Google Ads is a powerful platform for promoting your business on Google's search results pages, Google Display Network, and YouTube. Paid advertising is a serious business and is Google's largest source of revenue (Statista) with US $ 116.32 billion from Google Ads in 2018 alone. Setting up a Google Ads account and starting ads is relatively easy, but much harder to learn. Even with experience, you can make mistakes, and achieving big advertising rewards depends on how your campaign is set up and the time spent on continuous optimization. Here are seven common Google Ads mistakes you should avoid to get the most out of your advertising costs. 1. Generating sales and leads is a key goal of most companies' advertising activities. Traffic and brand awareness are also important, but sooner or later you need to see revenue from advertising costs to secure more budget. Advertisers need to understand profit margins so that they can measure performance and optimize their campaigns appropriately. A smart advertiser spends time calculating the lifetime value of a new customer and calculates the amount of money that can be spent on acquiring a new customer. The following formula shows how to calculate the lifetime value and ultimately the average net income per customer. How to Calculate Lifetime Customer Value and Average Net Income Per Customer Recommendations Clarify exactly how much you can afford to pay for leads and understand the percentage of leads your team will convert into sales. Calculate the average number of transactions, average order amount, gross margin, and subtract marketing and Cork Bicycle Rent zone operating costs to understand your average net income per customer. At a minimum, calculate the required target advertising cost-effectiveness (ROAS) and categorize it by product or service. You can then optimize your Google Ads bidding strategy and create an account to achieve the desired results. 2. Do not mix search and display within a search network campaign Default settings when creating a new Google Ads search campaign. The display network is opt-in by default. If you set up a new search campaign, if you don't change the setting, your ads will appear on Google's display network (the network of Google's third-party partner display websites) with the default settings for your search network campaign. The setting Google recommends is a "search and display network" that claims to provide "the best opportunity to reach most customers." Technically this is correct, but the performance of search and display networks is very different, so it's best to handle them in separate campaigns. The AI-powered Google SmartShopping campaign, accessible to Google partner agencies in beta, also includes display, remarketing, and search shopping ads. Recommendations Do not mix search network settings and display network settings in your search campaign. It affects the ability to measure and optimize the performance of these completely different networks. Display network ads have a much lower CTR, which is the number of clicks on your ad divided by the number of impressions (impressions) on your ad. The new Google SmartShopping campaign uses machine learning to show ads to the right users on the display and search as they consider purchases and inquiries. This algorithm uses over 200 intent signals to determine who, when, and where to display your ad. This sounds great, but if you want to have full control over where your ads are displayed and for transparency, you'll need to create separate campaigns for each network. 3. Pay close attention to the keyword match type By default, keywords added to your Google Ads account default to the "partial match" match type, unless you specifically select them. "Partial match keywords" are probably triggered by far more terms than you want to display, attracting clicks and impressions for queries that aren't really relevant to your ad's purpose. Without careful management, this can quickly cost money.