Why Your Google Ads Aren’t Scaling: Find & Fix the Real Bottlenecks in Your Business

Scaling Google Ads isn’t about more tweaks, it’s about fixing the real bottlenecks in your funnel and business. 

In this episode of the Google Ads Unleashed Podcast, host Jeremy breaks down why 70% of performance happens outside the ad account, covering conversion rate optimisation, offer strategy, pricing, retention, and customer journey analysis.

Learn how to identify true growth constraints, from low AOV and poor checkout UX to weak retention, and stop wasting time on meaningless in-platform tweaks.

Get your free 30 minute strategy session with Jeremy here: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/

Scale your store with 1:1 coaching: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/1-2-1-coaching

Transcript

Last week I attended a conference in Utre uh the Netherlands uh that was organized by our friends from Channibal and Product Hero and there was one talk that I hear which I found really inspiring and underlines one of the previous episodes I've done but I wanted to talk about this again and I'm going to tell you a secret that not many people know. Let's dive right in. Hello and welcome back to Google Ads Unleash, guys. Hope everyone is doing fabulously this Monday. So, um this will actually come out I think on the 30th. So, it will always already be um a week after I've actually attended the event, but last week a colleague of mine and I went to Utre, met some fabulous people there, some brilliant minds, and attended a couple of keynotes and one very very cool mastermind um or like whatever you'd call it, right? Sort of uh uh master class I assume and it was actually from um Bob Meyer from the PPC hub, right? Um the title of it was I think stop fixing stop trying to fix everything and focus on one thing at once. And essentially what it was all about is about an episode that I've done already. So you obviously make it about the episode I made, but rather um he more or less presented a theoretical framework of how to think about Google Ads if you are serious about wanting to fix real issues and serious about really wanting to grow accounts. Okay, so the concept was as follows and I want to really pay homage to this as I'm not nicking the content now here but rather I feel Um, we hit an interesting zeitgeist there because I always have thought about Google in this way. And it's refreshing to see that a thought leader in the industry was of the exact same opinion and presented this to, you know, 200 people in the room or something and blew 99% of people's minds with this kind of content. So, um, because it's so simple yet so obvious to me um, and that is that Google ads is a discipline that used to require a lot of manual work. Okay. So many many moons ago when I sort of first got into it, you had to adjust keywords on daily basis and set bids. You'd have to do tons of manual work in order to um actually do the doing, right? Because there was no advanced bidding strategies. There were no crazy there was no Pmax. There was no AI max. There was barely any broad match, right? I remember when broad match modifier was introduced, right? And the thing is is that for a long time people hence had to provide a lot of work and input with Google ads accounts because it was actually hard work. Nowadays, Google ads is more of a we need to create a cosmos or an environment where people find the right product at the right time for the right people. Um, um at the right moment, right? And we have to provide a data environment to Google that helps Google just do the job automatically without us really having to have that much input anymore. Of course, we have to oh have overview of the uh of off the budgets of the search terms. We have to do some negatives lots of stuff, right? Listen to the episode about the SOPs, what we do on a weekly, bi-weekly, monthly basis. But the trap that happens here is that you sometimes appear to be busy just to be busy, right? Whether you're an e-commerce business owner where or Google Ads expert and think, "Okay, I need to sort of prove my value here and do all the doing and do all the hard work and whatever." Or if you're an e-commerce expert, you're trying to I get this all the time in consultancy where people are, "Oh, should I, you know, up the budgets there a little bit and drop the rowass targets there a little bit? literally even had it this morning, right? And people would get so bogged down into this work for one very uncomfortable reason and that is because it's comfortable because it's easy, right? Um I am even about to lose a client over this, right? I'm going to be brutely honest and very uh uh I should say very uh vulnerable here. We're are going to say goodbye to a client because they are unwilling to accept the truth and that is that we can't media buy ourselves out of or into growth and we can't media by ourselves out of problems or lack of growth. Okay? And it's pissing me off to no degree that people don't understand this because uh but it's human nature, right? We want to see the solutions in change tweaking that bid or making that new ad or whatnot. But the solutions eyes is usually somewhere else. 30% of your success is only within the ad platform, maybe even less. 70% of your success is beyond what happens. And the interesting thing is that everyone goes through that journey, right? There's a certain amount of ad real estate that exists. There's so many people searching for your stuff or your service or whatever. Then we create a data environment where Google's doing its job. You can see if it's working. by uh and especially against competitors as well by your clickthrough rate in your CPCs. The CPC is already an indicator of what happens beyond the click right if people actually like the page if it loads quickly etc. And then it's either your entire lead genen process whether you get uh then you know leads on a on a landing page so conversion rate there or whether it's your MQLSQL ratio or even deal closed ratio and then deal value, average deal value, a average deal margin and lifetime value. Or in e-commerce, it's your add to cart rate, begin checkout, purchase rate, uh conversion rate, um and then your um average order value, your margin, and your lifetime value. And what the is the fact of the matter that if you reverse this chain and start at the recurring customers is that you can work your way backwards and understand where the bottleneck is and where your real attention should go because I bet you in your money there's people listening to this who spend couple of hours each week in an ad account tweaking this doing this and really it's not really moving the needle right what you should be doing is understanding where you should be moving the needle and deploying mechanisms and strategies in order to solve those bottlenecks and those usually go from conversion upwards right or from recur from that that kind of chain that I just mentioned upwards. Let's say for instance, you're a beauty business and you're doing everything right, but you're returning customer rates at 5%. Clearly, there's something wrong with your retention marketing and your uh products because people don't want to buy them once they've bought them. Okay? So, or your customer service or whatever. So, that is something you need to fix. But the problem is that's difficult and it's uncomfortable. Changing your product is difficult. We for in another thing We are working with a um we have been working with a supplement brand for a while and we've realized they've been for a long time grossly overspending on ads. So now at least we're profitable, but their recurring customer value is really really terrible because their package is too big, right? They sell like a kilo of the f****** thing and it lasts half a year for someone. Of course, no one's going to buy it again or cross buy or whatever. They love the product, but it's much good value for money, right? So, you kind kind of have to think a little bit like a business owner and uh do that. So, that is difficult to fix. It's easy to think, oh, I can make another display campaign or do that and so on, but it's not solving the root issue of what is causing your wos. Okay? Or like yesterday, we've went up the went backwards with the chain with um a client of ours. They sell a piece of furniture, right? They have no recurring customers because in some industries That's normal, right? Or barely any returning customers. And that's normal because let's say who buys a second bed, right? If you bought one bed, you typically don't need one for another 10 years. So, it's a one-time purchase. Typically, it was like a house. There's not really recurring customers for houses, right? As an example, so that's not an issue. But his margins were good. His average order value is fantastic. His conversion rate was uh that's was the first thing, right? So, we're been running ads now for him for a while and it's conversion rate I say for a while but we've established a new benchmark of where he should be and we understood okay there's an issue with conversion rate from begin checkout to conversion there's a huge drop off about 50%. So we told him fix the trust signals in the checkout and we're also going to do some uh research on what better offer we could do for instance risk reversal or something like that or look at competitor what do they do and then do things differently or see if we can do some sort of offer that helps with the conversion rate. Right? Add to cart to begin checkout wasn't an issue but at cart rate was low as well. So that indicates probably not only that there's kind of a pull the trigger issue um with you know lack of trust in the checkout but also also like an issue with the offer or something like that. Right? Could also be an issue with what product they should choose. He's got like five or six or seven of a similar like type of furniture and it's really hard for people to know what to choose, right? So, it could be something like that. So, we're also installing Hot Jar um or any kind of feedback tool to now ask people on the site what may stop them from making a purchase. So, that way we find out how do we make it easier? Maybe we need a live chat, maybe we need this and so on. But you realize we're trying to improve Google Ads performance here. But I haven't even touched the f****** ad account so far because all of those I could do anything I want in the ad account and appear busy and do this and do that and whatever. Maybe you'll add another percent or something like that, but it's not going to move the needle. So what I need everyone who listens to this to understand is that you got to stop looking busy and got to stop understand you got to start understanding what the actual solution is to fixing. in your funnel. And the beautiful thing about this is is that you can do this bit by bit. Okay. So um and also this establishes you know newer equilibria which you not seen before. So let's say for so for instance we done this last summer right? We had a client he was making okay revenue uh but it wasn't quite there where we wanted to be. So profit was all right but the commission rate was a massive issue and at to cart rate. So we installed hot asking what's going on and everyone was complaining about the price and we realized as a reseller he hadn't adjusted his prices in ages and as a result we were undercut by 90% of the competition. We've changed that and over overnight sales doubled we didn't do sweet FA in the ads we understood what the bottleneck was uncomfortable fixed that and went back and it did actually what it's meant to do within Google Ads. And this is how you should be thinking about Google Ads. This is where you should be spending your time. Of course, you should have SOPs. Of course, you should have so certain routine tasks, hygiene stuff which you should always do in order to improve performance. But real growth comes from analyzing what the funnel is on a monthly basis, analyzing what it looks off, and fixing that. And And unfortunately that's more difficult. It is uncomfortable. That's why people don't do it. But that's why we exist and that's why we run a successful agency because that's what we do. Right? Um which other people do not, right? So um and that is how you outgun your competitors and how you become really good at this job. And with that, if you need help with that, let me know. Jeremy Digital.marketing or Jeremy and Google Ads on LinkedIn, you can simply send me a message or you can also head to the website and book a one-to-one call with me. Um, and hopefully I can help you fix your conversion journey as well. This has been Jeremy Young, the personal Google Ads expert, and I wish you a happy and productive week ahead.