How Googling Yourself for Ads Hurts Your Campaigns

E-commerce retailers often can't help but google themselves (or their target keywords) to see how well their marketing campaign is doing. While googling may seem like a simple way to see the efficiency of your ads, it's hardly a productive one.

Numerous ways exist to measure the performance of your paid search campaign. From tracking metrics to measuring marketing ROI, your marketing team can name a variety of methods with highly accurate results. None of them includes googling yourself.

Besides giving you the wrong information, googling your business can undermine your promotional efforts, increase expenses, and affect your entire sales and marketing campaign.

Let's take a closer look at why googling yourself for ads simply doesn't make any sense.

You May Not Find Your Ads

Many business owners panic when they don't see relevant ads while googling themselves. In reality, they may never see them, simply because Google search is highly personalised.

Two people typing in the same keyword or brand name into the search field will get completely different results. Why? Because search engines take a personalised approach to make sure you get highly relevant search results.

Google looks at your:

Location
Browsing history
Web history
Social data
OS
Device

In fact, the search giant considers over 200 pieces of information to bring you the results the algorithm believes you need. Other factors that can affect the appearance of your ads are:

The time when you access the search.
Google algorithm updates and testing.

Since you as a business owner probably have a much different browsing history and social data than your target audience does, you aren't likely to get the same search results.

You Can Make Wrong Conclusions

When you don't find your ad in response to the search, it's easy to make wrong conclusions. The first instinct is to change the approach to your PPC campaign.

From increasing the budget and changing ad design to switching tactics and cancelling the campaign altogether, business owners hurt their e-commerce marketing strategy instead of improving it.

In reality, your campaign could be doing great. Any changes could make the situation worse, boosting your expenses and decreasing marketing ROI.

Before making any decisions about campaign alterations, you need to evaluate your strategy properly.

You Hurt Your Paid Search Marketing Campaign

When you search for a keyword, see an ad but don't click on it, Google decides that the ad isn't relevant to the search phrase. The more often it happens, the less likely the search engine is to serve up this ad in response to these keywords in the future.

This type of behaviour has a direct effect on your CTR (click-through rate), which is the relationship between the number of impressions (views in search results) and the number of clicks. With time, the cost of an ad that doesn't get clicked goes up.

In short, every time you initiate a search but don't click the ad, you are telling Google that the ad isn't relevant. Essentially, you are hurting your campaign. Meanwhile, Google "remembers" that you don't click the ad, so it stops showing it after a while.

There are Other Ways to Measuring Ad Performance

If you are worried about your campaign results, you need to take a smart approach to evaluating your campaign.

To measure your ad performance, you don't need to google your business (even if you really want to). You simply need to learn how to work with PPC metrics.

These metrics include:

Impressions — the number of times your ads appear in search results.
Clicks — the number of times a user clicks your ad (or engages with it).
CTR — the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions.
Average CPC — average cost per click for the received clicks.
Conversions — the number of conversions generated by your ads.
Quality score — an indication of how relevant your ads, keywords, and landing pages are to users.
Wasted spend — money you pay for clicks that don't convert.

Google Ads offers numerous other reporting metrics that can be utilised according to your current campaign needs.

You Could Be Wasting Your Time

Instead of trying to gain insight into the performance of your marketing campaign by googling your keywords, you can improve your paid search marketing efforts by:

Using negative keywords — by adding irrelevant keywords to the negative keyword list, you keep your ads from showing up in response to irrelevant queries. If you have to deal with numerous negative keywords, consider adding long-tail keywords and switching the match type to "exact."
Working on your landing page — the quality of the landing page directly affects your Quality Score and the entire performance of your PPC campaign. Make sure all the content is detailed and relevant to the ad. Check the bounce rate of the landing page to see how many users don't find it satisfactory.
Trying Google Responsive Display ads — these ads utilise ML(Machine Learning) to create the perfect ad for your audience by using different combinations of provided assets (logos, descriptions, images, videos, etc.). This approach helps you reach a larger target audience without increasing the budget.
Re-evaluating your keywords — check how well your keywords are performing in ads. If some of them aren't having as much effect as others, delete the former and increase the budget for the latter.
Working on your advertising assets — review ad descriptions, images, and CTAs. Perhaps you need to update and improve them in order for the ads to be more efficient.

Once you implement changes, continue tracking your performance metrics. Googling your business won't help you see the efficiency of new tactics.

No More Googling: The Right Approach to Measuring Your PPC Campaign

Googling yourself is a counter-productive measure. Besides failing to obtain any valuable information, you could get the wrong insight and damage your marketing campaign.

To measure the performance of your PPC campaign, follow your metrics. As soon as you see a problem, you can start adjusting your efforts. Don't make any changes without detailed data on your hands.

Would you like to learn more about measuring your PPC campaign? We are here to help.