“Done is better than perfect”
“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”
"Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without"
These are wise words… words of which many of us need reminding every now and again – and they apply to your work with PPC, in spades.
Here are five practical ways you can benefit from that action-over-perfection mindset in Google Ads.
1 Text Ads
Have those three text ads per ad group.
If you are not in a copywriting mood, or don’t fancy your chances of improving on your current ads, it doesn’t matter. Put in a new ad anyway.
Testing beats not testing – and it’s not unusual for thrown together copy to outperform carefully crafted versions.
2 Audiences
Add them. You don’t need to know ideal audiences or have data yet to determine them… Just add audiences on ‘Observation’ and you’re on your way to a new layer of actionable data.
3 Ad Extensions
Sitelinks, call-outs and structured snippets.
If you are missing one of these sets of extensions, you are missing out – simple as that.
It would be really, really hard to do these extensions badly enough to perform worse than not having them at all… so add them quickly if you don’t have time or inclination to add them carefully… but do add them.
4 Conversion Tracking
The real world of conversion tracking is often a bit messy. There’s frequently some reason why you can’t track the whole story… so track part of it.
As long as you track something correlated with value, you can use it to optimise… and that is gold dust.
5 Attribution
There’s a reason why you don’t know which attributing model fits your users’ buying pattern… It’s because none of them do.
There’s no way of accurately measuring by % how much influence each ‘touch point’ has had on a person’s decision to buy something. Not even close…
But that doesn’t mean that all attribution models are equal. Last click (the default) is simple, but it’s particularly short-sighted. Switch to position-based (or linear, or data-driven if it’s available) and you’ll at least get a fuller, more useful picture of the different contributions towards the end conversion.
Finally… the same principle applies to your decision about running ads at all.
Google Ads isn’t always profitable, even when done well. But with or without a killer ROI… you will always gain something from running them (even if it’s only knowledge). If you don’t try, you won’t gain anything..
So, for a chance of winning, take some advice from the goddess of victory: Just do it.
