A Big Warning To All Small Businesses And Agencies That Use Google Ads

Small biz owners and digital marketers that run Google Ads campaigns, you need to be careful when it comes to the recommendations tab within the Google Ads control panel. 

This is a little tab, located on the left-hand side of your control panel, often heavily pushed by sneaky Google reps as a way to improve your ad performance. However, in reality, it’s there to make you spend more money.

The recommendations tab offers suggestions such as increasing your budget, changing the way your keywords are targeted, adding new keywords, and adding more audiences. While these may seem like good ideas, they often lead to a massive increase in ad spend without any real improvement in campaign performance.

One thing to be particularly careful of is changing your keywords to broad match modifiers. This can lead to increased spending and a higher cost per lead or cost per sale without any real improvement in ad performance due to how wide your ad targeting will get. 

Another thing to be cautious of is increasing your budget. 

While it may be tempting to follow the recommendations and increase your budget, it’s important to remember that doing so too quickly or too dramatically can throw the algorithms off and negatively impact your ad performance.

It’s really important to remember that the recommendations tab is there to make you spend more money, not necessarily to improve your ad performance. It’s important to be cautious and only make small, incremental changes to your budget and keyword targeting. 

A good rule of thumb is to only increase your budget by 10-15% at a time to risk throwing all your hard work down the dunny. 

Google and it’s A.I. can be very sensitive sometimes. 

Picture of Jamie Williamson

Jamie Williamson

Head Honcho @ Umped