Common Misconceptions About Google Ads Traffic People Are Paying For 💸

Do you have any idea if you’re really getting your money’s worth in your PPC ads?
Unfortunately, many marketers allow themselves to be misled by certain false or inaccurate information about online advertising. Well, if you understood the reality, you could get so much more from this powerful marketing platform, and driving traffic to your site is just one of them. Lets dive right in:

The Truth Behind Your Google Ads Traffic

Strategic Marketer Jason Pittock has an interesting chat with ClickGUARD’s Head of Customer Success – Aleksandar Đorđević as they talk about the typical misconceptions about Google Ads traffic that people are paying for. In the brief webinar, Aleks shares his expert advice on what marketers should NOT believe in and what they instead should watch out for when they put out an ad and entice visitors to their site. Now is as good a time as any to debunk some myths about Google Ads traffic. 

Why marketers don’t always have their conversion tracking set up correctly? 

It could be either a lack of experience or more like having an attitude of “we will get this taken care of later down the line.” But more often than not, it’s all about the overall approach that they take. Most marketers are quite guilty of not looking into their ads' conversion tracking the way they’re supposed to.  But what they might forget is the fact that everything is there, visible; they just need to know what they’re looking for and what data are more useful. If you’re running ads, you need to have your conversion tracking set up from the get-go. The same goes with ClickGUARD, if you want to skyrocket your results, you need to set up conversion tracking from the start. The journey to understanding the intent behind each and every click from your Google Ads traffic starts with tracking and post-click analysis.

So, what’s the first thing you need to do to know how your ads are doing?

Aleks suggests that you first look into your dashboard to see the overview of all the clicks you’ve collected and how the current rule set has performed. Then based on what you see in the dashboard, you can determine if you need to dig deeper into the data or change/adjust the rules. Sounds difficult? Well, it really isn’t. Beware, though, of some things that might give you the wrong impression about running Google Ads.

Misconceptions About Google Ads Traffic

#1 Regardless of the niche of the business, the way to analyze your ads and the data you need to collect are the same.

When you review the data from Google Ads traffic, what you want to look for or flag depends on the niche of the business. For instance, it’s not the same if you’re working with a global company or someone that is advertising for a specific small region. The same is true if it's an e-commerce/e-shop or a law firm from the U.S. You may run different campaigns – like shopping campaigns for e-shops and search campaigns for law firms. You can easily see that different campaigns require different approaches and the CPC would turn out to be relatively cheaper for e-shops than it would be for law firms. For some businesses, it’s expected to get more clicks from mobile phones while for some, it’s more important to get visitors who use computers, this depends on the industry, buyer persona and of course the product/service that is being promoted. 

These factors impact the actual approach you take when you take a deep dive into the data you collect from your Google Ads traffic. In short, the start of the process of analyzing your data is different based on a business, though the result is the same – “you want to address repetitive behaviour that is not converting. You want to see the intent of people that are clicking on your ads - see who is converting and who is not,” says Aleks.

#2 - The first thing you should always ask when taking a deep dive into paid traffic is how much ROI you are getting -.the data doesn’t lie!

While this is a common and understandable question, what you should be concerned about first is the kind of improvement you want to see or what ROAS you should expect. It seems like most people are chasing the wrong results or the so-called “vanity metrics”. They tend to care about how many clicks they got on their ad, sometimes even more than how many conversions did these clicks yield!  And let’s face it: Installing conversion tracking takes less than a minute (with GTM it might even be seconds). So perhaps the problem is not your lack of experience or technical complexity; it’s just that you need to focus on what is truly important. 

#3 More site visits and clicks mean that your site is doing well in getting your products across.

Aleks tells us that it's actually the “INTENT behind every single click on your ads that brings people to your website.” And if you can track this and analyze the data - you will be able to filter out THE wasteful traffic and focus on the good/converting traffic. No matter how great your ads are, they won’t work without tracking conversions. In short, marketing doesn’t work without tracking conversions. And it’s not something you should “consider” implementing; it is something you just don’t run ads without. Many businesses don’t understand and appreciate what conversion really is for them and whenever this happens, they fail to take advantage of the wealth of data they can get that can tell them if their ads are working to bring in business or not. 

# 4 Bad traffic is always caused by the use of wrong keywords, poorly written ads, or the way campaigns are structured.

A lot of factors can lead to bad traffic and wasteful clicks. But blaming these alone on usual things like not using the right keywords or poorly written ads, etc. is not the best way to address the issue. The often-overlooked reason for bad traffic and wasteful clicks is that marketers fail to analyze the traffic they are paying for because without this data, they don’t really know what’s going on, even if they’re tracking conversions. Okay, you see your ad, you see that there are many conversions from that many clicks, but that’s all. You don’t know who clicked, how they interacted with your website, nothing! And Google Ads dashboard isn’t going to cut it, nor Google Analytics. This simply leads to you running ads that repeatedly waste your budget! So the key here, as Aleks puts it “is to look into the raw data that you’ve collected and apply a couple of formulas and pivot tables to create a view that would show you the actual knowledge that lies behind the numbers.”

How do we prevent being targeted by bad traffic?

Aleks says that aside from making sure that you properly set up your Google Ads, you need to remember that to prevent being targeted by bad traffic, you should:

• Understand your customer persona
• Understand the intent of your visitors
• Find a way to segment those that are converting and bringing you profit and those that are wasting your budget.
• Finally, analyze your paid traffic so you can prevent WASTE. Without properly addressing specific patterns that are not bringing you conversions - you are doomed to waste marketing $$ for nothing.

In summary, a lot of marketers out there do not analyze what they pay for, they don’t determine what is the WASTE, and what is actually good CONVERTING traffic. Conversion tracking is a “must-have” all right, and every second you spend on analyzing the data potentially can increase your ROI exponentially. So, let’s make every click count!