I Spent $1000 on Google Ads and Here's What I Learnt

During my campaigns I also spent time with Google Ad Strategists to go through my campaigns. It just seems like a fancy title for 'Sales people', and their main aim appears to be to make users spend more.

Here is what I learned -

Display Ads - Almost all clicks from Display Ads were fraudulent/invalid and it appears they all come from Kids clicking on Apps/Games on phones/tablets. I generated 0 sales from these campaigns despite doing many optimizations. I did let the ad specialist know however I felt they are trained not to acknowledge this.

Performance Max campaigns - Didn't give a positive Return on Investment - They are designed to make you spend the most and give the least return. Part of the reason being it's running Display Ads and overbidding on many of the keywords. The campaign barely generated any sales and most of them were because the campaign ended up spending for ranking for my own brand name. Performance Max was bidding 30x-50x for my keywords so when I moved those keywords to a search campaign, I was paying only few cents.

Search Campaigns - For small business they just seem too expensive to run besides ranking for my own brand name.

Ad Specialists are encouraged to give you suggestions to spend more. Most of the suggestions included - Increasing the budget, increasing cost per click.

No suggestions by the specialists were made on how to reduce invalid clicks for the campaigns.

No replies were received when I reported poor sales performance.

I feel like the strategists are just trained to churn through as many advertisers as possible, advise them to spend "more" for the system to learn but not focus on actual results.