The Collapse of Google Ads

if you've been advertising on Google ads for a while you have probably felt 2024 to be harder or painful or performance is down and you don't know what the heck's going on right what is happening or you think Google's fleecing you which is probably happening or something else right you're trying to figure it out now I run a Google ads agency here at grow my ads we have 100 plus clients so I get to see a lot of different Industries I get to see a lot of different clients I also have a free community called

PBC Launchpad that's in the description below and there's I think close to 2,000 people in there so I get a lot of questions a lot of messages there and I get to see lots of different Industries and scenarios taking place I will say 2024 I've been in the Google ads game for over a decade 2024 has been rough I'm dying out of here it's been hard I I think it's harder today to operate a Google ads account than it was a few years ago when you could run Alpha Beta structures manual CPC Scag ad groups

Etc you have way more control I think as Google's taken control away and really pushed into this idea that hey just let us take the Reign and automation will take over and you know we've got all the AI and smart machine learning that you know this will be an easy thing now it's not now I don't think it's it's just Google I do blame Google for a lot of what I'm seeing and what others are seeing I do think there's some macro pressures out there I think we are in a bit of a softer economy

but you can't just blame things right you know uh there's that story who moved the cheese right the cheese is moving a bit so what do you do how do you manage your advertising or if you run an agency or you're a freelancer how do you navigate tough periods of decreased performance when it's not a tactical issue how do you navigate that with your clients if you run a business and you're managing Google ads in house whether it's yourself or you have a marketing internal person running it how are you navigating the decrease in Google

ads are you banking on everything are you just upset each month because your Google ads performance is down this is what I'm seeing from a lot of businesses and I think this is just an incorrect way of going about it and there's a lot that can be done to improve performance not just on Google ads but within your business so I want to talk about what we're doing at grow my ads with our clients I want to talk about what I do with my own personal consultations with my inner circle of clients that I work

with one-on-one and what I'm Consulting and recommending to people that come to us just for general advice with whether it's account Audits and just conversations with other entrepreneurs this is how I'm looking at it and maybe I'm wrong but I just wanted to give you what I'm seeing what we're seeing here at grow my ads as a team and what we're doing about it so let's just dive [Music] in okay so first the idea of this video actually came from a question inside of our free community called PBC Launchpad this was from Tammy I do

an AMA once a month and so this was from September 2024's AMA Tammy said hey and this tough first question answer I would like advice on something that one is talking about which is conversion slowdown everyone is saying that it's because the economy has slowed but that is not it and the reason why I know is because organic leads are surpassing by Google ads leads which has never happened before I believe the target CPA is rising because of extreme increases in Google ad CPC so even though I raised my target CPA the account never seems

to function as well as it did and these are accounts that are 3 4 years old they've produced hundreds of conversions this has also happened across various Industries not just home Home Service businesses something is definitely going on and I refuse to believe it's just happening to my accounts I'm seriously considering starting these accounts over and doing Max clicks or manual CPC I really need to get some good guidance on this that was a tough first question answer I have by the way if you want to listen to my full answer it's in the September

2024 AMA video on our YouTube channel and it's timestamp Tammy and and it was a great answer or a great question by Tammy tough one really to answer but that is what got me thinking about the idea of this video cuz I I you know I ranted in my answer to her and I wanted to do a more sort of cohesive video uh regarding this topic let's start with a few pieces okay one Google search TPC up 133% year-over-year ads spin growth slowing this is a article on search engine land which is a reputable publication

this was in April of 24 of 2024 so pretty recent data and they're saying listen you know CPC is up 133% year-over-year that would be obviously across everything uh whatever sort of data points they have in regards to that cpcs are up this one's pretty wild cpcs are up 40 to 50% for retailers in the past five years okay so if you've been in this game for 5 years you have seen on average an increase of 40 to 50% that is crazy right and it's really really hard to continue to operate how you did four

to 5 years ago when you have this inflation going on in your cpcs now this is where rabbit holes you can start going down conspiracies you can start talking about right it's a conspiracy part of this is increased competition yes what happened in The Last 5 Years well we had something called covid right so Co happens and boom internet purchases go crazy easy I mean all of our e-commerce clients went nuts in fact you would think that would have helped us as an agency it didn't I had many e-commerce clients shut ads off completely because

they could not keep up with shipping they were like 2 3 4 weeks behind on shipment like we can't do this anymore we have too much volume coming in we need to shut ads off so it actually impacted me during Co and running an agency and having those type of clients right okay so this this takes place then people come back start spending again and and yes so I think there's increase in advertising naturally within Google ads however there Google ads is in an Anti-Trust case right now there's been some whistleblowers go Google quietly increases

ad prices to meet targets claims Executives so SE the search engine reportedly raises prices up to 10% without informing advertisers okay there is something called a floor price right Google sets this price so if you are in we'll just say the mortgage industry and mortgage keywords are obviously going to be in the finance sector Okay Google you could be like the only person advertising on This is highly unlikely in this scenario but just roll with me here let's say you're the only Advertiser on the search term uh Home Loans Tampa Florida okay there's literally no

one else advertising on that in Tampa Florida and you you know you are a mortgage broker in Tampa and you're bidding on that keyword that doesn't mean you pay just a penny for that click right no Google sets a floor price hey Home Loans this is in the finance sector they're bidding this in Tampa Bay Florida here's what the floor price is so they set a floor price this is what you got this is what it's going to cost just to pay to play to get an add up right even with zero competition and then

when competitors come in they're auction based system kicks in from there so if you were the only Advertiser you literally would just be paying whatever the floor price is in that scenario but they set that floor price so in that case let's say it's 10 bucks right so you would have to pay no matter what $10 to for a click in mortgages for that term even if you're the only Advertiser now it's a high there's no industry that I know of right now that has zero advertisers in it so it you know it's very unlikely

that there's not some competition with just about search term but what Google did or at least this whistleblower is claiming is like hey you know we got to just kind of crank up those floor prices and that's what they would do they would quietly just crank the floor prices up that would increase cpcs that was not competition that was not an natural competition factor that caused that increase that was Google just increas in their price just like if a brand decided hey instead of selling our you know Arizona te for 99 cents but it's now

going to be $125 no God please no no no well they did that but you and I don't really get to see that so they did that behind the scenes without advertisers being aware of it so that increase cost now it just takes one simple Google search for Google ads revenue and you can get all kinds of data here look at this so this is advertising revenue of Google from 2001 to 2023 look at this continued growth okay so Google as a company in my opinion no longer innovates right it's more more like they've just

been optimizing so Google was great five plus years ago in fact we were you know a premier partner agency partner with them I've been out to California I was at a party with John Legend that was hosted by Google I so like they they did all these crazy things they were truly supportive to advertisers and agencies if you had a problem they would help you fix it then there was a pivot many years ago where the support no longer was real support it started to become very salesy always be closing and every rep started saying

very similar things so they started pushing certain things they want more YouTube ad Revenue guess what they're going to be pushing YouTube ad spin across all the advertisers us as an agency we had agency reps out of New York City those reps became no longer support but again more salespeople so we started feeling this today I won't even talk to a Google ads rep there's a few good ones out there I've come across but most of them I just ignore they all they're they're all scripted salespeople at this point in my opinion Bas off my

experience with them but that was not the case many years ago and so there's there was this pivot within Google ads organization in regards to even the support system of advertisers and agencies which any of you who have had to deal with that Google support in the last several years you've definitely have felt how terrible it is and then how pushy Google reps are and all they care about is pushing their latest campaign type or whatever they want and pushing you to spend more money so there's been this like and and really The Innovation stuff

that's coming out even like pmax and stuff it's really I it doesn't seem like they're listening to advertisers and it just seems like they're really trying to optimize and continue to sell their unused inventory their junk inventory in my opinion to continue to try to get these increases that they're getting it's going to get harder for them to continue to increase ad Revenue moving forward in my opinion without doing what they're kind of doing so shareholders are happy I'm sure the executives are happy based off the financial numbers they're seeing advertisers are not advertisers are

being squeezed right when your cpcs are up 133% year-over-year what does that mean that means you cannot spend the same amount of money you did last year and get the same results you got last year right you literally would have to increase your budget 133% and it's never this clean of math but you would have to increase by 133% to bridge the gap now cuz your cost of doing business with Google ads is up 133% you can't buy the same amount of traffic you did last year with this natural increase in cpcs and again I

say natural but we know Google's behind the scenes and they've cranked up some costs on us so they are fleecing advertisers 100% right okay and the economy feels soft again I'm not a macro Economist by any means or or or claim to be but based off what I'm seeing it feels so soft now certain industries are being impacted more we have clients in the furniture industry they're getting absolutely wrecked but Furniture's just down due to the fact that Co skyrocketed sales and now we're coming it's a mean reversion so we're coming back down and the

re we're just coming back to reality this is what the the landscape is for furniture purchases in October of 2024 it's not what it was several years ago okay so we have to navigate that along with increased advertising cost so what the heck do you do number one if performance Max is not working for you I get this question a lot then pivot try standard shopping try going back to manual CPC if you have to if you're feeling this pinch and you're just a continued decline then switch try going back to standard campaigns if you're

on standard campaigns and you haven't tried performance give it a shot you have to keep testing best practices are just best practices right that doesn't mean it's going to be best for you I have clients that pmax does not do anything for and we run standard shopping we run standard search we run DSA campaigns we run standard remarketing I have accounts where we tested pmax after running a very well optimized standard structure and pmax is doing better for us so you have to test there is no one-size solution for everyone out there then this is

a conversation I have with my clients all the time hey you were operating at this specific return or if you if you're going off a row as this was your row as if you're going off of a myrr you're looking at your entire company as a whole your my was this last year cpcs are up right cost of doing business on Google ads is up are you willing to increase spend to bridge that Gap that you're probably going to start seeing decreases us cuz if you do not spend what you did or if you spend

what you did last year you will not get what you got last year due to the fact that costs are up are you willing to spend more are you willing to analyze your financial data and are you actually at a moment right now where hey does it make sense to be operating at the numbers we're operating should we be actually decreasing the return we're willing to go after should we actually get more aggressive and in some cases the answer is no you shouldn't you should actually be working on efficiency right now it's all going to

vary depending on who you are what your business is and where you're currently at okay so the number one thing I talk to businesses about right now though is stop blaming the advertising it's hard it sucks I get it sucks for me as an agency but you can't just say all right Google ads is down we're down right start working on your business and many business owners I talk to today still are not doing that so yes Google ads is down compared to last year or two years ago or three years ago you cannot magically

just fix that and in some cases literally the campaigns are dialed in they're optimized and I'm telling them this your this is not a tactical issue this is a macro issue what does that mean you should be doing start working on your business don't think ads is it ads should not be your whole business that should not be where all sales are coming from that should not just be where you have all of your focus right what are you doing with conversion rate optimization right now the amount of crap websites I still encounter is mind-blowing

in 2024 they'll spend $50,000 a month on ads and not a single dime goes to improving their website even just the speed of it could improve the conversions that they get but they don't they're just not doing much there right and I get it's a lot of hard work and it's expensive but you if you're spending any money on ads you should also be focusing on how do you optimize post click right so what are you doing to work on your business what is your offer what are your competitors doing what's your competitor offer what

can you do that's unique in the marketplace compared to your competition when's the last time you've analyzed your competition checkout process what's your checkout process like what is your value to your customer currently what's the customer experience like right now can you improve upon that are you doing anything to continue to get reviews positive reviews I can't tell you how many companies will complain about their ad results I'm like dude you got a three star like aggregate review rating on Google customer reviews out of literally like 50 reviews or 100 reviews you've got you have

well yeah but we you know sometimes order just don't come in and people work on it you can't operate at a three okay people are not going to want to continue to do business with a poor reviewed company work on that so I know I'm rambling and I know this is a giant ramp but I've I've wanted to address this topic and and I know I'm doing this in a way that's a bit off the off the cuff but if you take anything from this it's yes ads Google ads costs are up Google ads performance

is probably down for many of you year-over-year or looking through the past couple years it's not one thing it's many things yes Google's fleecing you what are you going to do about it they're Monopoly right you just got to work with what you got to work with they are trying to continue to make infinite money and growth for themselves and you are getting fleeced as a small Advertiser you can complain they're in an antitrust lawsuit now so we'll see what comes of that but you've got you have to just work with what you have you

got to play in the arena that you're playing in but there are things you can control you can't control what Google does as an organization you can't control what they do to the cpcs even if it is total what you can control though is your own company your own offering your website your checkout process your customer experience your customer service the reviews that you get from your customers that social value and proof that then you can show to Future customers people don't just click and buy they're going to navigate they're going to they're going to

sit there and compare you to the competition do competitor analysis what can you do better than them what offerings can you create that are better how do you improve on your current offering that is how you move forward Google ads is nothing more than a customer acquisition tool okay there's a lot of things that can be done post click and that is my rant to everyone today is is work on post click work on improving what you can do within your business Google you got to operate as you can sure there's going to be a

lot of unoptimized accounts out there come get a free audit from us we'll tell you if it's good or not I'm as upfront with anyone as possible I not I could care I know I'm not going to get your business if I say your account's really good it's not your agency's fault or your internal person's fault you have no tactical issues I but I'm not in the business of trying to lie to people to get their business through these audits our audits are there to just tell you where you're currently at and then if you

want to hire us good if not I hope I at least provided value to you so get an audit if you need to get some 30 even even if it's not from us go hire an expert have them audit your account if your account is pretty well optimized then it's not a tactical thing you got to start working on this macro stuff navigate what what we're going through and you do that and the companies that do that I think will only be stronger and continue to grow over the next few years and so keep testing

again if if certain campaign types aren't working for you like performance Max isn't working move to standard campaigns test in or campaign you have to keep testing but what you can't do is and I see many business do this they just complain they complain they come complain but I'm not seeing any action being done working on your business start working on your business the game is hard but this is where you can start dominating because a lot of people are too lazy to actually work in a climate that gets hard right so the people who

are willing to gut it and the people are willing to really work on the Nitty Gritty hard stuff will come out better I think in the next few years hey you just listened to that giant rant maybe some of it probably not all of it however if you're like hey I don't know if my Google ads account though is optimized and yes I should be working on my business and the macro stuff but I actually think my ad account's not good well then go get a free audit from us we offer that if you qualify

that's in the description below and again you don't have to do it from us find someone else to do it get a third an expert third eye view into your account and see is your account optimized because if it's not then sure there's plenty of opportunity for you there you know I've done a thousand plus Audits and I see I still see a ton of really really bad accounts this message obviously a big rant is really towards those who are struggling and they know they're doing the right things they know they have optimized accounts or

campaigns that were working and they're just not as well anymore so this rant was more about that but if you do feel like hey I there's a lot of work tactically that should be going on within my Google ads account go get an audit or I've got a lot of great value on this YouTube channel check out forther videos once this ends there going to be a few video recommendations for you like how to set up a search campaign the right way or the complete performance Max course that I did I spent you know three

months building that out it's totally free several hours of content go check that stuff out if you want to get more value want to get into the weeds and see do I have tactical issues within my account so that's going to be up next you're going to see recommendations here on the ending slide go check some of those videos out or go get an audit if not I'll see you on the next video thanks [Music]