Google Ads Are A Scam (Or Why Your Google Ads Aren't Showing Up)

from the basement of the beautiful chrysler building in new york city, where management pinky promised us they had removed all the asbestos from the ceiling. this is the scammies. i'm your host, michael robertson. in each episode, we're trying to make you just a little bit smarter so you can spot the scams and the scammers and ultimately, keep more of your own money. this episode, i'm not going to bury the lead. i'm going to smack you right in the face with it. google ads are a scam. i know that's a bold and audacious claim, given that google has shaped the world like no other tik company over the last two decades, and bold claims need powerful evidence, and in this episode i will provide evidence on why google ads, formerly called adwords, are scam. but first i want to establish some background. i'm not a google hater. in fact, i admire google's tiknical prowess, their foresight and expanding into new opportunities like youtube and gmail and android and their amazing ability to execute. i actually know google well, not just because i've been in the tik industry for 25 years, but because i actually worked at google for a bit after they bought my voip company, gizmo 5, which became part of the google voice team, but just because google executes well and generates astounding profit doesn't mean they're honest in all aspects of their business. most of their revenue is generated by google ads, which is a pay-per-click online advertising platform that allows advertisers to display their ad on google search engines results page. it's a clever business and i actually did something similar before google's version. i started a search engine company called files in the late 90s. what we did is we indexed ftp servers- the places where people would find files- and i had the idea to approach the first online tik store called siberian outpost. remember them. they're the ones that had a commercial that shot hamsters out of a cannon. i'll show you hello. we want you to remember our name: outpostcom. that's why we've decided to fire gerbils out of this cannon through the o and outpost- cute little guy fire and again, so close fire. i'm not sure you could make that commercial today, but it occurred to me that we could match searches on files to products that siberian outpost was selling and capture user attention by linking ads to specific search targets. so, for example, when someone searched for palm pilot software on files, they'd see an ad for cases or a new palm pilot 3 offer to charge siberian outposts 35 cents only when someone clicked on a product listing which would then take them to that product page on siberian outpost website. they eagerly agreed this was a very innovative sales channel. when we turned it on, we saw a whopping 37 percent click through, because it was the first time anyone matched search intent to e-commerce inventory, since i was matching search queries to ads in my company long before google. obviously i don't think that is a scam, but there's an enormous difference in what i was doing it files and what google does now. while i charge siberian outpost a flat fee of 35 cents, google lets buyers bid on prices in an advertising auction- or at least that's what they tell the world, while they suggest it operates like a typical option. that's not true. in a typical auction, everyone can see others bids. that's true with all auctions, ebay auctions, for example. here's an example. you can see every bid is there with the time and the amount. the exact opposite is true with google adword auctions: you don't know what is actually for sale, you don't know who you're bidding against, you don't know their bids and oftentimes you don't know which items you actually won. google auctions are a black box, a mystery. they claim it's an auction but they hide virtually every aspect. now google gives advertisers the illusion that they're in control by providing some broad levers. for example, they let you set the maximum amount to spend per day or per month, or the maximum you'll pay for a partikular click. but those are very broad settings. now i want to give you a specific example using one of my companies and our google ad experience. i started a company called zoom quarter. it's a cloud service which records video meetings and sends you a copy. it's ideal for meetings you can't attend, maybe because they're at an inconvenient time or there's a conflict, or maybe it's just a meeting where you want to copy for later reference. to use the service. you tell zoom quarter the meeting url and the time of the meeting and it will virtually attend the meeting on your behalf, record it and send you a copy for our google ad campaign. i investigated the search term record zoom. seems logical, since zoom quarter can record zoom calls as well as microsoft team webex and go to meeting. i did a couple sample searches and saw no ads on many results pages for record zoom. great, i thought, because since google lets you set up price as low as one cent per click, i can set a low price, not pay that much and get a lot of customers. so we constructed an ad and set the minimum price. here's what the ad looks like. but our ad almost never ran. apparently google has an undisclosed country minimum. if you enter a low cost per click, google will simply never show your ad in certain countries. they may display it in a foreign country like india, but no american users will see your ad if you put one cent per click. now i check the add console and this is the dashboard that google provides to all their customers, and google recommended i raise the maximum click to 50 cents to get my ad to show up. so i did. and then i did a series of searches for record zoom. still about fifty percent of the searches there were no ad results. but on the other 50 there were ads, but there were always three to four customers. let me show you an example and you can test this yourself by searching for record zoom on google. right. here's a search. i type record zoom- no ads whatsoever. a few seconds later i do the same search and here you see one, two, three, four advertisers all smashed together. still wasn't getting that much traffic. when i checked the advertising console, google indicated i needed to bid at least a dollar 50 per click to be at the absolute top, not just in the top advertising block, but at the highest location of the page, which most people know gets about 85 percent of the clicks. now google could run an ad on all the search results page, but they designed their algorithm to not do so. instead of giving advertisers a low cost bid to be at the top search result, they choose to run no ads, even though there are advertisers willing to pay. when they do run ads, they force advertisers to compete against each other for a small amount of inventory, which naturally pushes the prices up. imagine this simple scenario: there are two advertisers, advertiser a and advertiser b, both trying to get the same search results page and each has a low bid of five cents and a high bid of two dollars. now imagine still: there are two searches for that ad. if the bidders knew there were two results pages, advertiser a could bid five cents and win the first one, and then advertiser b could win five cents and win the second one, and everyone's happy, except not google, because they only made 10 cents. but what google does is doesn't run the ad on the first page and then forces both advertisers to be on the second page- the same page- and force their bids up because they know that the top bid is two dollars for a click turns out, it'll be a terrible deal for the advertisers, but a lucrative one for google. another telling aspect is that you will rarely see a single ad on a page. you will see pages with no ads, or two, three or four ads, but rarely one with just one. this is so google can claim that the per click price was bid up by the competition, instead of what's actually happening, which is they're just arbitrarily setting a price within their system. the per click price is one of the metrics they often report to wall street, so there's a huge financial interest.

Why I HATE Adsense (And REFUSE To Use It On My Website)

hey everyone. it's neil patel here for another Q&A Thursday video. I'm here with Adam the Dolce from viewership. hello everyone, and this week's question is this: one is from Albert Santiago de la Cruz and this question is very pointed to Neil: what do you think of Adsense? I hate, yes, hi, hey, Adsense hater, since I hate YouTube ads. no offense to YouTube, no offense Google, cuz you're making good money from it and other people are as well good for them. I hate Facebook ads because you can now monetize your videos on Facebook. I hate any form of banner ads, and the reason I hate ads is for one thing: well, tiknically, I don't hate ads, I like buying ads. yeah, I just hate putting ads on my own website, and here's why I hate putting ads on my website. number one: if I put Adsense on my website, I'm getting a fraction of the money. Google, the middleman, is keeping the other portion, and there's nothing wrong with that. they're in business to make money - and they do it. but you, as a publisher, you're not keeping the majority of the money, or you may, or who knows what this foot is, but I don't think everything is crystal clear on how much you get a key number - if someone can choose the advertisers on your website, that means they're making more money than whatever they're paying you and they're just not paying you money. they're paying Google of money and they're paying Google more money than whatever you're getting, which means they're making more money than whatever they're spending. so if they're making more money, that means you would make more money if you just sold a product or service like they ordered. to give you a good idea, Adam puts Adsense on your YouTube videos right -? he has over a million views. that's a lot. how much revenue do you generate from those ads per month? about 2,000, 2,500, 2,000 to 2,500 dollars. one, that's not bad. that's a good amount of money. but with your YouTube channel, when you first start off and you started selling import products and ebooks from that same traffic before you even had your own website, how much revenue were you generating when you do that? yeah, like 10x that usually. when I first started. so he was generating $20,000 a month roughly. that's so much more than putting Adson son your size. you get what I mean, right? I'm not trying to say that you shouldn't use Adsense because I hate Google. I love Google's, my favorite search engine. I'm just saying you would make more money if you create your own products or services and then you were the one who are doing the advertising. you don't want to be the person at the bottom of the totem pole. you want to be the person who's buying that. you don't want to be the person who's serving at all. right, tiknically, if you're a Google, you're serving as you'd be at the top of the totem pole, but you don't want to be the person placing ads on your website. you want to be the person who are buying the ads, because that's where the money is. I also just won that last thing on why I personally hate Adsense, or at least relying on that as your sole source of income, is that your entire livelihood in life is all dependent on this other company. basically, Google is your boss. like Google can fire you and they can shut you down. they can D monetize you, especially on YouTube, and then suddenly your business. let's say, I have known youtubers to make 5060 thousand dollars a month from Adsense. you get D monetized, you're out, that's it. there goes your income and if you want to do ads, you can use Adsense. but consider Adsense, consider direct ad sales, consider signing up for other media partners. our ad partners do direct sales, whatever it is, and by doing that you won't be as rely on an Adsense, and then you have income coming from multiple places. so if something wrong happened, at least you'd still be making money, sure, yeah, sponsored videos: it's also a good way. sponsor blog post- what do you think? I don't like sponsored blog posts, but you could do that as well. yeah, you have to make sure you leave a disclaimer saying this was sponsored. whether it's a video or blog post, it's just the ethical thing to do. I think in some countries it's required, but and generally you should do it, cuz it's ethical, interesting, cool. so that's it for this week's Q&A- Thursday video. if you want a question, answer it on next week's video. leave a comment below. either way, I'll answer it. thank you for watching. please subscribe, comment, share, like. I appreciate it. thank you very much.

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GOOGLE IS ACTUALLY PROMOTING THIS SCAM!? (I got *SCAMMED* by Mangoes)

i can't believe i'll be saying this, but in the last few days i have learned how incredibly easy it is to run internet scams successfully, despite people actually reporting against your- you know your- scam. the scam would most probably still be online, continuing to scam more people. so here's what happened. on third april, i have received an ad on my youtube home page- uh, for mangoes. you know the fruits, mangoes right. so, being a mango lover myself, i clicked on that ad and it took me to a website called fruit deal dot. in. this is the website. so they were selling- basically they were selling- mangoes there for cheap prices, like. okay, it was. now that i think about it, i think i mean i realized that it is. the offers on those websites are too good to believe. but at that time i actually don't did not know about the cost of mangoes, because i've never shopped fruits online or offline, so i did not know about the prices. and now that i think about it, now that i, you know, did some research and all that stuff, i feel like an idiot because those prices were just too good to believe. so, anyways, i placed an order on that website for like 10 kg mangoes and it costed me i don't know, like around a thousand rupees, something like that, and i placed the order. i went to sleep and the next morning i woke up and i checked my smartphone. i was basically waiting for an update from from that. you know that that seller. you know, basically if you order something online you are supposed to receive an sms or something, right you know, for example, with a tracking link where you can track your order. but i did not receive any, uh. so the next morning i woke up i kept checking my mail, i kept checking my sms: nothing. there's no tracking number, there's no. you know, there's no update from that seller whatsoever. so i went to the website again to log into the website and see if there is any tracking link in the in in my account on that website. but then i realized that i did not even log in to that website when ordering. when i ordered in that website, it did not even ask me to sign up or to create an account. it basically, i, basically, i was, i was such a big idiot that i just put in my uh address, i just put in my delivery address and all that stuff and i just paid. i mean, they did not even ask me to create an account. so that was a major red flag, because now that i don't have an account on that website, i cannot see my order. there's no proof that i ordered on that website, right, there's absolutely nothing. and that is when i realized that maybe this is a scam. so i went on google and i searched for, uh, fruit deal dot in reviews, and then i found these consumer, you know, the customer- complaints websites. uh, i found out that fruit deal has a rating of one star, which is a major red flag again. so i clicked on that link and i, you know, went through all those comments or all those complaints from other people who have ordered from that website and i realized that it is a scam website. i i realized that people who ordered, you know, maybe one or two weeks ago, still did not receive their order or any update from the company which proves- or which, you know, just completely confirms it- that it is a scam website and i am not going to receive my 10 kg mangoes and my thousand rupees is gone and honestly, i don't feel mad about me losing a thousand rupees, because it's not a big amount, but what i'm mad about is how confident these scammers are literally like they were openly running a scam and they're scamming people and that too, they're running ads for their scams. they're running google ads for their scams. i mean this ad that i was toking about, which, which i clicked on, that ad was popping in my youtube home page from two to three days. i've seen that ad multiple, multiple times before i clicked on it. so they were openly running google advertisements for their scam website and they were scamming people with the help of google ads, which is like unbelievable. you would expect that a company like google, before they, you know, publish an ad on their advertisement network, they would at least do a little bit of review. i mean, i have run google ads in the past and i know for a fact that if you want to run an ad, you basically have to create an ad and you have to submit it for a review and once it is approved, that ad will be published. but i don't know what's wrong with, uh, with that review process, because now i don't trust in that review process anymore, because obviously google let this cam website run ads like it did not do. a proper review is what i feel. the campaign- i'm not even kidding- this partikular campaign is still active. i am seeing ads for this partikular ad campaign. uh, this, this mango selling scam online. even now, this, this, this ad is active even now. i've seen it today, i've seen it yesterday. it is still running. the second thing that bothers me is the carelessness of the payment gateways. now, this website, this fruit deal dot in website, is actually using, um, two payment gateways, if i remember it correctly. first one is paytm payments bank. the second one is, i think, pay you, yeah, pay you. so these are the two payment gateways that these this website is using, and it's incredible to see that these payment gateways, before they are partnering with a business, they don't even do a general kyc. i mean, i'm sure they will do a kyc before they can accept or, you know, accept a client in order to start supporting payments for them. but this review or this kyc, is clearly not even effective because they let the scan. they basically partnered with the scam website. they are helping that scam website to steal money from people. i know, i know it's a big statement, but that is. that is exactly what's happening. that is a fact. if you want to run a business online and accept payments online, you would obviously need a payment gateway, and in order to sign up or to create an account with a payment gateway or, you know, to integrate it on your website, you would need to complete a kyc process. so the job of the payment gateway is to make sure that the business that you're running online is a legitimate business and not a scam business or not a scam website. and that clearly failed in this case because, uh, that payment gateway is perfectly integrated with, uh, this scam website. those two payment gateways, they are perfectly integrated with this cam website and they are still active. that's what makes me mad. they are still. that website is still active. so, yeah, there's definitely something wrong with them. uh, i don't know what went wrong. maybe it might be an inside job, maybe the person who is running the scam may know a few people working at those payment gateways, and maybe it's all an inside scam. i don't know, but something's definitely not right. definitely not right because this is not supposed to happen. so, and then what i tried to do is i tried to do some basic enumeration on that website- fruit deal dot in- and i found out that it is actually a wordpress website. so if you go to slash licensetxt, you will find the wordpress version and all that stuff. so, yeah, the point is that this is a wordpress website. it's, it's basically a template. they did not even build this website from scratch. it's basically a template. and the payment gateways that they're using, as i said, they're using uh, paytm payments bank and um pay you. so these are basically wordpress plugins. there's a wordpress plugin called paytm payments bank, so it's it's as easy as installing that plugin and then creating an account with paytm, uh, completing the kyc and review process and then linking those things. it's, it's very simple. uh, i mean, it is not supposed to be simple if you are running a scam website, because you need to provide legitimate proofs that it is a legitimate business, but it's not the case here, clearly. anyway, let's move on. okay, so i did the most obvious thing, which is reporting this website to the authorities, and by authorities i mean the domain register, which is good id in this case. if you do a simple whois lookup on that domain, you will find out.

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Avoid Google Ads – Don’t Use Google Ads Until You Watch This (How Google Ads Work)

Hey everyone, Jason here, digital marketing consultant, and this Google ads tutorial for beginners, you're going to learn what the heck Google ads are, how they work And, most importantly, the top five reasons you might want to avoid them Like the plague if you're looking for a viable solution for driving more traffic and sales to your business. So make sure you check out the timestamp table of contents in the description, along with some other helpful videos that will walk you through how to set up Google ads, if you decide it's right for you. So, before we get into those five big warnings, let's go and tok about what Google ads are and how they actually work to drive- potentially drive- more customers and sales, keyword being potentially So. you have four different ad types. You have search, you have display, you have video and you have app. of course, app is all about downloading mobile applications. Video are ads that are displayed across YouTube and some search partners. Google display ads are ones that show up in Gmail and across other websites. And then, of course, the one we're going to be focusing on is search, which are the ads that show up on the search results page. So here's how Google ads work for search, Someone is looking to buy something. So they head over to Google and they type in whatever their question or query or product. they're looking for us And as an advertiser, you can say, “Hey, someone types that in, I want my ad to show up” And is pretty much as complicated as it gets. Of course, when we get to warning number three, you're going to see that it can actually get pretty convoluted pretty fast. but that's just a basic overview. Someone goes to Google because they're looking for something. you say, “Hey, when someone is looking for this, then show my ad” And then you have the opportunity for them to click on your ad, which is when you pay, and then they go to your website or, if they're doing it on their phone, they can click and directly call you if you're doing call ads. I won't get into the different types of ads you can do on search, but that's just a general overview of how search ads work. So why would you not want to do these? right? Because there's a lot of reasons why you might want to do these, because it's a great opportunity to get in front of people who are actively looking for your product or service. but here's the big downside. Other businesses have already figured out that they can find customers on Google, which means prices are high And they're going to continue to go up as more and more businesses jump on the Google advertising train. So here's the thing: unless you're going to spend at least $1,500 a month for the next three to four months, Google search ads is not a good solution for you. Now, this doesn't mean at minimum you have to spend 1500 in order to be successful. It's just a good rule of thumb or bar to look out, because your first two to three months you're probably not going to see a great return, if any, because you it's just a time to learn and test. So if you have a tight marketing budget and you're trying to figure out where can I immediately spend some money and actually start seeing some results back because you don't have any time to test, then Google ads really isn't the place for you. Google ads is a proven platform, but it's an expensive platform, especially if you're just joining, because there are a lot of PPC nerds- or pay-per-click nerds- that’s what PPC stands for- who do Google ads day in and day out, And it's just not reasonable as a beginner to think that you can jump on the platform and be successful and compete with those people who pretty much do it every single day. Now the second big reason you might not want to do Google ads is if you have a long lead time. Google ads are great where local services-based businesses, because you can target by geolocation, like a city or a zip code or a state, And then if you're selling products online via eCommerce store, you can have your product listing show up exactly when someone's looking for the exact product that you have, which is awesome. But if you're in a niche or industry or you have a service where it takes a longer period of time to educate your potential prospect and warm them up to the idea of doing business with you, then Google ads probably isn't the best place to spend your advertising dollars. because Google ads is great for people who are actively looking to buy right now. it's not necessarily always an impulse buy, but it's an easy way to think of Google ads as an impulse buy versus trying to warm people up and bring them into a prolonged sales process. Now the third reason Google ads might not be for you is if you're not a type a OCD personality. So in the beginning of this tutorial video I toked about how search ads work. right. Someone type something in and you say, “Hey, when they type that in, I want my to show up”. Well, the problem is, via something called match types, which we won't get convoluted and get into, Essentially, you can tell Google how strict you want to be with what someone is typing in. And part of the problem is, unless you know exactly what people are typing in, you're going to spend a lot of money figuring out which search phrases actually produce the results that you want, meaning customers. And then also, number two, it's really hard to know what keywords are actually working if you're not super OCD, because Google will show your ad pretty much any time it is remotely possible to show your ad, And this just goes into Google's business model, right? The more they show your ad and the more it gets clicked, the more they make money. but they don't make money necessarily by sending you the most qualified traffic, which means you can get a lot of unqualified traffic from Google search ads. Now, I almost didn't include this because I know there's going to be some people in the comments who say, “Well, that's really the advertiser's fault”. And that's true to an extent. but when you're just getting started, you're not going to know which key words are going to be good and going to be bad, or which keywords are going to give you a bunch of unqualified people hitting your website who are just lookie-loo right, And so you're going to get a lot of unqualified traffic, And even after a few months, you could possibly still be paying for unqualified traffic. So that's a big downside And that's why, in number one, I tok about needing a significant budget and stomach to continue to spend that amount of money while you try and filter out all those unqualified people. Now the fourth big warning I have for you here: a reason you don't want to use Google ads is if you're going to just rely on Google setting it up for you. Now there's going to be some pushback on this, But when it comes to Google ads reps, they really aren't experts when it comes to setting up your account. Just as an example- not necessarily a brag- we had a client who spent over 14 K over six months and in just two weeks of reworking his account and $750, we cut his cost per click by half and he got more leads off that $750, than he did in spending 14 K and six months, And this is something we see as a digital agency over and over and over and over again, to the point where I just can't in good conscious say that you can trust a Google ad rep to help you set up your account. And you have to think of it this way too. You're working with a company that's incentivized to have you- spend more money and pay more per click- set up your account, So there's just an inherent conflict of interest. And, by the way, the Google ad reps that agencies have access to and you have access to as an individual are two very different sets of people. So if you're working with an agency and they say they have a Google ads rep, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing. Those Google ad reps are very different: The ones that work with agencies, who

Fake MonkeyBall Website and Google Ads | Crypto Scam Alert! ⚠️

what's up, everyone- it's russ here, and welcome to another episode of crypto's camelot. in this video, i wanted to go over um scams involving monkey ball, which i'm really looking forward to. it's a soccer game with monkeys- i mean, you know what's better than monkeys and soccer, right? very popular in the world. so the bringing that together. i highly recommend you check it out. if you do want to get in, make sure you do it the right way and that's through their website, monkeyballcom, and they've got the official links there. so they've got their twitter telegram discord. i'm not sure what that is. medium right, medium artikle there, right. so check it out. highly recommend it. from what i've seen it, it's going to be amazing. and if you do want to get in, there is a kyc process and make sure you go through that. you cannot purchase the tokens now, right. these mbs nbs tokens can only be purchased after, i think, on the 30th of november, or you can kyc and you can go through a process where you might be able to get them before if you do have star launcher tokens. but all those instructions are here, so check it out now. the scammers are targeting this project big time, uh, that they've recently hacked their discord, uh, and there's a lot of scams going on. so the first one is, um, i wanted to show you, well, the most important one. let's get to that one. so, if you're going to google and, uh, if you type in monkey ball spacer- without space, doesn't matter, um, you'll see this ad pop up, right, it says it has monkey ball dash metacom. right, and that's fake. this is the official website, monkeyballcom. now, if you go to this website, you'll see it does look similar, right. so, um, it has let the games begin here and it's got. you know, you get more tokens and it says that you can actually buy it now, uh, and they accept ethan b, whereas in the official website you can see, right, uh, it's different. so they've obviously done their homework and they're paying google a lot of money to get this game across to people and google's allowing it. it's crazy, right, um? so you have to watch out for this one, because i've seen their discord. um, a lot of people are falling for this cam and they're losing a lot of money. so i do hope you found my, my video first and you and you don't get scammed, right, and there are some other websites as well, which is monkey ball dash cell dot live and it says that people are purchasing this right and you can buy it. you cannot actually buy this and obviously they're trying to form all you in here, um, saying that there's 23 minutes left until the token cell ends. right, if you fall into this, obviously targeting newbies, um, and uh, yeah, so if you send it to this address, you want to see the funds again? okay, and there's another website as well which looks similar to the original. um, obviously they've done a better job than this. right, it looks nothing like the home page, but here they've used the branding and they're saying: look, there's a lot of people getting scammed. it looks like they've, uh, you know, saying that you can actually buy the token now if you follow this. so don't do it. make sure you're aware of it now. if you want to get more information about their current scams, go to the official discord. firstly, check out the faq. they'll tell you how to purchase it and then go into scam prevention and you'll see all the information about the current scams. as you can see those websites, there is um, a fake monkey bot, uh, so this is, i think, where the discord has got hacked right, and there is a fake telegram group as well. make sure you don't fall. fall into that, um, and i think there's a fake twitter as well, okay, so, yeah, there is a lot in this space that the scammers are doing to steal funds, uh, and it just makes me really angry. you know like i do what i do because, uh, i'm helping someone. so i do hope if you are investing, if you're planning to invest in monkey ball, um, do it through the official channels. make sure you, kyc, do all of that, right, uh. so that's it. that's monkey ball, that's the scams around monkey ball, um, hope you found this video useful. uh. now for people who've come in, new like, uh and subscribed: thanks very much, like, i really appreciate you subscribing to my channel and, of course, the kind comments as well. i really do appreciate that. i'm really sorry for those people who've fallen for the meta visa, meta vpad scam which i posted before. um, that seems to be very common. i've got a lot of people who've said their fault. you know, they fell for it and i'm i'm really sorry to hear that. um and uh, yeah, just stay safe out there and, you know, make sure you subscribe, share my videos, like and get this content out there, because my main purpose in doing all of this is i get nothing out of it, but my satisfaction is making sure that people are safe out there, because crypto is crazy- um, there's a crazy waste, right and, uh, there are a lot of scammers and and they know how to make money from this. um, so, yeah, all the best, stay safe and i'll catch you next time.

7 Harsh Truths You Find Out When You Run Google Ads

corbin here from zoco marketing. in today's video, we are going to be toking about these seven harsh truths when it comes to google ads. these are truths that not a lot of people tok about, and i think it's important for you to understand if you are just starting out a new google ads account or starting advertising for your small business. a little background on myself: i've spent the last seven years working inside of google ads and have managed literally millions of dollars inside of the platform, so i want to give you a heads up on some of the things that i think a lot of people don't expect when they start running google ads. so let's jump right into these harsh truths. the first harsh truth is that when you are first starting a google ads account, your minimum budget that i recommend is between one to two thousand dollars. there are rare cases where you can get away with doing less than that, but most of the time, if you really want to be effective inside of google ads, you're going to have to commit at least one to two thousand dollars to begin with, and also with that one to two thousand dollars, your mindset should not be to become profitable in that first month, but to learn as much as you can. there are lots of things that you need to be testing when you start running a google ads account, and chances are you aren't going to hit a home run the first time. on top of that, most of the google bidding strategies utilize ai and algorithm bidding, which means you have to teach these algorithms how to find your customers and your target market. the average learning phase of a google bridging strategy is 7 to 14 days. so even in that first 7 to 14 days, your goal is to just go through and train your bidding strategy, as strange as that may sound. so, when you are first starting a google ads account, make sure that that is something that you are willing to be able to do is to lose basically one to two thousand dollars just to collect data. the second harsh truth is the fact that average cost per clicks and the competition is rising every year. according to hubspot, search advertising spend in 2021 was 144.8 billion compared to 58 billion in 2020, so a big leap in advertising dollars that is going towards search spending. essentially, more competition is entering the market every single day and, as a result, the average cost per click last year was two dollars and 32 cents, and this year so far is that two dollars and 69 cents, according to word stream. so just expect, when you start to run google ads every year, if chances are- your average cost per click is naturally going to go up. and now on to harsh truth number three, and that is that the average conversion rate for google ads is 3.75. what that means is that if you get a 100 clicks to your ad, 97 people will not either buy your product or fill out a form for your lead. that means only three of those people will actually go through and do the action that you want them to, and you are paying for all 100 of those clicks, so it can become very expensive and going along with that, one of the things that a lot of advertisers don't think about is the experience after somebody clicks on your ad, aka your landing page. your landing page is what contributes to this conversion rate, and it's something you need to be thinking about before you launch your campaign. now. there are lots of different tools to improve your conversion rate and your landing pages, one of my favorite being unbounce, but there are lots of other tools as well. or, if you're on an ecommerce store, there are lots of tools for shopify or woocommerce or whatever it may be. but one of the harsh truths is that running a google ads campaign is not just about the google ads itself. it's about what they see after they click on your ad as well. that makes a full strategy successful. as i so, don't run ads until you have a good landing page or a good website that you feel confident will actually capture leads or capture sales, because you don't want to be paying for traffic that isn't going to convert because your page sucks. and speaking of paying money, let's move on to harsh truth number four, and that is the fact that google's business goals are not the same as your business goals. at the end of the day, google's goal is to get you to spend as much money inside of the platform as possible. your goal is to get as much revenue for your business as possible at an efficient rate, so that you can have profit. unfortunately, google sometimes gets you to spend more money than you need to in order to accomplish your goals. there are lots of different little settings that google has inside of the platform that can go through and trick you to spend more money, and there are also lots of different settings that, if you set them up the wrong way- even not even with google trying not to trick you- that can spend a lot of money as well. to name a few of these settings, just so you are aware of them and to look out for them when you come across them, here are a few: the display network settings, the search partner network settings, the location settings, optimizing towards the wrong conversion actions when you're setting up conversion from conversion tracking, not setting up conversion tracking at all, choosing the wrong bidding strategy, choosing the wrong keyword match types and blindly clicking the auto apply suggestions and the recommendations tabs inside of google, which will basically just get you to sometimes raise your budget by you know, hundreds and hundreds of percent. that's just a few to keep an eye on while you are going through and setting up your google ads campaigns. now on to harsh truth number five, and that is the fact that not every search query on google is monetizable, and what i mean by that is not every search query you can go through and put an ad on the top page of google, and i think wordstream said this best is that they found in a survey that one in four search queries are navigational, meaning people are going to navigate to a specific site and 68 were informational. so people going to find specific information, which, if you do the math, that leaves seven percent with commercial intent and, as a result, google's algorithms are really good at identifying when there is commercial intent and showing ads only in that seven percent of search queries. now, i don't think this is going to be a big problem for a lot of people watching this video, because chances are your product or service has a lot of commercial intent. but it's something for you to keep in mind is that you can't just buy your way to the top of the page on every single search query, and what i mean by that is if we come over here to google how to make a tortilla, right, you'll notike here that there are no ads inside of here, because this is a very heavily informational post. somebody's coming to look for a blog post to teach them how to make a tortilla or watch a video. so something for you to keep in mind. like i said, i don't think it's gonna affect a lot of people here, but something good to know. harsh truth number seven is that bots and competitors can go through and click on your ads. there are a lot of bots on the internet that can go through and click ads. google has made a lot of strides to get rid of this, but unfortunately some still creep through and there are a lot of bad actors that can come through and click your ads as well. once again, google is making big strides to prevent this as much as possible, but still does not cover everything. i personally like to use a software called zlix to go through and prevent this from happening as much as possible and block specific ip addresses, especially if they're malicious and going through and clicking on my ads very often. but it is a harsh truth to know that there are bots out there that could be clicking your ads and wasting your money, and competitors can also be going through and clicking on your ads and wasting your money. and now on to the seventh and final harsh truth: competitors can bid on your brand name, and google is to.