrong. And you see the same thing, you know, Google loves recommending headlines, descriptions, things for your ads.

Things that make them more money.

Sometimes they're great. Sometimes it's like, that's not my service at all.

And sometimes they just want you to click it because it's definitely going to make them more bank.

Exactly. Yep. And sometimes they would even violate Google's own policies. Like they'll, the AI recommends something that we know if we run that, you're going to flag our account because we can't say that in an ad. So yeah, we got one the other day.

It was impersonating a public figure and I'm like, who am I impersonating?

'Cause that's, oh, that's, that's a big thing right now. We've had a lot of people reach out for help.

Is it a new, okay. Yeah. 'Cause it just happened to me like 2 days ago. I'm like, what are you talking about? They're like, we paused the whole ad account 'cause they said I was impersonating a public figure. It sounds like a glitch.

Yeah, maybe. It's something that they are enforcing a lot relatively recently.

Interesting.

And they did break out, like it, it falls under, I think it's a circumventing, or I can't remember if it's circumventing or unacceptable business practices. It falls under a larger policy that's been around for a long time, but they did more recently kind of break it out into this subcategory. And we've seen a lot of enforcement recently. Some of it corresponds with, you know, so many people out there like making, you know, fake YouTube videos and AI-generated content that looks like a person. I see that. I think that's gotten it more on their radar.

These are just videos of me. So that wasn't really, you know, unless they consider me impersonating myself, which I don't highly recommend.

They might. I've seen Google make some weird, weird decisions.

It's a weird decision. So on the topic of the AOV side, the average order value for those maybe in the e-commerce world listening, because we have a number of people from different topics we can cover here, but what would you recommend they don't tackle a price point at that doesn't make sense to even start testing if they don't get their retail price point up so they can attach a better AOV to it?

Yeah, so I would say the big exception of course is if you have a lot of lifetime value. So if you're like, hey, I'm going to sell a stick of deodorant for $5 now, but they're going to be a customer for the next 10 years, that's a different thing. But if we're talking about, you know, just AOV, where there's not tons of lifetime value, as a rule of thumb, I would say if your AOV is lower than $50, you're probably gonna have a pretty hard time getting Google to work successfully. There will be exceptions and outliers to that for sure. But that would probably be my rule of thumb right now.

It's our rule of thumb on the, on the DTC side as well as on the Amazon side. It just really doesn't seem to dial in. And even then you're looking at trying to get them to $150 to $250 in the, at least within the first 90 days. Or you simply don't get the cost justification, the ROI doesn't kick in. And a lot of people focus on ROAS, but they don't really understand what that means. Can you break that down for the folks listening?

Yeah, absolutely. So ROAS, return on ad spend, that's looking at, okay, I spent $1 in advertising, how many dollars of revenue came from that? But there are, like you said, a lot of pitfalls to that. A, it doesn't take into account things like that lifetime value. So if you're only focused on ROAS, then you're only looking at that first order. And you might be like, oh, I can't run ads because, you know, I can't be profitable my first order. But then you're missing out if that person is going to come, come back and place 5 or 6 orders. So that's, that's a downside. Other downsides are trusting that number too much, because the customer journey these days is massive. You know, not everyone sees an ad, clicks on it, buys right away. There are so many different things. They might go out and check something out on Reddit. And then see an ad and then find you organically and then see your YouTube video. Like, there's so many things that play into it. And there's so many places along that journey where that tracking can fall off, and where that ad may have influenced a purchase, but, but you don't know because it wasn't tracked back. And so in addition to looking at return on ad spend, we also look at things like media efficiency ratio, looking at the overall revenue you're generating relative— related to how much you're spending in marketing. And seeing how is that changing over time. Are you getting more efficient, less efficient? Is revenue going up and making kind of bigger picture budget allocation decisions based upon that?

Yeah. Those businesses you see are doing better. Are they, are they staying within a 12 or 24-month customer lifetime value? Which ones are you seeing that are kind of more strategically having success because they're maybe willing to spend more, they're willing to look at it from a larger window of opportunity? What are you seeing?

Yeah, I'd say it's hard to, hard to give a blanket answer to that just because we have so many different types of customers seeing such different, such different results. I would definitely say when we're making decisions around, you know, budget allocation based on things like lifetime value, MRR, things like that, we're generally not looking much out beyond 12 months and what revenue it might generate during that time because there's just, you know, A, cash flow is a thing, and then B, there's so many things that can change down the road.

Yeah. Yeah, that's a great question. And it is kind of a broad stroke, how long is a piece of string question, but I was curious to see where you would take the answer. I mean, you work with a variety, I assume, of client types. What's your, what is your kind of scope and what's your favorite niche?

Yeah, broad variety. Ecom, lead gen, local, national. The favorite one to work with, I mean, ecommerce is fun because you see the immediate results. Like, hey, dollar in the door, orders, you know, et cetera. So that's fun. But it's also really fun when you have, you know, a B2B customer and you're like, hey, this one lead is going to make you, you know, $100,000 of revenue over the next year. Like that's, that's a real fun, fun win. So yeah, fun, different categories, different strokes.

How did you get started? Were you a media buyer yourself? Did you build the company to expand what you do or, you know, where, what's your storyline, I guess?

Yeah, yeah, the quick story on that. So I've been doing this for 12 or 13 years at this point. And so my first entry into, into Google Ads, kind of this world was with StubGroup. The company was started by my brother and long-term friend of his, and they brought me on as employee number one back in the day. And we bootstrapped it and grew it from there. And then so I got media buyer, talking to clients, doing every, every job under the sun at the company, and then took over the CEO role about 6 or so years ago.

Okay. So you're the chief revenue officer, now you're the CEO of the company. How many people in your— where do we say you're? Texas, right? But we're—

Yeah. Yeah. I'm in Texas. We're fully remote as a company. So we've got people all over. We've got around 30 or so team members right now.

Excellent. What are you seeing in 2025 that somebody should be aware of? You, you can open your crystal ball and say, well, 4th quarter into next year, I predict— not gonna hold you accountable, but I'm just curious if you, if you shake the black ball, what do you, what do you think you're gonna see?

It's not an original answer, but you have to say AI. Specifically what I mean by AI is how it's affecting consumer behavior. So people going to ChatGPT, Copilot, Grok, Gemini, et cetera, to do their searches. I mean, I was, I was talking with my wife yesterday. She's like, oh man, I'm using Copilot all the time because it's, it's easier to do that than to search on Google. And I'm like, well, that's a billion dollar, many billion dollar statement right there.

Mm-hmm.

And so we're absolutely seeing that for our clients as well. We're starting to see clients getting business, getting leads, getting orders from ChatGPT, from Gemini. And that's only going to increase over time. Ready to escape your grind? We help entrepreneurs build real wealth with private label brands. Visit voltagedn.com to start now.

Yeah. Can you affect that in some way, shape, or form with your Google Ads?

With ads? Not currently. I do believe that ads are going to come to those platforms. I think ChatGPT is going to have to bring ads. Google is already incorporating ads into their AI mode. which is, you know, the tab you can, you can click into when you're doing normal searches on Google. But in terms of influencing like Brock and whatnot, ChatGPT, etc., not on the advertising side. There are things on the organic side you can do to try and get your information sourced. We're doing a lot of work in that space right now with clients to help them figure that out.

Okay, so yeah, AI is kind of a broad stroke. It's a, it's a, again, we're back to the how long is a piece of string because it's going to be variable by niche, category, product, service. And a lot of other variables, you know, I assume you're still seeing a good amount of traffic across Google, a good amount of opportunity, but there is shifting things to be aware of, if I'm hearing you correctly.

Absolutely. Yeah. So traffic's not down on Google. Traffic continues to grow and it's still by far the 800-pound gorilla. It's still the primary place people go for information services, but it also has a bigger threat right now from these other tools than Google has faced in really a couple of decades. And one of the things that's going to be really interesting to see is from a user behavior perspective, like, I think the pie is going to get bigger. There are people are already using ChatGPT, Gemini, et cetera, to do search for things, to have conversations they never did have with Google.

Yeah.

So the amount of that pie is growing. But the question is, okay, how many of them are never going to actually get to Google as part of that journey? And therefore Google's not going to have a chance to throw an ad at them and make money off them.

Yeah, no, it makes sense. It's an ever-shifting environment. And it almost feels to some degree like the organic side of this thing is a bit up in the air at the moment as to how you, how you impact that. And I've always personally loved paid traffic. It's just difficult to dial in. And it takes a bit of threshold and pain for people to get past that stage of optimization. You know, starting a campaign is one thing and optimizing it is completely different. Maybe walk us through some of the best tips in what campaign types and objectives they should use if they're going to start out?

Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, you need to define what success is. We see a lot of advertisers, they'll just run campaigns, and they have no tracking set up, they don't really know what they're looking for. And so they're setting themselves up for failure. Because if it does work well, they don't know how to replicate that, because they don't know where that good performance came from. And if it doesn't work well, they don't know how to make it better, because they don't know what's not working well. So getting conversion tracking set up when you start saying, okay, what's my offer? What am I driving? Is it a lead form? Great. If so, do I have a good landing page that's actually communicating that, making it easy for people to get there? Or, you know, am I sending traffic to my homepage, and they have to navigate all around the website to find the information? Things, just basic things like that, people still very often forget to do. And then I would say, when it comes to campaign types, Google is making a big push towards automation, automated campaign types. So Performance Max would be a great example. It's this campaign type, it's kind Kind of a, kind of a, you give a bunch of stuff to Google and then Google goes and makes all the decisions. Yeah.

I haven't had a lot of success with that one myself.

It, especially in the lead gen space, it's very hard to make successful. In e-commerce, we see it work well for a lot, but in lead gen, the most common thing that happens is we get a bunch of spam leads coming through, like spam filling out forms. And then that reinforces people starting. They're like, oh, it's a great cost per conversion. Let's get you more of that. And then you wake up and it's like, well, yeah, it says I got a great cost per conversion, but it's literally robots and spam. And I just wasted a bunch of money. That happens a lot. That's a mess.

Yeah, I've seen that happen before, but on the e-com side, I don't see it as much.

On the e-com side, the reason I think e-com is different is because what is tracking as results, if you have it set up correctly, is actual orders.

Actual orders.

People don't do spam orders, generally speaking, you know, they're not giving their credit card out and letting you charge it. And so because it has a much better quality of data coming back in, it's more likely to work. And then you can take that learning and make it work better for lead gen by doing things like optimizing, like we talked about. towards sales qualified leads, things down the pipeline. So there are some more advanced strategies that can work well there.

How much would you recommend somebody's going to be willing to start at per day, per budget? And let's say on the e-commerce side to start, what would you recommend they don't, you know, do? Or what would you recommend they make sure they understand they should spend in order to see some kind of results to optimize?

As a rule of thumb for most companies, I wouldn't start Google Ads unless you can spend at least $2,000 per month. as your budget. And you're willing to do that for several months to collect data, to figure out what's working, what's not working. There are exceptions to every rule, of course, but that's kind of my rule of thumb.

Yeah, that's pretty good. I was, that's lower than what I would've anticipated. That's just probably based on speed. I would've thought more like $3,000 to $5,000 a month to just kind of figure out, well, and it's how fast do you want to cut that data down into how quickly you want to make decisions would be how much you're willing to spend to find out, right? Exactly.

Yeah. And it depends too on what your market is. You know, someone's in a local market where there's relatively little traffic. That's a very different thing than if you're a national e-commerce brand trying to go after a very competitive space, then, you know, $2K is nothing there. So it's definitely depends on market and competition level.

This is good. This is good. Anything I didn't ask you?

I think those questions were great. The one other thing I'll just bring up, we kind of touched on it with the public figure impersonation, but Google is very trigger happy about suspending accounts. and preventing you from advertising. And this happens for a billion different reasons. And when it happens, it can be a nightmare to fix. And we spent a lot of time working in this space, a lot of clients who hire us specifically for help with this. So I would just say for everyone getting into Google Ads, really carefully read through Google's policies, try to educate yourself as much as you can about what they don't want you to do. And don't, don't take shortcuts. Like when you're setting up your account, you're entering your information, your payment information, you're setting up Google Merchant Center, whatever it is, Really be thorough and get it right. Because Google does not apply common sense once they suspend you. And it can take months, literally, if ever.

It's a painful process. We deal with that on the Amazon side too. So that can take quite a long time to get through their customer support and validation. Anything else that happens, whether we did it or it was done to us, is a frustrating process. Where can somebody get help from you on one of those issues, whether they're looking to get started or they need to fix an account that was shut down?

Yeah, we have a ton of content on our website, subgroup.com. We have like a whole policy center with a bunch of free guides. And then from there, as well. If you, you know, want to bring the experts in, you can, you can hire us to come in and fix the problem for you. Cool.

And what does it mean you're a Google partner? What does that mean?

Yeah, so Google has this partner program. And a step above that, they call their Premier Partner Program, which is where we're at currently. It basically means we hit a bunch of thresholds in terms of how much spend we manage, the quality of the work that we do, our retention rate of customers, our adoption rate of Google's different platforms. It's kind of a stamp of approval from Google saying, hey, these guys You can, you can trust them to, to manage your ads because we see what they're doing and it looks good.

Okay. Awesome, man. I appreciate it. You got a wealth of knowledge in you. Clearly, you know your stuff. There's a conscientious awareness of what you're doing. You've obviously had a lot of experience in your growth. Maybe you got a case study or something you want to share with us real quick? Something you're proud of? Something that brags on your company a little bit?

Yeah, let's see. Case study. Let me pull up so that I don't miss any numbers here. Yeah, of course.

Caveats and asterisks enclosed, disclaimers, all that stuff. All results are not typical.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So one of the more recent ones we put up, so we had a SaaS company, they're in the kind of the entertainment space. And they came to us, they've been running Google Ads for a while. But they, you know, weren't super happy with where things are at. And so we took a look at things. And we were able to ultimately, we increased their subscriptions by 349%. We did that by making the quality of traffic more relevant, you know, cutting out a lot of irrelevant traffic, and then really working on the cost per click as well. I think we got that down by about 51%. They're just paying a lot per click. And there's Only so much you can do no matter what your conversion rate is to make that successful. So 249% more conversions, 51% lower cost per click, 42% lower decrease in cost per subscription acquisition.

Very nice. Very nice. If someone wants to work with you and get results to that degree, what would they expect? A contract, 3 months, month to month, you know, based on percentage of revenue or based on percentage of spend? How do you work your business?

Yeah, it's pretty straightforward. We charge a monthly retainer plus percentage of ad spend that we're managing. Our contracts are usually either 3 months and then month to month after that, or month to month from the beginning, just depending on, you know, kind of what, what setup fee you want to pay. And, you know, no long-term contracts. We try to let our work speak for itself.

Okay, very good. Well, then, dude, thanks for sharing some information today. Hopefully guys got some good information out of this. Google AdWords is definitely an opportunity, not going anywhere. It is more complex beast than it has been in the past. So you're gonna want to get some guidance and information and some training. Sounds like there's some free stuff on the, on the subgroup.com. You can go check that out. Obviously connect with John if you have any additional questions or need support with account closures or impersonating people, even if it's not you. Those can be challenging. So I got to go play with that myself. But I encourage everybody to give it a shot if you're in the e-commerce world. Once you dial this in, my experience, and you can, you know, tell me yours, is that once it works, it works really well. It takes a little bit to figure it out, but once you get it figured out, it can really grow and scale pretty quick. Would you? Agree or disagree with that?

Absolutely agree.

Yeah. Fantastic. Well, man, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

Thanks so much for having me.

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