Expertise, simply put, is hard to develop. The author Malcolm Gladwell thinks it takes 10,000 hours to master a craft. There’s no question it takes a significant amount of time and effort to become a master at any skill. Most people who try to learn Google Ads seem to take the self-taught method. They consume all the free content they can in articles, videos, books, and social media. We mention this in other blog posts; indeed, it’s the method most likely to succeed. The reason is that it’s continuous. It places responsibility on the person learning to push toward the goal they want to achieve. A cycle of motivation is required there, and this brushes on the secret of learning ads. As we’ve also written about before, though, this method takes the longest. Most people don’t know where to begin and don’t have the time to figure out. This means self learning Google Ads, for many, just isn’t accessible. Because of this, they often look to other methods of learning.
Often, this means taking some kind of course in Google Ads. Many small business owners may opt into taking a short, in-person course. These are often offered by their local SBA, chamber of commerce, or another group. Truly, they can be helpful to learn the core principles of how Google Ads works. There are also problems with in-person courses though. The primary is that you’re attempting to learn an online skill offline, and in a shortened period of time. For this reason, many other people opt for online courses. There’s no doubt these can be much more convenient and comprehensive. One advantage is that they’re able to explore real accounts, giving you a more extensive sense of the real work to do. They can also go into greater detail. With an online course you can complete learning, leave, and revisit it another day. This makes them superior to most in-person courses for most people. Still, they fall apart in the same ways that in-person courses do. It’s almost guaranteed that real world challenges will occur in your account. Some of these defy best practices. But you’re left with theoretical knowledge but no practical experience in solving problems. Why is your campaign getting no impressions or clicks? Why is it driving no leads or customers? Why isn’t your campaign profitable? If you can’t answer these questions, you can’t actually manage Google Ads in the long term. These types of problems are guaranteed, on a long enough timeline, to rear their ugly head.
The real answer, the real secret to become a Google Ads Expert is an idea, not a skill. Feedback loops that give you a learning challenge you can overcome are the secret. Think about going to the gym; the real secret to becoming fit isn’t in being able to easily lift every weight. Equally, it isn’t putting weights in front of yourself that are impossible for you to lift. When going to the gym, you’ll get fit when you continuously give yourself a challenge that you can overcome. With Google Ads it’s the same thing. You become skilled at Google Ads, truly skilled, when you overcome real challenges. This requires you go through the cycle of ideation, launch, and watching results. You learn when you confirm if results of a new campaign achieve their goal. You’re subject to harsh reality here; if your campaign doesn’t achieve those goals it’s a failure. This harsh reality is required to keep us all honest.
Take the example of a new campaign launch. There are two main feedback loops you probably want to confirm here. First, that you can drive any leads or customers. Second, that you can drive them at the right price. In order to do this, you don’t need anything superfluous. You don’t need the perfect user experience, content strategy, or audience. You need something minimally viable to achieve this goal. Often, this means you need a few key things. You need to create a search campaign. To choose the right settings. To make 1 – 3 simple ads. To find 10 – 100 keywords. To send people to a simple landing page or call-to-action. To setup simple conversion tracking. Most of all, you need is a clear goal of what you want to achieve. This means writing down a goal for cost per lead, or customer, and volume. Be sure, you should not expect to achieve these immediately. Instead, you want to see how your new campaign compares to goals. Once you’ve done that, you need to let campaigns run until they achieve this goal or not. Likely, you’ll want to confirm these results as quickly as possible. This means you should make sure your campaign spends it’s full daily budget. That may require a bit of optimization to increase spend. Once that is happening, you need to evaluate the results of the test on a regular basis. If you see no leads you know that either Google Ads isn’t for you or that you may have botched the launch. If your campaign spends 2 – 10 times the cost per action you want, you know you have your work cut out for you. Least likely, if it achieves your goal easily, you know you may be able to scale easily.
Take another, later example: scaling a profitable campaign. Assume you’re a relatively new advertiser on Google. Your first campaigns launched successfully. You drove your first leads and eventually hit breakeven on your goal daily budget. Now that you’ve done this it’s time to increase scale and grow profit, but you have limited experience doing this. How do you become an expert, a true master of scale? By creating a feedback loop. Likely, your goal is to reach significantly more customers and drive more profit. The first step to doing that is by contemplating your goals. What total scale do you want to achieve, and what is the first benchmark on that? Often you can think in terms of 10s. You may want to 10x or 100x current results. To do that, a good first goal could be to double current lead volume. From there, you’d follow the a similar process to launch. You’ll seek to review settings. To test increasing daily budget. To change ad schedules and run for a longer periods of time. To expand the geographic targeting. Or, to turn on AI max to expand the reach of your campaign. You’ll also likely expand your audience. This means you’ll double estimated monthly search volume, perhaps by doubling keywords. You could even include expanding networks onto Google’s Search Network or Performance Max. From there, you’ll also want to beef up your ads by adding all available asset types. You’d even optimize landing pages to match best practices. To do this you’ll improve design, copy, calls to action, and add new content on those pages. You may even take this to the extent of running a/b tests on your landing pages. You also may want to adjust how you observe results. Some parts may just be expanding best practices. Others, like adding new keywords, may require you to create new ad groups or run an experiment. But either way, the feedback loop doesn’t happen when you simply make these changes live. The feedback loop happens when you make the changes, let them run, and then observe the results. Often, some of the changes may not be successful. Some new settings may not increase volume. New keywords may not drive the right audience and may hurt CAC or profitability. Your landing page a/b test may not result in a new page that outperforms your existing landing page. But every failed experiment, when part of a feedback loop, teaches you something new. When completing the feedback loop, every test is valuable whether it wins or loses. As people sometimes say, either you win or you learn.
This all may sound obvious. But you’d be surprised how many businesses don’t complete the feedback loop. They may not set clear goals. They may not achieve a launch that is minimally viable. Some don’t follow up to compare results against their goals. This is a shame, and keeps their goals out of grasp. Completing the feedback loops, though, leads to future success. Feedback loops are powerful because they create a flywheel. That is, each lesson empowers you to move faster, run better tests, and develop your expertise. In marketing or Google Ads, every feedback loop moves you forward.