Google Ads budget overruns are virtually inevitable. What's important is keeping them within a reasonable tolerance and/or balancing them out by underspending elsewhere. Avoiding massive short-term, out-of-control spending sprees is paramount to keeping your client or your job! In this article, and this video, I'll explain how my agency mitigates budget overruns. As such, we rarely run into these issues, although we did have an oopsie recently. The last time we had a large overrun was 6-years ago, which is [...]

Farewell Discovery Ads, we knew thee well! Google is in the process of replacing Discovery Ads with Demand Gen campaigns. Indeed, Demand Gen campaigns have been in closed beta for a while and are starting to roll out broadly. This means you'll no longer be able to create Discovery campaigns and your existing Discovery campaigns will be "upgraded" to Demand Gen automatically. In this article, I'll explain the main differences between Discovery and Lead Gen. But before I go into [...]

A few years back, Google introduced non-last-click attribution models. Effectively, this meant we could optionally track conversions across visitors' multiple sessions. The new list of attribution model options included: last click (pre-existing) first click linear time decay position-based data-driven (only available to high conversion volume accounts) This immediately led to confusion, inconsistent tracking strategies, and problems with delayed conversion reporting. Over time, Google relaxed the qualifications for data-driven attribution, made it the default option, and started "upgrading" Google Ads automatically... [...]

In this continuing series for specific industries, I'm covering Google Ads for SaaS (Software as a Service) in this article. SaaS for this article includes any web-based software or web "app" offered on a pay-as-you-go pricing model. Note that this doesn't include mobile apps, typically advertised using specialized app campaigns like Google's UAC (Universal App Campaign) through various app stores. I'll touch on these in this post, but write a separate article to cover that in more detail. We work [...]