Common Google Ads Mistakes eCommerce Businesses Make and How to Avoid Them

In this episode of the Google Ads Unleashed Podcast, host Jeremy dives into the costly pitfalls many Ecommerce brands make on Google Ads—and how to avoid them. 

Learn why poor tracking, weak product pages, sloppy feeds, and wrong bid strategies can quietly kill your profits. If you’ve ever wondered why your campaigns aren’t scaling like they should, this episode is for you!

Get your free 30 minute strategy session with Jeremy here: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/

Scale your store with 1:1 coaching: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/1-2-1-coaching

Transcript

Hello guys, and welcome back to Google Ads unleashed. Hope. Everyone is doing fabulously this Monday, this week, and today I want to be talking about something which I am quite passionate about, and that is how to avoid some common mistakes that E commerce businesses make
when it comes to Google ads, and how you can avoid them. Because the thing is, I'm a firm believer that mistakes are just part of life, right? You're just gonna always make I make so many mistakes as a business owner. It's not even funny like
but I don't worry about it too much anymore, because a lot of people sort of trying to overthink, as I always call them, the Evergreen theorists. They always try to theorize everything and are afraid of making a mistake, and that is what's holding them back. It's like learning a language, right? If you're afraid to make a mistake when learning a new language, you're always, always going to be stuck, because you're not going to be practicing, you're not going to speak, you're not going to make Advan advances. You have to make mistakes in order to advance. So the issue, though, is in E comm and knee Gen as well, of course, but specifically e com is that if you make mistakes, it costs you a lot of money, and that is what paralyzes a lot of people. So I've made all the mistakes they are to make, right? So today's episode is going to be about a few common Google Ads mistakes that you can avoid. So if you may have encountered the situation or heard of someone making those mistakes, then you can already avoid them, because I have made them already, and we start at the end, and that is on the site. So one of the most common mistakes that I see is to simply have an unoptimized product page. Too many businesses that I talk to think they can just slap out a page, put no effort into it, and they think, Oh, I'm going to run ads to it, and in the end, it's just going to work itself out. What you really have to do, you must, must, must optimize your landing page from mobile. You must optimize your page so that your ideal customer profile is feels addressed on your page, and actually your product solves the problem in the transition that they hope to be buying right like they don't buy a product. They buy an outcome, and too many pages are just not doing that, and very often with a lot of our clients, because not, I don't want to be bragging or anything, but we're obviously pretty good at what we do, and we kind of reach a limit at some point of how much ad spend we could actually spend, because we run out of search volume, or we run just out of
like the conversion rate, simply not strong enough to be able to spend more.
And we say the next growth lever is your landing page. And too many people just do not think about that and neglect that grossly. And that is where, in my opinion, they leave most money on the table. So instead of spending 15 grand the next month, just spend 10 grand and take the five grand to upgrade your PDPs. You're going to be having a massive difference afterwards, and you're going to be thanking me. I also got an episode on how to optimize your PDP, and so have a look for that one. The second big mistake is that a lot of businesses make is that they do not track the right metrics, or they don't understand what they need to track. They, for instance, don't even understand what is their break even ROAs. They don't understand what to what what CAC, do I need? So customer acquisition like N CAC, they don't understand what a good mer looks like. They don't understand what a good budget mix between the channels look like. They don't even understand what kind of conversion actions they should be tracking, right? So
I've seen wild setups where people have multiple purchase conversion actions, right and have duplicate conversion tracking. I've seen wild setups where people don't
track add to carts in there as well. In fact, only about four weeks ago, we onboarded a client who said, Oh, my Google Ads has gone down. It's doing terribly. I'm like,
dude, before you came to us, you were spending 20 grand turning over, I don't know, half a million in total, with this business, obviously, a lot of meta ads. Do you really think that 450k
as tracked in the previous month came from Google Ads he was tracking? I.
Two cards and begin checkouts as well as a value. So all campaigns were optimizing on that and not on purchases. And he had no idea what a break even Ross said was he thought a ROAs of four to five. That's what he needs. The reality is a two. Ross was perfectly fine for him, for for his for his turnover. So some of somarum understand what to track, and understand what strategy you need in order to track right? What do I mean by that,
sort of, let's say, for instance, you have a lot a lot of products with a lot of different margins. You need to do profit tracking. I've got a full episode on that to go back and listen to her. If you have many, many products, they all have the same margin, use some form of labelizing strategy, like flow boost. If you have just a one product store, make sure your tracking still is crystal clear. It's massively important that you track the right things and that you work towards the correct North Star metric, okay,
tracking, hugely important. Sec. A third thing that a lot of people get wrong and big mistakes that they make, is they do not put enough time and effort into their their product feed. Your product feed is your absolute heart of your success, without that, that and, of course, your product and offer and landing page, you are screwed. I have seen the shittest Ad Account setups you've ever seen your life, and it still worked, because people had a good feed and a good product, right? I've seen the best setups in Google ads, but people had a shit product and it didn't work. They didn't work on that, or they had a terrible product feed and it didn't work. Best example, actually, many years ago,
I was working with a company that sold metal furniture. I think I've mentioned this example on the pod before. And all of their products, they would name them, sort of like IKEA. Did you know something like a table, Eric and I don't know chair, Rudolph and so on. But of course, no one searches like that for for it. So the first thing we did was transform the product feed. Actually have meaningful titles in them. Actually have descriptive product descriptions, good pictures, etc. Boom, overnight, the same campaigns worked. What? Not rocket science, right? But it's a huge mistake a lot of people make, and that particular company actually had plowed 10s and 1000s of euros, not even hundreds of 1000s, into Google ads before. Inefficiently, don't make the same mistake. Put effort into your product feed. I've got plenty of podcasts about product title, product image, price optimization. Go back and listen to all of them. Do not make that mistake. Then a lot of mistakes I see a lot of E commerce businesses make is they do not take advantage of the existing first party data. Your first party data is crucial to target the right people. If you want Google to find more people who are like the your customers, tell Google who your customers are, upload a list of existing customers upload a high value customer list. So for instance, however you define that your VIP purchases, these could be repeat purchases, these could be subscribers, these could be whatever, and use that to effectively optimize your campaigns. Google will automatically take into consideration who these people are and show these people the correct products. For example, we have a client who sells coffee, and after we've established their feed, their feeds in fantastic shape, we got now a massively good idea about what a good CAC looks like, and what that translates to is a target, CPA goal in Google, right? Which is, which is great. We now are at a stage where we can actually
what was on about first party data, yes, where we have actually had so many customers now that we've uploaded effective lists into the Google Ads account, and now we can actually start scaling into a search term such as just coffee, because they're quite niche with their specific coffee. But of course, that search term will have the highest search volume, and it'll only now selectively show ads to people who are in our ICP so that we can take advantage of that additional search volume. And it's been really helpful. It's also been helpful in, for instance, optimizing towards new customers or even using p max now to activate lapsed customers. It's also been super helpful in
sort of.
Trying to exclude existing costs, etc, etc, right? So guys use first party data. You are being inefficient. If you are not using that.
Then on the immediate buying side, their side, there are so so many mistakes that I could be mentioning, but I'm gonna pick out top three which I see time and time again and which popped my head. And that is one thing I see very often, is the wrong bid strategy is used people you need to the whole idea of a bid strategy is to effectively bid towards what the goal is of your ad account. It I think that sort of is goes hand in hand with the first mistake that I've mentioned is many people don't actually know what their goal is, and for that reason, use the wrong bid strategy, right if you're a goal is to get a new customer CPA of 50 pounds, let's say then you have to use Target CPA Right. Like that's then traditionally the bid strategy you want, if you if your entire business is about getting new customers into the funnel to buy your supplements, right? You have a supplement brand, you sell one supplement, you need to use Target CPA right as a bid strategy. If your goal is to get a positive return on ad spend on your first order, you need target ROAs, etc, etc. Traditionally, target ROAs is better suited for E commerce, businesses. This is a very generalistic thing to say, I know, and usually target CPA is better for lead gen, right, unless you, of course, transmit conversion values in
as well. But this, this is a different couple of fish, but wrong bid strategy used is massive. I see that in brand campaigns as well. I see it in branded shopping campaigns. Oftentimes, that is a mistake that I see. Then the second mistake I see is no clear segmentation strategy. Usually, often I go into Google Ads accounts and I see 1p max with brand included
with what, with maybe five asset groups for no fucking reason,
and a brand search campaign, and the brand campaigns on broad and then people are just pulverizing money into that don't do that. Have a good idea of why and how to segment your ad account. I've done, actually a pod a couple of weeks ago about how to segment with a very, very clear phrase that I use oftentimes, and that is,
you know, frag fragmentation. What do I always say?
Cons consolidate if, but more or less, what I'm trying to say is consolidate, if you can fragment if you need it. And the determining three factors that should always guide your decision is daily budget. What is my bid strategy? And what am I advertising? If you can harmonize these three factors throughout your entire ad account, boom, bash, boom, you're going to have the best setup possible. So if you need to split brand and brand, non brand, two different campaigns, do you need a different bid strategy to exist into a customers versus if, for instance, in an RSA versus new customers boom, different campaigns.
Please, please, please, segment your your accounts properly.
This is just a huge mistake that I see all the time.
And the last big mistake that I often see
would be probably to just not put the effort in so Google needs. I always like to think Google is a bit like a garden, right? You don't sort of seed your
your seeds and plant your flowers in the bed and then just let them grow and do their own thing. Well, to a certain degree you do because, you know that's that's what the artist of managing the Google Ads account. You have to know when to recede, you have to know when to report, you have to know when to prune. You have to know when to do all of these things. But if you just let it grow, it's gonna be one big fuck off wild garden, right? And although that looks cool and can be cool most of the times, it's not really what you want, right? You want well maintained lawn. You want a well maintained flower bed. You want to have everything growing nicely and not cannibalize each other. Yeah, that is what you want. And this is a big mistake, I see second forget and never been touched.
But for instance, we recently took over an ad account,
which is
in the women's accessories niche, and we basically implemented all of the basics that that I talked about just now. And what do we see?
We've basically doubled sales within about five, six weeks
because we actually segmented the ad account. We actually put the right message in there was like Black Friday messaging. Still, that's how long it's not been touched. And unsurprisingly, it's doing really well right now. So it just needs tender loving care. And that is one of the last things that are what one of the things I very commonly see,
if your ad account needs a look at, then let me know as well. Just message me Jeremy at younger digital dot marketing. You can also find me on LinkedIn, Jeremy and Google ads. You can also send me a message via our website or book a strategy call with us straight away at young and digital dot marketing, I would love to hear from you. Maybe you're making one of them mistakes, and you need advice on how to fix it. I'm here for that, and with that, I say thank you very much. This has been Jeremy Young, a personal Google Ads expert, and I wish you a happy and productive week ahead. You.