These common mistakes can ruin your whole Google Ads budget according to lessons learned in audits. In this article, I mention some problem areas in PPC Programs that most likely result in wastage of your budget when you look at your ads account. These missteps are divided into two categories namely Foundational Problems and Easy Fixes.

These 4 Missteps Are Commonly Known For Disrupting Your Budget:

Paid Foundational Search Mistakes

These problems aren’t easy to pinpoint through your Google Ads account audit and need more than a press of a button or setting change.

Many PC Audits fail in this area because problems like this aren’t easily noticeable and also not easy to fix. You may need to contact your executive team or client for a buy-in, change your approach, or change company directives, which in most cases are unfavorable. The next issues can cause a big waste in your Google Ads budget, so be prepared as we consider them.

1. Going In The Wrong Direction

Tracking conversion is a recurring problem, whether your business is substantial or compact size. It can be a shortage in tracking or wrong tracking, even tracking too much at once. The problem with a shortage in tracking is evident. You can’t refine something when you don’t know what works and what doesn’t.

The same counts for wrong tracking. Tracking too many things at once, however, confuses your numbers and impacts the making of decisions. For instance, when you track every transaction from the smallest interest to the actual sale that’s made can potentially confuse.

This isn’t all bad and the information can be useful but adding all of this to your report can be risky.

2. A Mindset To Save Money

A source of big problems is putting too much into saving money, instead of making effective use of returns. Saving money through lower Cost per Click (CPC) and Acquisition Costs (CPA) is a good thing, however, there’s a limit. Focusing on saving instead of returns makes your paid search account smaller and smaller until it eventually fades away.

In general, having a healthy paid search program needs a working budget to grow. Don’t throw money away, you can still control your overall ROI while spending a little more. Sometimes clients spend more to add fuel to the fire and that’s wry because the agencies focus on driving down costs.

To avoid misunderstandings, good communication is important.

3. Blindness To Post-Clicks

Everything can be done perfectly before the ‘click.’ From keywords to the budget and everything in between behind the effort. But all that means nothing if the post-click experience is bad. By that, I mean the ‘aftermath’ of clicking.

A bad post-click experience can be anything from a bad landing page, which is the homepage of your website, to a landing page that loads forever or even a conflict between the landing page messaging and the ad. A good example of this is when you look at an ad and get to the landing page of the business, then notice the addresses don’t match.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to find that half of the people clicking your ad don’t continue to complete the request for more info. Don’t give potential clients a reason to not go further. Put in the same amount of effort in the post-click as you do the pre-click. In the fast-moving world of PPC, post-click experiences can be a blockage in the road.

4. A Lack in Fortitude

Unwillingness to postpone a request or demand can also result in wasted ads, leading to a wasted budget. As a PPC pro, we get a lot of requests from managers or clients that are unhelpful. The might suggest the use of a particular keyword or a certain audience to target, which in some cases makes sense, but in other cases go against broader objectives.

You need to have the nerve to question these demands and postpone. Being a little overwhelmed or inexperienced, this can be hard to do. If you’re an agency you don’t want to go against your clients’ ‘advice’ because your client is always right. You have t be willing to start a discussion before things go wrong, and that can happen quickly.

For example, the client asked its agency to spend more on a certain brand for various reasons. It’s a fair request, but to fulfill the request the agency had to pull back their bidding on top-converting brands which in the end directly impacted revenue resulting from that the client wasn’t happy.

If the agency had decided to postpone a little and communicated the impact it would have on the directive, the whole situation could’ve been avoided.

Don’t waste your ads budget!

Being aware of some of the most common mistakes that are being made, you can now avoid mishaps and possibly save on your budget.