We know what we should be spending on Google Ads. It could well be more than our current budget. But Google has no idea what that figure is.
Anyone who manages their own Google Ads campaign will be very familiar with the “recommendations” that assault us every time we sign into the system. No matter what the recommendations are, they’re normally aimed at getting us to spend more, often directly. Well, as the old saying goes, you can’t blame a girl for trying*.
It’s even more overt when you arrange a telephone advice consultation with a Google Ads representative. To be fair, my experience with these is normally pretty positive, although the meeting normally consists of the representative talking us through the already-listed, system-generated recommendations, followed by a suggestion that… we spend more.
So, should we spend more because of this? No.
Think of it this way. If the system recommendations are doing their job, they’ll be directing our campaigns to be more efficient, by focusing on the ads and targets that are generating the best results. We’ll be continually homing in on whatever gives the lowest cost per conversion. By definition then, any additional spend will be on adverts which give a higher cost per conversion.
Now, those adverts could still be very worthwhile. But unless our campaign is for an online store, where we can see the additional spend will be directly profitable, Google doesn’t know this. Only we do – and even then, we may only be using our intuition. For many B2B campaigns, nailing down the value of a website visitor is almost impossible.
We know what we should be spending on Google Ads. While this could well be more than our current budget, Google has no idea what that figure is.
*A saying that’s more famous than it has any right to be – apparently the earliest references are merely from an old Dick Van Dyke Show episode and a relatively unknown single by Barbara Gaskin, both from the sixties. Don’t say you never learn anything here.