Why Your Google Ads Campaigns Aren’t Scaling: Top Mistakes to Avoid

If conversion tracking is off, nothing else in the account matters.

I don't care about the bidding strategy, , the conversions, the

cpa, nothing, nothing matters at all.

So conversion tracking first and foremost is extremely important.

So , that's how universal this, kind of evaluation can be.

It applies to everyone.

More than two thirds of the conversions are coming from the

brand that's going to, if it's scale, higher amount of bad spend, no.

No, no, no, That's the first thing right off the bat.

That's probably the one of the biggest limiting scale factors.

Things, current results are good, but hasn't been able to scale

at wasta scale aggressively.

perfect.

That's all.

That's all we're gonna do.

That's what we're, that's all I'm gonna know.

And that's what we're gonna go off of in the beginning.

So this is gonna be pure cold.

Haven't seen this client before.

, last 30 days spent 22 k.

$8 conversions.

Cool.

So let's begin.

First thing that I do is I always look at the conversion tracking.

That's going to dictate everything that happens in an account

conversion tracking is off, nothing else in the account matters.

I don't care about the bidding strategy, , , the conversions, the

cpa, nothing, nothing matters at all.

So conversion tracking first and foremost is extremely important.

So what I'm gonna do first is just take a look at the campaign structures.

So, , , let's see what they're spending the most on.

That's gonna make the most amount of sense.

So we got a shopping campaign on Target.

Roaz, YouTube search.

YouTube Shopping, search Search, YouTube, My, this is Uhoh.

All right, well this is a friendly partner of ours, so this is gonna be fun.

So we got the video, video, a lot of video campaigns.

, let's see what they spent in video.

So 21 In video, they spent eight.

Okay, so that's good.

That's one.

Third, let's see what they spent in shopping.

in shopping, they spent 15.

Okay.

With four campaigns.

Got it.

in search.

, 7,500.

Alright, now that's the, the search.

So search.

, and it's pretty evenly divided up between the three, but YouTube

is still a big portion of it.

Looking at the bidding strategies, this is all the information I'm gonna gather

before I check the conversion action so that all this is leading up to what is

currently being structured, which is gonna dictate how I look at the conversion.

So we're using restricted bidding strategies everywhere, and they

said that they're wanting to scale.

The other thing that I kind of noticed right off the bat is when you look

at the conversions, the descending.

There is 2,700 conversions.

2000 of those are coming from.

What this looks to be is brand with search partners.

So that's another issue right there.

If more than two thirds of the conversions are coming from the

brand, that's going to inhibit scale.

The other thing that's gonna inhibit scale is the bidding strategies.

Running on a restrictive bidding strategy most often is what it looks like.

So let's look at the conversions.

Okay, so they're running a website conversion as primary.

This is secondary.

That's fine.

It's good.

Looks like it's working well because Google ads gonna

capture more on analytics.

That's fine.

, everything else is inactive.

Calls from ads, YouTube channel subscriptions, all of

the other tags are inactive.

And then the custom goals, there's three of them.

And these are actual purchases.

So it looks like they're importing it, but they're not actually a pending

attending campaign purchase in Cape.

So, That's fine here.

So purchase, , this one's gonna be capturing the conversions.

Now, first thing off the bat, there's an incorrect structure,

learning how to YouTube one third, their spend is in YouTube.

Their engaged through conversion window is three days, and they're

using a restricted bidding strategy.

. What this means is that it's gonna say, Hey, unless make a Target

roaz or Target cpa, don't spend any money, don't scale well.

When you count your review through, engage, convert, or engage new conversions

of only three days instead of 30, you don't get all the conversion value and

you're not gonna be able to get all of the information back into Google.

Under restricted bidding strategy is going to be too restrictive.

It means if I'm only feeding it three out of the 30 that I could.

But I said, why can't I scale?

Why isn't my campaigns gaining more impressions than conversions?

While you're only counting them for three days?

The clickthrough conversion window is 30 days.

Not too worried about that, like to move it out to 90, but this one

right here, when you're running heavy YouTube, especially when you're

running heavy inbound brand, means that all of your YouTube videos

are doing really, really good.

But your data driven can only attribute your conversions back to the brand.

Why?

Because if it comes after four days, it's physically impossible to rero back to.

Does that make sense for everybody so far?

Again, gonna go a little fast here, but it's gonna be drinking in front

of fire hose and we get stuff.

That's the first thing right off the bat.

That's probably the one of the biggest limiting scale factors of it.

Restricted betting strategy, incorrect conversion tracking, heavy

on YouTube, too much into brand.

That's a big structural issue that I noticed right off the bat there.

So we wanna move this from three to 30 days.

This is going to allow the, , YouTube and I'm gonna look at, and I'm

sure there's gonna be some YouTube campaigns that have a probably a

fair amount of, , engaged views.

But just globally, when I look at the account tool, not just the campaigns,

, I can see that 100 of the 2,700 have been coming from Engage Views.

There is Engage View conversions.

This is only three.

Now, if I'm looking at three days and seeing a hundred,

there's probably a lot more.

Let's check timeline.

Let's see how much we could be potentially missing.

Knowing that this is heavy brand, though my timeline is gonna be fairly short

because brand is usually one click, one day, one, one attributed conversion.

I would imagine 80% of my conversions for the brand campaign,

if I look at days to conversion, are gonna be within one per one.

Percent.

So 101 out of 111,000 within one day.

Yes, that's the case.

That's reducing that time like a lot.

That means that my time in reality is actually longer.

I'm just a self-fulfilling prophecy by only tracking the short and then

put positioning all of my husband in conversions into the short.

So we already know that there's a seven day conversion lag.

We're tracking YouTube for three days.

That's a mistake.

We can't track a three day conversion window on Engage View, which YouTube

does well with a seven day time lag, basically by saying, Hey, even before

halfway through the sales cycle, we stop tracking and also let's

use restrictive bidding strategy.

We add more budget.

Nothing comes through.

We've, blinded ourself from seeing that that's gonna be one of the

things that's going to limit that.

So next thing that we're gonna look at is the different types of individual

campaigns and what we're showing up for.

What is this company called again?

Okay, so just looking globally at all the search terms and we look, wanna take

a search term filter and say, what is small pet and apply, and this is gonna

give you the differentiation between all the shopping campaigns, search campaigns.

I don't care if they're called non-branded, I don't care if they're

called non-branded shopping campaigns.

If we look at small pet select, we can find that anything that

was small pet, small pets, small blah, blah, blah, blah, here.

search terms coming from shopping, search, whatever it may be.

So now when we're looking at this, we can see, okay, we have a

SPS non-brand likely Miss Bells.

I don't know what the hell that is, but that's probably not a good idea

to separate that from brand campaign.

Probably not.

Not too smart because now we're looking at all non-brand doing okay,

but it's actually brand, which is a huge mistake that people usually make.

So then I look.

, , non-brand bedding, small select, small pet select bedding,

that's gonna limit to scale.

Why can't scale brand?

You can't scale the last part of any funnel.

You like to scale the first part or the middle part, but you can't

just try to double down and people are already searching for you.

You can't make your own baby that wants to buy your own product.

It's not gonna happen in the bidding strategy.

those are things that we have to look for in immediately is the sh generic.

, that's probably not br.

It's non-brand.

That's brand non-brand.

Brand non-brand.

Or that one's brand?

, brand.

This is non-brand.

Brand.

Okay.

So we already can tell you that the non-brand versus the brand

doesn't make sense anymore.

That's all gone.

So this is where you have half of your non-brand being brand and your brand

being brand and your YouTube not tracking conversions, nothing's gonna scale.

So we're just in the first few minutes here of this evaluation.

Any and now I'm just gonna pause here cuz again, I'm going pretty.

Any questions so far?

I can't see the chat anymore, so just yay or na with any questions.

People are just wondering, why are you speaking so fast today?

Like incredibly fast.

Oh, this is just my normal speed . but this is, but I said you could rewatch

this a few times and you'll get the kind of, just the cadence of it.

, I think that this is good.

That's why I said we'll skip the quiz this week and just know like maybe this

is just how to evaluate an account, but it's, the common every single time.

This is how it always runs.

That's why this is just now normal, just day-to-day operations.

So how, what are we known so far?

Tracking is incorrect.

The non-brand showing up for brand.

More than three quarters of our conversions are coming from branded

search terms and our top of funnel, middle of funnel that we should

be able to scale won't be able to.

So let's look at some individual campaigns.

Now because this says Search Partners, you can segment by conversions and go on.

Oh, I'm sorry, segment not by conversions.

, I'm an idiot Segment and go top versus other search partners

in here around the brand.

I'm not too worried about cuz Search Partners usually is fairly

okay on branded conversions.

But we see here that we only spent 45 cents fine.

, search partners $11 and we got, value by cost.

That's working well cost for conversion.

11.

Good.

So we're looking at the different networks.

A lot of times what you find is a campaign that has too much of a

restricting bidding strategy will go too heavy into search partners,

which is usually fairly junk traffic.

And they think they're on Google and they're actually not Going campaign by

campaign allows us to say, if you've opted into things like the search

partners and that kind of stuff, you'll find some, sometimes inefficiencies.

I've actually saved a couple clients by saying, don't spend 80% of

search partners turn that off, and wow, quality of traffic increase.

So that's something that we need to check that box.

So let's see.

Search partners not, and all we're looking for is just a higher amount of bad spend.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

Go down to globally at the bottom.

Looks like search partners.

Only spent $78.

Not an issue there.

All right.

Now let's do some other things here.

So this search campaign that's generic high is also showing up

for the brand term quite often.

So terms like.

, 690.

We'll see the differentiation between those.

This is going to give us a a couple things here.

What I'm looking at is the highest spending campaigns.

What are they doing?

Pardo's 80 20 roll holds tight for any campaign evaluation, which means that

if I'm looking at 80% of the activity, that's, the whole account, the 20% is

not gonna make a break a difference in a campaign, the 20% can do double as good,

and you're still only 40% efficient.

So we're looking at the conversions here.

We have 48 conversions on things.

And there's 254.

Good.

There's probably some other things here that's not gonna be really great.

, in terms of the, , scalability, because the, cost for conversion

is five, globally is 14, which means you take the opposite of 14.

That's been reduced down to five, and this is more like $30.

So for average cost per non-branded conversion is $30.

Say, does not contain, and there's gonna be some, some differentiation.

I'm going a little bit too quickly here.

, this one's at 18, but there's also gonna be some brand in there.

, , which is fine.

So now we're gonna look at non-branded C P A and and CAC versus Roaz.

I don't have L T b.

We'd have to find that on a call.

But now we're gonna look at what is the cost for conversion

versus the value per conversion.

And find out how much are we just paying for these people

over and over and over again.

And if we're just throwing all of our profitability out right at the

end of the end of the sequence.

Cause we're misattributing and YouTube is now bringing us new full traffic.

So we wanna look at something, the value per conversion, this.

It's going to allow us to see what is the A O V versus the C P A.

Then the bigger issues that we're gonna have is what is the actual L T V?

So cost per conversion and value per conversion are gonna be two

things that we're looking at here.

So cost per conversion, So cost for a conversion on the brand dollar 50.

Good.

That is good.

That's not bad.

We're way overspent, but that's not bad at all.

The generic, we know that it's $14 and 50.

Okay.

Now, if you had a, that's not that great.

If you're at a 33% profit margin, that's break.

Even if you had good L t D.

That's fine.

Again, I, I actually still don't know what this client does, by the way.

That's what you'll notice is we already kind of found a huge efficiency.

I can't even, I don't even know what this company sells.

So that's, how universal this, kind of evaluation can be.

It flies to everyone.

But if you're looking at, let's say 50% profit margins, that

means that I make 25 on that.

I spent 14 on that.

I got a $10.

Why can't they scale?

I don't know.

Can they scale profitably?

Yes.

Are they gonna scale this profitably right now?

No.

So then we look at the, so non-brand R L S A.

Okay.

That's a little bit high.

A little bit high.

, Non-brand bedding, which we already know has some brand in there that's also

gonna be sucking up the, profitability, the non-brand similar audience.

Value per conversion seems really odd to me, , that they'll only be $7 and $1.

This means that we're probably tracking conversions that are

actually not sales, that are probably have the default value of one.

Let's just see here.

, a calls from ads.

That's would be one of those, yeah.

Calls.

So calls are what's dropping that a o b.

Okay.

That's why.

So we only had a call from AD that came in from this one here, and that cost us $25.

Would you want to count calls?

Probably not.

I, technically wouldn't, and especially if you're gonna use a bidding strategy

like target cost per acquisition, make sure that it cost me, you know, 20 $18

for a phone call to come in, or 25.

Probably a bad idea.

So we're looking at the way that we're measuring success of a

campaign, yet have to kind of go one by one, non-brand, not profitable.

R L s a non-brand, not profitable top of funnel, could potentially be profitable

if this is actually top of funnel.

And we already know that there's a little bit too much mix and match

between each individual campaigns.

So as a general thumb, let's say this is, let's say one third non.

Want their brand again, not profitable.

So we're starting to see that they have too many campaigns that are

stretching themselves too thin without a good, good structure.

Right now, each one of these things that I can open up are going to have a.

Inefficiencies.

This one here is a YouTube remarketing.

Other emails.

Again, we'll have to take some time to find out what these are.

Other emails excluding recent purchasers.

Okay, so these are people that probably are in their email list, that they're

just continually cycling it through.

We can look at the audiences and find out is it actually working well.

So we wanna, we can kind of dive deeper into each individual.

One email list here, $27,009 Cost for conversion.

Are we counting just the good sales?

This one looks to be good.

These are all purchases.

Excellent.

Now this is YouTube again, we're missing 90% of the conversions that

actually came from this, this campaign.

So this is working very well at $9 cost per acquisition.

Missing conversions, low hanging fruit, good opportunity.

Would you scale?

This one depends on how often they're updating their lists.

So let's just kind of go back and do more, generalized , information Here.

We're looking at the brand.

This is where we're gonna look at the audiences.

The audiences are going to be less and less and less efficient.

But these audiences are things that we're going to tell us the more, most truth

in the account, similar to all visitors.

Good.

All right.

Now let's see.

, lifestyles and hobby.

Pet lovers.

Pet lovers has a good cost for conversion, which means Google knows

these people and they're Google the brand and they're buying, which means

this is an audience that we can expand upon because we know that when they

find out about our brand and they buy, even if it's a return, it's cheap.

Good.

This is what we're gonna gather on the brand campaign, the brand campaign.

Has a lot of truths in there that can be extracted and

brought back to the beginning.

So what I'm doing now is I'm kind of finding areas of low hanging opportunity,

so I can say, consolidate, run these, start these, and you'll have good

success and track it and measure it.

This way.

The brand will tell you who your customers are.

It's still very, very valuable.

That's why it's always a good deal to, as well, to run the brand.

So pet lovers, affinity nail it.

Pet supplies good.

We have a few pet clients and I also can tell you that these

are good for them as well.

So that's just something this is a truth that's becoming verified.

The dog lovers, which is my best, , personally on YouTube.

Good.

, home and garden decor enthusiast.

Okay.

Mother's Day dining.

Now you can kinda see where they fall off a little bit.

Cat lovers good.

I don't know about home and garden as much.

It could just be an overlap.

, but then the conversions drop down.

But right now we can see that our pet lovers, our pet supplies

and our dog lovers are our three biggest, , good audiences.

Remember when we did the training where we were talking about

top funnel and ways to expand?

When I said use Google's affinities in end markets, their own

database, this is still holding.

Google knows the most about the, about these people because it's a very wide

audience that Google continuously watches and fills with more cold traffic daily.

It's not dsk, it's not placement.

, it's evergreen.

. So we'd have, you normally would take a note, drop it off to the side

and say, here's where the audience is gonna start to target when we're

looking at YouTube specifically.

So we've got the brand campaign shopping campaign.

I'm okay with the running a T Row ads, which I actually, I

like this one's working really well and everything's fine there.

There's probably a little bit too much brand, but that

will, that'll be easy cleanup.

So let's look at some of the YouTube videos here.

This is where I think that there's a lot of low hanging.

There is a total, and I hate these columns here.

Lemme just turn these off real quick.

Cause they always make this screen really fat.

There we go.

there is a good amount of YouTube.

So YouTube in feed subscribers, engagement, instream subscribers,

engagement, customer emails, YouTube, remarketing, remarketing, marketing.

They have not gone cold yet.

It doesn't look like it, it looks like the subscribers and engagement

could be people that are subscribed.

So let's just check this out here.

All right, so this is actually.

Is this just pure cold,

no topics?

Oh, the running placements.

Okay.

Really low views.

Until until yesterday when Google lost all converter tracking says uh oh.

And they gotta figure something out.

. All right, so those are using placements, which is actually really interesting

cause they're not getting, they're not getting anything from their placements.

, but their other, their expansion is actually on right now.

It's still not delivering anything.

Okay.

, no exclusions where I showed.

So here's what's interesting is when you look at the cost and you look at

the placements, their, expansion is turned on, which means, Hey, I'm gonna

target these very specific campaigns.

Are these specific channels on YouTube?

Awesome.

Now what happened?

Well, we spent 16, $4 for, and like, you know, 0 cents on these five placements.

What else happened?

Well, I spent $2,700 on whatever YouTube wanted to do.

So this campaign is running coal.

, just no targeting, no audiences, no signals, no

demographics running wide open.

They call it infeed subscribers and engagement.

It's not, it's a placement with expansion opportunity that ignored the

placement of this things is not gonna grow and then we're not gonna track it.

This right now is wasting.

Nothing but just a ton of asset in the last 30 days with zero

conversions off of Google's.

Just, I'm gonna guess where to go.

I'm not gonna feed myself any sort of good conversion.

I'm gonna track three things, three days, but anything that did come from

this channel here is just gonna show up where the brand, because we're not

tracking what's actually moving the needle because we're leaving everything up to.

So this one here, I would shut off completely redo.

It's not a placement campaign.

95% of all that aspect did not go to the placements.

So you start to dive in deep and you think, what am I, what the,

is the campaign trying to do?

What I think is the campaign trying to do it?

What is it actually doing half the time?

That's the issue.

Well, I think it's going to placements.

It's not, I think it's tracking conversions.

It's not.

So I think the brand campaign is doing really well.

It is why?

I don't know.

, so that's the one , that's not working.

Now let's look at, was that the, yeah, I think that was

the subscribers, uh, in feed.

Let's do skippable.

So are we on placements again?

Okay, so we're on placements, but this one's not running as well.

Other, which is like traffic not included.

This one.

So we spent all of our ad spend again.

You're cool again, . So we have two campaigns that are trying to target

placements that aren't actually showing up in placements because Google said,

ah, haven't ignore that because it can't, you left that setting on.

So YouTube right now, two things in YouTube are not.

All right, so what have we learned?

Well, we learned that our YouTube campaigns in the video are

spending 8,000 of the 24,000.

So one third of the spend and the two campaigns that are spending $6,000

almost of the $8,000, is just a pure cold campaign without targeting.

And cross your fingers and we're not getting anything.

We're not tracking it.

Typically a bad advertiser will say, yeah, well, you know, YouTube doesn't

have good click through engagement.

And I would chalk it up as well.

What you tried to happen didn't happen.

It's doing its own thing and you're not tracking the actual

convergence long enough.

And that's one third of your spend.

Can I scale this?

No, absolutely not.

I can't scale your email list.

But these two that you think are working are actually not, so

that's 6,000 outta the 24,000.

I can shave off six grand right now and you probably wouldn't feel a.

No conversions would really drop in a brand.

You might see like a 5% drop.

You're not gonna see a third.

It's, it's just not that good.

I would've tracked at least a click or a three day view through

conversion the last 30 days.

If it was working in the slightest, it's not.

So we just chunked off one third of the entire account from a huge

inefficiency that this company apparently doesn't know about.