Myles Root
- I have helped over 15+ brands across multiple niches purely with Google Ads strategy for the last 1.2 years.
- On a monthly basis I work with 5-6 eCommerce brands doing 6+ & 7+ figures a year and manage between £68k - £100k in ad spend every month.
- I help them move away from reliance on Meta by creating a new customer acquisition strategy in Google Ads.
1. Conversion Tracking You Can Trust
Being able to trust your conversion tracking setup is key.
Both for your peace of mind, and the success of Google's bidding algorithm
Use this guide to set it up.
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The Complete Conversion Tracking Guide.
This SOP guides you step-by-step through installing conversion tracking with either Google Tag, or Google Tag Manager. If you follow the instructions you will have a complete tracking setup including: Google Ads Conversion Tracking Purchase conversions (with enhanced conversions) Add To Cart conv
2. Turn Off Auto-Apply Recommendations
Auto-apply recommendations allow Google to change the settings in your account.
And often these changes are made so that you spend more money.
You should turn them off so that you don't waste money.
- Log into your Google Ads account: Go to https://ads.google.com and sign in with your account credentials.
- Navigate to 'Recommendations': On the left-hand menu, click on the "Recommendations" tab.
- Find 'Auto-Apply' settings: At the top of the Recommendations page, you'll see a notification or banner about "Auto-apply recommendations." Click on "Manage" or "Auto-apply settings."
- Turn off auto-apply: In the Auto-apply settings, toggle off any recommendations that are currently set to auto-apply. You can also choose to leave certain ones on if desired.
- Save changes: Once you've made your selections, click "Save" or "Apply" to confirm the changes.
3. Split Your Brand & Prospecting Campaigns
Something that could be eating into your ad budget without you even noticing is brand traffic in your cold/prospecting campaigns.
This is a common problem in Google Ads, and fixing it could save you money and make scaling easier.
What’s going on?
When you run Google Ads campaigns like shopping or search to find new customers, Google might show your ads for brand searches like “[your brand name] + [product].”
That’s because Google doesn’t know that your brand name is the name of your business.
It just sees a high-converting keyword, and so targets people who are searching for this.
Why this matters:
- You’ll pay higher CPCs for brand traffic that you could get cheaper in a dedicated brand campaign.
- You won’t know the real return from cold traffic versus brand traffic.
- When you scale, you’ll be paying for both brand and cold traffic, meaning you’re paying double for some visitors.
Example: Imagine half the traffic in your shopping campaign is warm and half is cold. If your CPC is $1, your cost per new visitor is $2. So that campaign is twice as expensive as you think for generating new customers.
How To Fix This:
Check your campaigns for brand terms:
For PMax campaigns: Go to the insights tab, scroll to search term insights, and check over a 30/60-day period for brand terms triggering your ads.
For shopping or search campaigns: Look at the search terms report for the same date range length. Use filters like “search term contains” or sort by impressions to spot brand searches.
Exclude brand terms:
Go to Tools > Shared Library > Exclusion Lists and create a negative keyword list of brand terms, including typos.
If your brand was Hello Fresh, you’d do this.
- Hello Fresh (Broad)
- “Hello fresh” (Phrase)
- [hellofresh] (exact)
- [helofresh]
Broad match works slightly differently for negative keywords than it does when you’re targeting keywords. So don’t worry about excluding relevant searches when using broad match for negatives.
For PMax campaigns:
Create the negative keyword list and then submit it to your PMax campaign using Google’s implementation form.
By doing this, you’ll stop over-paying for traffic and get a clear view of what your cold campaigns are really doing.
You don't want to overspend for people who are already familiar with who you are and what you offer.
You also want to know exactly how much it costs to acquire new customers.
Separating your branded and prospecting campaigns is the way to do this.
It allows you to control budgets and bidding strategies for high-intent (brand) and low-intent (prospecting) audiences, optimizing spend and targeting for each group effectively.
4. Set Up A Brand Search Campaign
The easiest results to get on Google is your own brand name.
People who search for your brand are already highly interested – this is low-hanging fruit you don’t want to miss.
- Running a Branded Search Campaign also allows you to:
- Take up more space on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
- Protect your brand from competitors bidding on your terms
- Induce a purchase in someone simply 'Googling' you
- Gather cheap conversion data for the rest of your campaigns
- Adds safety to the buying journey for your customers ('Official Site')
Follow this training to set one up:
8. Centralise Your Data
When running paid ads, it's important that you're tracking a few key metrics.
Use this spreadsheet (sheet 2) to put everything a central location for easy use. Sheet 1 has info on the KPIs.
Watch this video to understand how to use it.
Read this email for even more info on a few of the KPIs.
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