After 20 years of doing paid media, I still find it hard.
I saw a post recently that said, “I don’t understand why people think Google Ads is so hard.”
Really? If you think it’s easy, are you looking at the big picture?
Sure, Google Ads is easy if you do everything your Google rep recommends. Platform management and navigation? Easy. Following the playbook? Easy.
It’s not the platform that makes it hard. It’s everything outside the platform. The complex situations that compile on top of each other. The business problems that can’t be solved by pushing buttons in an interface.
Here are five things that make Google Ads difficult:
1. Tracking Issues That Never End
Clients with constant tracking issues. Dev teams continuously backlog marketing tickets for enhanced conversion tracking and Google Tag Manager setup. Meanwhile, data is loose, leaky, or nonexistent—and performance is declining.
A client’s tracking was broken during a website “upgrade”; their data integrity had been degrading for months. Google had nothing to optimize. The signals were broken. And the marketing team was being evaluated on performance they couldn’t measure.
How we manage this: Be persistent. Educate dev and IT teams on the business impact. Marketing often takes a back seat to tech priorities, but this isn’t optional. Until issues can be fixed, find directional data points. Manually upload data if possible. And don’t make decisions based on small data sets or short time periods.
It’s tough for us; the agency. It’s worse for them; clients and their business.
2. AI-Generated Reports That Are Terribly Wrong (But Still Create Panic)
AI-generated reports that claim huge problems—except they’re missing all context.
These AI reports run through a tool, get generated in five minutes, and send an alarmist message: “Your ads are shut down two days a week! You have no mobile presence! Red alert!”
Never mind that in collaboration with the client, we intentionally pause ads on weekends. Never mind that we jointly excluded mobile for strategic reasons. But when they see it flagged as a “problem” in a report, it induces panic anyway.
The report has no context. Just alarm bells. And suddenly we’re defending decisions we all agreed on.
Agency side: If you know your craft, you can debunk most claims in five minutes. The unfortunate thing? These reports take minutes to generate but can waste an entire hour-long weekly sync reviewing all the wrong points. No thanks.
Brand side: Be careful what you deploy if you’re managing on your own. We’re seeing lots of claims that AI tools can do it all. But do you want them to? In many cases, the scary alerts are incorrect in the sense that they are only surface level. Example: Campaign A saw 57% drop in leads last month! But the reasoning was an approved budget reallocation.
Taken in isolation, a fact about your account can be very scary. But facts without context are just noise. AI doesn’t understand strategy or why you made certain decisions. At Group Twenty Seven, we understand the context. That’s the expertise AI can’t replace.
3. Clients Want to Make Changes Continuously (And When They Don’t Listen, Performance Plummets)
Almost every day, a new client wants to change something. Update this headline. Pause that campaign. Add this keyword.
I get it. When something’s not working or you are new to the organization, you want to take action. That’s human nature.
But here’s my best advice after 20 years: Wait.
Making constant knee-jerk changes hurts performance.
One client kept pushing us to make changes every week. We showed her the graph. Every time we made multiple changes, performance dropped. When we left things alone and let the system optimize, performance improved.
The toughest thing I do as an expert? Recommend that we wait. That we focus on the bigger problem—like getting the IT team to fix tracking—instead of changing a headline that won’t move the needle.
I get it. When there’s a problem, all we want to do is take action. But sometimes the best action is patience.
4. When You Have to Say No to Help Them Win
You sign a new client. They tell you there’s one main product they want to promote. You think it’s great for their starting budget of $10,000 per month.
Then you get on the kickoff call. Everyone’s excited they finally have an agency.
“Can we also add five more product groups?”
No.
Maybe an inexperienced person says yes. But here’s what happens: You launch ten campaigns with $1,000 budgets. Each campaign gets a few clicks a day. Nothing performs. The client is disappointed. And it’s because we didn’t say no.
Sometimes with B2B, the universe is small. It’s possible to work with limited budgets. But you have to be strategic. You have to focus.
I’m in the service business. I have a hard time saying no. But at the end of the day, saying yes to everything only hurts the client.
So we say: “Yes, we can do that with more budget.” Or: “No, we can’t, and here’s why.”
What is the most important thing you need to sell? What do you need to amplify? Let’s start there and do it right.
5. Being Commercially Literate Is a Weak Spot for Many Platform Managers
They understand everything about platform metrics, levers, and how to navigate the interface. But when faced with a business question, they produce a lot of data and reporting that means nothing to leadership.
This is why a lot of Google Ads programs don’t work. There’s no depth. No connection between platform metrics and business outcomes.
“We’re having a hard time selling this product. What can we do?”
That’s not a platform question. That’s a business question. And you need digital ads specialists who can ask and understand: What’s the opportunity? What are competitors doing? What are the pain points when your customer service people talk to clients? What’s broken in the sales process?
How do we match the ad’s promise to the landing page experience? How are we nurturing leads after they convert? How does the messaging align with what customers actually need?
You can make a huge report with beautiful dashboards that mean nothing. There’s strategic business thinking required here.
Aaand that’s why it’s hard!
The things outside the platform. The complex situations that compound. The business acumen required. The patience needed. The ability to say no. The strategic thinking that connects platform performance to real business outcomes.
Google Ads is hard. It will continue to be hard.
And that’s why we will continue to be good at it.