We asked the Pilothouse Google team about the most common mistakes media buyers make in Google Ads.

Have a look 👀👇

🙅‍♀️ Full reliance on manual bidding or full reliance on automatic bidding.

Manual bids are good to start off, but generally performance is better when you let the AI bidding kick in once enough conversions have come through. Then, use other levers to optimize your CPAs. 

🙅‍♀️ Focusing too much on target cost per acquisition (CPA) or target return on ad spend (ROAS) for every campaign. 

This leads to campaigns that only exist at the bottom of the funnel. Business growth requires top of funnel, middle of funnel and bottom of funnel campaigns.

🙅‍♀️  Not testing cold prospecting campaigns on the GDN.

The Google Display Network is arguably one of the most difficult channels to run profitable ads to a cold audience. With such a massive variety of ad types and bid strategies, and ads that reach 98% of the accessible web, it’s crazy not to at least test it. 

🙅‍♀️  Not spending enough time on Google Landing Pages.

Make sure your landing page matches the search term that brought them there. 

Also, explain why they should do business with your company. Very few people are going to say ‘yes’ if you ask them to marry you on a first date!

🙅‍♀️ Not tapping into YouTube’s potential.

Like Facebook, people spend considerable amounts of time watching videos on YouTube, and the ability to retarget and reach the right audiences on this platform is considerable.