While I'm not asked this question directly very often, I am frequently asked whether "$X" is enough budget for a Google Ads campaign. This is kind of looking at it from the wrong way around. That said, I do understand that advertisers often have a "what's affordable" number in their head. In this article I'm going to address a few different aspects of low budget campaigns, but mainly help establish what's a minimum viable budget to set you up for [...]

Google Ads introduced conversion value rules way back in the summer of 2021. Yes, it has really been that long! Based on how many Google Ads audits we perform I can confidently tell you that the percentage of advertisers using the feature sits below a few percentage points. As I'll explore in this article, that's pretty disheartening for such a powerful tool. On the other hand, there are some very obvious reasons why this is so. How do Value Rules [...]

Over the years I've seen conversion tracking with Google move from simple last click cookie attribution to a myriad of different options and features, and attribution methods. Here's a short list of what you need to consider these days: Native, GA4, Google Tag Manager, or 3rd party implementation Yes or no to Server-side tracking How to implement Enhanced Conversions for leads or web Whether to use an attribution model other than data-driven How long to set the click-through and view-through [...]

For many years, Google has tried to convince advertisers to allocate budget to inventory other than search. And this hasn't worked very well, particularly for small business advertisers, where budgets are precious and results (conversions) are paramount. As such, the vast majority of spending continued to be on search ads followed far behind by display remarketing ads. Whether it was the Google Display Network (GDN) of third-party publishers, YouTube Ads, or the more recent Discovery Network (Gmail, Newsfeed, and YouTube), [...]

After several years of P-Max "black box" complaints Google is finally unlocking more detailed reporting and controls. These changes are being welcomed by advertisers and agencies alike. Yet here we are now with Google attempting to do the same thing, to a large degree, with search campaigns. That is to say that their new "AI Max" settings unleash new automations without as much control or transparency as we might like. In this article I'll review AI Max and chime in [...]