3 Ways Google Wastes Ad Spend

TO:___Attorneys & Managing Partners
FROM:_Benji Albrecht, Founder and CEO of BPAgency
DATE: April 5, 2024
RE: Top 3 Budget-Wasting Google Ads Settings

Google misleads you - especially in advertising.

Google’s Ad products are promoted under the guise of helping you reach more customers, but some their features are notorious for wasting your advertising dollars.

Here are the Top 3 Budget Wasters:

Option #1: Direct Business Search

According to Google, this new Local Services Ads (LSA) feature helps “you reach specific customers.”

Unfortunately, “specific” means customers who are searching directly for your brand. If Direct Business Search is active in your LSA profile, you may be paying to acquire referrals who would have found your website or Google Business Profile anyway.

How to turn off Direct Business Search:

1. Sign into your LSA account.

2. Click Profile and Budget in the left sidebar.

3. Toggle off the Direct Business Search slider:

Option #2: Display Expansion

When you configure a Google Ads Search campaign, Google automatically opts you in to spend unused budget to serve display ads on websites in Google’s Display Network.

Google claims this feature is an easy way to get more exposure and “get additional conversions at similar or lower cost.” The problem is display ads are served to cold traffic whereas search ads show when someone searches for the targeted keywords.

In other words, traffic on from the display network is not likely to convert. This is why I unselect the Display Network option on all of my search campaigns.

Option #3: Optimization Recommendations

Google monitors your ad campaigns and uses machine learning to recommend optimizations to improve your performance. But some of these recommendations are really just ways to get you to spend more money.

For example, when I logged into my agency’s ad account this morning, the optimization score was 73.5%. Google also provided me various recommendations to implement to improve the score.

Notice anything interesting about the recommendation below? Google recommends I use the display expansion feature - the option I was careful to unselect for the reasons explained above.

As you can see, you will need to weigh the pros and cons of each recommendation before applying them to your account.

If you decide you don’t want to apply them, you can click the 3 dots in the top right of the recommendation (next to the 1% in the figure above) and select “Dismiss.” This will remove the recommendation from your dashboard and improve your account optimization score.

TLDR: Be skeptical of Google’s standard account configurations and any recommendations for how to approve your account. Understand the details, or pay more money to acquire clients as a result.

This email is brought to you by Benji and the team at BPAgency.

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