We have audited literally thousands of Google Ads accounts. That feels really weird to say, to be honest with you. But I mean, over the course of all of our students, all of our prospects, all of our clients, years and years and years in this business, there have been thousands of Google Ads accounts that we've had our eyes on uh, between me and the strategists inside of Solutions eight. And I can tell you the number one mistake that we see without question and it boggles my mind that this could be a mistake. To be honest with you, it blows me away that people are throwing money away this way. The number one mistake we see, Can you guess? Conversion tracking. It's conversion tracking. Can you believe it's something so simple? No conversion tracking or improper conversion tracking. it's a trillion dollar machine learning mechanism that uses the information it's gathering in order to yield results for you, and not tracking conversions is flying blind. It's worse than doing something like radio, television, newspaper, because with those mediums, you know, you're not tracking conversions and so you're set up to measure accordingly with Google Ads, not tracking conversions and then optimizing it's in the name. Maximize conversions, maximize conversion value. I've chosen not to track conversions. Actually, I like to live dangerously 50% of the accounts that. Either have no conversion tracking in place whatsoever, which just blows me away, or the conversion tracking is set up so poorly that the data is absolutely worthless. And y'all, this happens more times than I care to tell you, and it happens in sophisticated accounts. You know, a lot of DIYers for sure, but agency built accounts, there's a couple of really big agency out there that just do an abysmal, horrible job at this. If you did nothing but set up proper conversion tracking, here's what's scary for me, not. Have you been, did nothing but set up proper conversion tracking on a long enough timeline. You might not necessarily need an agency. Now that's gonna stop being true as Google continues to drop conversions. Conversion tracking right now, by the way, is hard. it's interesting to see what happened post iOS 14 privacy first deprecation of cookies, Google moving towards what they're refusing to call flock now which I think is so funny. What little conversion data you can capture. You absolutely need to have. because what? What's happening is because we are restricted from. A data perspective, the little conversion data that you're capturing ends up being absolute gold. here are the best practices for conversion tracking. One. Use Google Ads. Google Ads allows you to track conversions within Google Ads via Google Tag Manager. Do not use Google Analytics as your primary conversion Tracking Google Analytics is flawed. It's effectively last click attributed, even though it has its own. Attribution windows. I'm not telling you not to track inside of Google Analytics. What I'm telling you to do is track inside of Google Ads then use Google Analytics to reconcile against that way. You have kind of a sense of the rising tides, but be forewarned. Analytics is gonna routinely drop about 30% of your, conversions or more. you'll see this if you've used Google Ads alongside Google Analytics, you'll see that Google Analytics is always lagging behind. Always, always, always, always. So use Google Ads and you'll open those windows up. I'm talking 90 30. 30. when you're building your conversion actions, what you're doing is you're telling Google what conversion windows to use. There's Very few reasons these days to use narrow conversion windows, especially because everything is so multi click, multi variant, multi-page. People take time to buy. I wrote a tweet today, a Twitter thread, I was doing some research and found out that Google identified the path to purchase for a candy bar was 20 clicks. 20 touches to buy a candy bar. It's insane. For an airline ticket, it's 500. you need to make sure that you are opening up your attribution windows wide as you possibly can and have three points of data at a minimum. Google Ads, number one, Google Analytics, number two. Number three is your CRM and or cms. what you're doing is you're triangulating. Right. Like you're figuring out like, okay, so here's the data point, here's the data point, here's the data point. And then that kind of gives me some semblance of what's going on from a truthful perspective. And if you want extra credit, you're gonna go get yourself an attribution software. I like North Beam. I happened to be an investor in North Beam. So I'm obviously partial, but I was a user before I was an investor, and I think that says a lot like we were using this thing became so hot to trot that we went and threw money at I think North Beam's amazing. Talked to the guy on wicked Reports, actually the other day on Perpetual Traffic. Really liked what he had to say. I haven't used Wicked Reports yet personally, but there are tools and software applications out there that are meant to act as a single source of truth. Go check out those applications and see what you can do in order to help yourself capture the conversion data you need in order to make the decisions that you're making. And by the way, we're all now. And women, right? Like, if you haven't watched John's video on Mer marketing Efficiency Ratio it's an absolute prerequisite. Go back and watch that video. I'll make sure to link to it in the description of this one because that's the paradigm that you need to assume. is conversion tracking important? Yes. Critically, critically important. Can conversion data be done, trusted? No, not at all. So we need the conversion tracking, so Google knows who's buying and we'll replicate those conversion actions. But it's almost like giving, it's like giving the hunting dog the sniff of what it is that it needs to hunt. you're not gonna, still not gonna be able to see everything. but your campaigns are gonna improve by orders of magnitude because Google now actually knows who to go after. And when reconciling your conversion data, make sure you're paying attention to attribution models because all of these. Applications are gonna have different modeling, different tracking. So first click versus last click are two entirely different maps, or they're entirely different knowledge graphs. Incidentally, I'm writing one Twitter thread every single day. So if you're not following me on Twitter, go follow me at Casa. The last thing I wanna say is Phone call conversions are a nightmare for Google ad agencies. Most of these agencies, all they're doing is saying anything that lasts over 45 seconds is a conversion, which is a lie. What we like to do is we track and record all calls, and then we listen to those calls and we score them manually, and then we pipe those back into Google because now we're not giving Google false positives, which is really, really, really important. A call that lasts for over 45 seconds could be a solicitor, an angry customer, an existing customer who just clicked on your ad. Somebody who thinks that. Calling your competitor because you're bidding on brand K. There's a whole bunch of reasons that 45 second phone calls aren't leads, so don't fall into that trap. Speaking about conversion tracking, clean conversion data is the most important thing you can do inside of the realm of Google Ads. Truly, it's just so massive for the performance of the campaign. And then once you have that clean conversion data, I've actually seen app. Not all the time, but I've actually seen accounts self optimize to a point where You kind of don't need the agency. We had a guy come to us, actually. he was selling info products on investing. This is as close as I can get without giving his identity away, but spending a significant amount of money doing it. And they just ran outbound display for nine. Hemorrhaged money for the first eight of those nine. But then by month nine Google says, oh, here's who buys from you. And they ended up having a campaign that was producing top of funnel traffic at, orders of magnitude that would rival Facebook. It was awesome. And it's just because they had conversion tracking set up. They batch and blast for, let Google, learn over time. They had way more patience than most people do. And they did great. I actually ended up not working with them long term. I was like, look, there's not a whole lot more we can do for you. you've optimized this campaign, proper conversion tracking. So important, The only thing more important than proper conversion tracking is following me on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter at casa and that's all I got. Appreciate y'all. I'll see you tomorrow.