Google Ads: The World’s Most Expensive Casino
House always wins — unless you fix your strategy, execution, and attribution.
Let’s be real: if your competitor is spending 10× more than you on digital marketing, stop pretending you can “out-advertise” them. You won’t. You’ll just light money on fire. In fact, you’d be better off throwing that cash onto the street. At least then, some stranger might use it more intelligently than Google will on your behalf.
So yes, paid marketing can work — but only if your unit economics aren’t a trainwreck. If your numbers don’t support paid, turn off your Google Ads account and pick up the phone. Cold calls are cheaper than letting Larry and Sergey’s machine grind your bank account to dust.
And if you don’t know your unit economics? Hard U-turn. Go read The Paid Media Spiral. If you don’t know what ROAS is? Even harder U-turn. Seriously, you’re not ready for the rest yet. Once you’ve cleared the “math quiz,” here’s the real question:
How much of paid marketing success is strategy vs execution?
The answer lives in four pillars:
Have an In-House PPC Expert — Even If You Outsource Everything
You can outsource execution. You cannot outsource judgment. Your in-house paid person’s job is to:
Ask the uncomfortable questions the agency doesn’t want to answer.
Understand the weeds. tROAS, tCPA, Manual CPC, Enhanced CPC, PMax, AIMax, DSA, Last Click, First Click, Linear, Time Decay, just to name a few. It’s less a toolkit and more a jungle — and unless you can name every plant, you’ll end up eating the poison berries.
Translate business goals into campaign rules and KPIs.
The world of Google Paid is sludge. Google Ads, Tag Manager, Merchant Center, Analytics, Business Profile, Looker Studio — for some reason all designed to report slightly different numbers for what should be the same data. A full-on horror film could be made about a newbie trying to untangle them. Unless you’re John Nash with a whiteboard in the garage, you’ll need someone who’s fluent in superlative sludge.
The Google’s ad suite is basically Yoda: ancient, powerful, and wise… but also impossible to understand, contradicts itself constantly, and still somehow runs the galaxy.
By the way — if your team isn’t running 3–5 campaign experiments and A/B tests at any given time, you’re not optimizing. Your “expert” is just babysitting.
Bottom line: your in-house expert should be your agency’s worst nightmare (in the best possible way), and should be leading your optimization efforts.
Build a Strong Analytics Backbone
Google’s native reporting is fine… if you enjoy bedtime stories for toddlers. For business decisions? Hot garbage.
Here’s what you actually need:
Data pulled together across paid, organic, CRM, and revenue.
The ability to zoom out (big picture) and drill in (what broke and why).
Real-time visibility into spend and performance.
This usually means Power BI or Looker Studio, but here’s the kicker: Unlike Google Analytics, Google Ads doesn’t connect natively to Power BI. Why? Because Google. You’ll need a third-party connector like Windsor.ai to plug that hole.
Without this backbone, you’re not piloting the plane — you’re reviewing the black box after the crash. And don’t waste your life chasing “perfect” data. It doesn’t exist. You need good enough proxies to make timely calls. Managerial judgment fills the gaps. If you want perfection, fire everyone and hand the keys to Mrs. Algorithm.
Don’t Forget About Offline
Even Amazon sells offline. If you have a sales team working abandoned carts, quote requests, or inbound leads, Google attribution is giving you maybe half the story.
You’ve got three options:
Easiest way: assign average deal values to bottom of the funnel conversions on the Google Platform. Crude, but it sends buying signals back to Google’s machine.
Easy way: push source info into your CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot). You’ll get precise attribution reports — but they won’t feed signals back to Google.
Capitalist way: spend enough money that Google assigns you an account manager who’ll help integrate offline conversions into your Ads account. Precise, automated, and expensive. Welcome to capitalism: the more money you give, the better service you get. Just like western democracies.
Align Targets for Revenue, Spend, and ROAS
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” The Cheshire Cat nailed it. Unfortunately, “there” might be permanent un-paid vacations. Targets keep you from wandering off a cliff. So if you prefer week-long paid vacations, definitely the three targets that lock together:
Monthly spend
Revenue
ROAS
And no, ROAS is not redundant if you’re tracking spend and revenue. It’s the glue. Stop managing paid like a static budget line. Tie spend to revenue as a percentage. If sales climb, your budget climbs. If sales tank, pull back.
Better yet: lean in early, over-invest a bit, watch the trend, and course-correct. ROAS is your north star. Hit it, and you’re scaling profitably — even if you blew past the original “budget.”
In Conclusion…
If you business leans on paid marketing, you need three things:
A leader who understands the fundamentals and can smell BS a mile away.
A hands-on keyboard expert who lives in Google’s ecosystem (3 years minimum to reach true fluency) and can read the matrix.
A CRM administrator who can tie online to offline.
Agencies are fine, but they’re execution partners — not your brain. Analytics is mandatory, not optional. Offline attribution is both a reality check and the other half of your paid spend.
Paid marketing is ubiquitous, but it’s not easy. If you can’t confidently say you’re on top of your program, guess what? You’re not.