The #1 Google Ads Mistake People Make and How to Fix It

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We have audited literally thousands of Google Ads accounts.

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That feels really weird to say, to be honest with you.

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But I mean, over the course of all of our students, all of our prospects,

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all of our clients, years and years and years in this business, there have been

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thousands of Google Ads accounts that we've had our eyes on uh, between me and

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the strategists inside of Solutions eight.

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And I can tell you the number one mistake that we see without

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question and it boggles my mind that this could be a mistake.

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To be honest with you, it blows me away that people are

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throwing money away this way.

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The number one mistake we see, Can you guess?

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Conversion tracking.

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It's conversion tracking.

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Can you believe it's something so simple?

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No conversion tracking or improper conversion tracking.

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it's a trillion dollar machine learning mechanism that uses the

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information it's gathering in order to yield results for you, and not

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tracking conversions is flying blind.

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It's worse than doing something like radio, television, newspaper, because

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with those mediums, you know, you're not tracking conversions and so you're

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set up to measure accordingly with Google Ads, not tracking conversions

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and then optimizing it's in the name.

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Maximize conversions, maximize conversion value.

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I've chosen not to track conversions.

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Actually, I like to live dangerously 50% of the accounts that.

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Either have no conversion tracking in place whatsoever, which just

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blows me away, or the conversion tracking is set up so poorly that

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the data is absolutely worthless.

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And y'all, this happens more times than I care to tell you, and it

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happens in sophisticated accounts.

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You know, a lot of DIYers for sure, but agency built accounts, there's a couple

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of really big agency out there that just do an abysmal, horrible job at this.

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If you did nothing but set up proper conversion tracking,

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here's what's scary for me, not.

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Have you been, did nothing but set up proper conversion tracking

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on a long enough timeline.

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You might not necessarily need an agency.

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Now that's gonna stop being true as Google continues to drop conversions.

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Conversion tracking right now, by the way, is hard.

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it's interesting to see what happened post iOS 14 privacy first deprecation

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of cookies, Google moving towards what they're refusing to call flock

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now which I think is so funny.

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What little conversion data you can capture.

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You absolutely need to have.

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because what?

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What's happening is because we are restricted from.

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A data perspective, the little conversion data that you're capturing

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ends up being absolute gold.

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here are the best practices for conversion tracking.

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One.

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Use Google Ads.

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Google Ads allows you to track conversions within Google Ads via Google Tag Manager.

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Do not use Google Analytics as your primary conversion Tracking

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Google Analytics is flawed.

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It's effectively last click attributed, even though it has its own.

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Attribution windows.

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I'm not telling you not to track inside of Google Analytics.

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What I'm telling you to do is track inside of Google Ads then use Google

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Analytics to reconcile against that way.

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You have kind of a sense of the rising tides, but be forewarned.

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Analytics is gonna routinely drop about 30% of your, conversions or more.

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you'll see this if you've used Google Ads alongside Google

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Analytics, you'll see that Google Analytics is always lagging behind.

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Always, always, always, always.

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So use Google Ads and you'll open those windows up.

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I'm talking 90 30.

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30.

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when you're building your conversion actions, what you're

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doing is you're telling Google what conversion windows to use.

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There's Very few reasons these days to use narrow conversion windows,

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especially because everything is so multi click, multi variant, multi-page.

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People take time to buy.

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I wrote a tweet today, a Twitter thread, I was doing some research and found

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out that Google identified the path to purchase for a candy bar was 20 clicks.

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20 touches to buy a candy bar.

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It's insane.

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For an airline ticket, it's 500.

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you need to make sure that you are opening up your attribution windows

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wide as you possibly can and have three points of data at a minimum.

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Google Ads, number one, Google Analytics, number two.

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Number three is your CRM and or cms.

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what you're doing is you're triangulating.

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Right.

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Like you're figuring out like, okay, so here's the data point, here's the

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data point, here's the data point.

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And then that kind of gives me some semblance of what's going

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on from a truthful perspective.

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And if you want extra credit, you're gonna go get yourself an attribution software.

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I like North Beam.

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I happened to be an investor in North Beam.

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So I'm obviously partial, but I was a user before I was an investor,

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and I think that says a lot like we were using this thing became so hot

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to trot that we went and threw money at ' I think North Beam's amazing.

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Talked to the guy on wicked Reports, actually the other

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day on Perpetual Traffic.

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Really liked what he had to say.

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I haven't used Wicked Reports yet personally, but there are tools and

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software applications out there that are meant to act as a single source of truth.

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Go check out those applications and see what you can do in order to

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help yourself capture the conversion data you need in order to make

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the decisions that you're making.

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And by the way, we're all now.

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And women, right?

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Like, if you haven't watched John's video on Mer marketing Efficiency

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Ratio it's an absolute prerequisite.

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Go back and watch that video.

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I'll make sure to link to it in the description of this one because that's

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the paradigm that you need to assume.

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is conversion tracking important?

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Yes.

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Critically, critically important.

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Can conversion data be done, trusted?

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No, not at all.

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So we need the conversion tracking, so Google knows who's buying and we'll

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replicate those conversion actions.

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But it's almost like giving, it's like giving the hunting dog the sniff

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of what it is that it needs to hunt.

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you're not gonna, still not gonna be able to see everything.

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but your campaigns are gonna improve by orders of magnitude because Google

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now actually knows who to go after.

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And when reconciling your conversion data, make sure you're paying attention to

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attribution models because all of these.

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Applications are gonna have different modeling, different tracking.

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So first click versus last click are two entirely different maps, or they're

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entirely different knowledge graphs.

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Incidentally, I'm writing one Twitter thread every single day.

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So if you're not following me on Twitter, go follow me at Casa.

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The last thing I wanna say is Phone call conversions are a

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nightmare for Google ad agencies.

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Most of these agencies, all they're doing is saying anything that lasts over 45

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seconds is a conversion, which is a lie.

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What we like to do is we track and record all calls, and then we listen to those

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calls and we score them manually, and then we pipe those back into Google because now

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we're not giving Google false positives, which is really, really, really important.

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A call that lasts for over 45 seconds could be a solicitor, an

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angry customer, an existing customer who just clicked on your ad.

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Somebody who thinks that.

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Calling your competitor because you're bidding on brand K.

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There's a whole bunch of reasons that 45 second phone calls aren't

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leads, so don't fall into that trap.

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Speaking about conversion tracking, clean conversion data is the

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most important thing you can do inside of the realm of Google Ads.

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Truly, it's just so massive for the performance of the campaign.

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And then once you have that clean conversion data, I've actually seen app.

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Not all the time, but I've actually seen accounts self optimize to a point

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where You kind of don't need the agency.

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We had a guy come to us, actually.

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he was selling info products on investing.

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This is as close as I can get without giving his identity away, but spending

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a significant amount of money doing it.

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And they just ran outbound display for nine.

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Hemorrhaged money for the first eight of those nine.

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But then by month nine Google says, oh, here's who buys from you.

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And they ended up having a campaign that was producing top of funnel

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traffic at, orders of magnitude that would rival Facebook.

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It was awesome.

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And it's just because they had conversion tracking set up.

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They batch and blast for, let Google, learn over time.

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They had way more patience than most people do.

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And they did great.

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I actually ended up not working with them long term.

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I was like, look, there's not a whole lot more we can do for you.

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you've optimized this campaign, proper conversion tracking.

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So important, The only thing more important than proper conversion

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tracking is following me on Twitter.

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Follow me on Twitter at casa and that's all I got.

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Appreciate y'all.