If money grew on a tree, would you ever cut the money tree down? As a lover of money, I hope not.
If you owned a printing press, would you ever wrap dynamite around it and blow it up? As a lover of money, I hope not.
Okay just one more.
Would you ever take all the cash out of your bank account, put it in a pile, pour gasoline on it, and start a bonfire with it? As a lover of money, I hope not.
A Shania Twain once said, “don’t be stupid.” And sorry, but turning off a Google Ads campaign is stupid.
Let me explain why.
You may be saying, but Jason, but we’re in a downturn and my business is losing money, and advertising on Google is an expense that I need to cut.
That can seem correct, but it’s not.
The reason turning off a Google Ads campaign is not “cutting an expense” is because a properly run Google Ads campaign is not an expense, rather it’s a printing press. A properly run Google Ads campaign is not an expense line item on the income statement, it’s actually a long term asset on the balance sheet. Properly run Google Ads campaigns don’t cost you money, they make you money.
Many advertisers don’t understand that. They don’t understand the end goal of what a perfect Google Ads campaign looks like. All they see and focus on is the money that Google charges them to advertise and the traffic that they get from their ad spend. What they don’t see or focus on is the value and revenue that that traffic brings in. And that’s the fundamental mistake a lot of business owners make. They look at advertising as an expense and not as an investment.
I understand that flawed logic when thinking about traditional, more abstract forms of advertising like television, radio, and print ads. With those forms of advertising, hard dollars go out the door and soft revenue comes in. You know exactly how much you spent, but the revenue that floats in over time is harder to define. But it still is wrong to think about that kind of advertising as a pure expense and not an investment if done correctly.
But search advertising is different. It’s harder, more concrete. You know exactly what you spent, but you should also know exactly what revenue that spend brings in. You should be aiming for a 3 to 5x return, more if possible, and your campaigns should be not only be profitable, they should be provably profitable, you should be able to prove profitability with conversion tracking!
With all the conversion tracking ability out there, smart advertisers are able to know exactly how much revenue their search campaigns bring in. And if you know how much revenue your search campaigns bring in, and you know how much it costs to get that revenue, then you should be able to adjust your campaigns to the point of profitability, and that is called owning a printing press.
Advertisers who turn off their Google Ads campaign to “save money” don’t understand search advertising. Google Ads, when done properly (all conversions tracked and level of profitability known), is a printing press, and it’s never the right time to turn off a printing press.
When you’re sculpting your Google Ads campaigns or working with a sculptor (a Google Ads consultant like myself), keep the end goal in mind. And the end goal is to a) know exactly many conversions your Google Ads campaign is bringing in, and b) exactly how much revenue and profit each conversion represents on average. Once you know those two things, you can adjust bids, keywords, ads, and other settings to get to a profitable cost per conversion, and once you achieve a profitable cost per conversion, you will have created an asset on your balance sheet, a printing press, and it would be business blasphemy to turn off a printing press, especially during a downturn.
