The availability heuristic: 7 ways Google Ads can steer your decisions

Experienced Google advertisers know where to find the data that’s essential to optimization and insight. But many novices aren’t even aware of the layers they’re missing.

And misleading information often replaces hidden information — at least in the current context. As a result, many advertisers find themselves unwittingly accepting platform-friendly narratives.

If you don’t fall into the novice category or neglect your account(s), why should this matter to you? Second-order effects.

If you’re Advertiser A, doing a pretty darn competent job, the shortcomings and neglect in accounts managed by Advertisers B, C, D, E, and F can cause all kinds of auction anomalies that can rattle your cage, too.

Hopefully, more advertisers will discover that the temptations inside Google Ads are bad for their financial health. I’ll walk you through my biggest concerns, why advertisers are so susceptible, and what to do about them.

How Google Ads leverages the availability heuristic

The availability heuristic describes what happens when well-meaning people are swayed by readily available information.

Take transportation safety, for example. Hearing vivid anecdotes about plane crashes could lead to overlooking the fact that, statistically, the aviation industry is safe overall. That’s how journalism, and perhaps our penchant for narrative, tend to work.

But with Google Ads, Google itself pushes narratives directly into the platform. This makes platform-friendly ideas more visible to you as you spend your ad budget.

Platform-focused storytelling even determines the naming of features and campaign types. For instance, names like Performance Max, AI Max, Smart Bidding, and Demand Gen might be there to sway you. There’s an awful lot in a name if it can influence your budget allocation decisions.

What are some of the most common examples of manipulative, overly available, or hard-to-find information in Google Ads? Let’s look at seven in detail.

1. Dashboard views

At the account or campaign level, many advertisers might accept the default key performance indicators (KPIs) on the dashboard, including comparative data for the previous period. This can be suboptimal for a couple of reasons.

First, why compare to the previous period when, for most companies, year-over-year (YoY) is the more salient comparison? YoY comparisons help avoid faulty comparisons due to seasonal fluctuations. Second, aggregate impressions and clicks probably mean far less than metrics like revenue and return on ad spend (ROAS).

Dig deeper: Are you being manipulated by Google Ads?

2. Columns

Similarly, the default dashboard columns favor noise over signal. At times, it seems like Google has packed the display with columns you don’t need.

For my purposes, I want to look at key metrics such as clicks, click-through rate (CTR), conversion value, conversion value divided by cost, and cost per click (CPC).

At the earliest opportunity, learn which metrics are essential to your account and which you don’t need. Then, tailor the column selection through Columns > Modify.

But know that naming tricks lurk in the available columns, too. Absolute top and top impression share (IS) might be handy competitive metrics, while search lost top IS (rank) probably isn’t. Anything that makes me feel restless and worried instead of calmly analytical is likely something I’d be better off not looking at.

3. Rows

As you check your dashboard, you might notice that your preferred number of rows displayed (typically 50 or 100) sometimes reverts to the minimum of 10.

Since pagination compromises optimization, some advertisers may work on only a couple of campaigns or view only a couple of pages’ worth of data before they decide to move on to something else.

The more friction there is, the more unoptimized account sections will fester. For example, if you inherited an unwieldy account with too many campaigns, you’ll need to ditch the status quo and figure out how to consolidate. Financial performance almost always improves.

4. Optimization Score and recommendations

Google constantly nudges advertisers to pore through and accept categorized account recommendations. Take this reminder, for example:

It includes two suggestions to remove redundant keywords and enable Display Expansion. Neither is going to help much. And the latter is almost certainly going to hurt your performance — unless you’re under threat of losing your job if you fail to spend a bloated budget by a certain deadline, regardless of performance.

Dig deeper: 4 Google Ads settings and recommendations worth a closer look

5. Ad group level targets

From a performance perspective, surface-level account management consistently fails. Say you have a campaign-level ROAS target your predecessor set at 350%. You keep pushing it higher to achieve what you hope will be a tighter campaign with lower spend and higher ROI.

But performance doesn’t budge. So, you panic and eventually limit the daily budget, pause the campaign, or blame made-up economic headwinds.

Meanwhile, the ad group-level targets were set to a variety of levels between 210% and 260%. They overrode the campaign-level setting you kept adjusting. You’ll never find out if you don’t crack open that campaign and drill down.

6. Search query reporting

Novice advertisers don’t know much, if anything, about keyword match types. Many novices don’t distinguish between keywords in their account and the user queries that mapped to those keywords. And they don’t know where to find search term reporting, either.

Here are a few categories of ill-mapped queries that advertisers should add as negative search terms in a particular ad group, campaign, or account:

• Purely navigational brand searches that drive up apparent ROI for niche acquisition keywords.
• Single-word queries (like “office”) in a category where you sell specific products.
• Brands and products you don’t sell.
• Competitor names if they shouldn’t be there.
• Brands and products that should map to other parts of the account.

7. Conversion counts

Figure out your KPIs, pick the primary one, and keep a few secondary ones on your dashboard for monitoring and background information. If you want deeper dives or multiple primary KPIs for additional precision, you could either use Google Analytics or import a couple of those goals into Google Ads and designate them as primary and secondary.

Notice how it’s already getting messy?

If you inherit a mature account, the reality might be much more byzantine. A multitude of account managers and stakeholders have made choices, and now the logic is all over the map.

The first thing you’ll want to do is be sure no one has set virtually identical KPIs as primary. Sadly, this is a fairly common practice.

Then clean up the remaining conversions. Take mildly valuable (but only directionally helpful) conversion events like store visits or even sought directions to the store. If they happen infrequently and provide valuable insights, directional KPIs help with optimization. If they’re too frequent and skew real revenue feedback, there’s nothing wrong with removing them entirely.

Dig deeper: Outsmarting Google Ads: Insider strategies to navigate changes like a pro

Know the tactics to avoid the platform’s influence

I’ve covered seven examples, but there are many others. As an advertiser, you’re playing a shell game where most advertisers are regularly influenced purely by what they think they see.

Your superpower? The operator of the shell game still lets you lift the shells, some of the time.