You can create a Test Account for free. No need for any credit card info. Its main use is for testing APIs, but you can essentially do anything to it like make campaigns, keyword research, make ads, etc. We use it to train newbies in our agency. It helps them gain confidence on where to navigate and make changes without the fear of spending any money. https://developers.google.com/google-ads/api/docs/best-practices/test-accounts More on reddit.com

When we have had agency-specific reps working within Google, they have been very helpful and gone out of their way to work with us on different issues. However, since there are 100+ accounts within our MCC, we get a lot of calls from Teleperformance or other outsourced reps and they are nearly always terrible, if not outright wrong. I actually had an interview with SE Roundtable last year, about how terrible some of these reps are: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ads-agency-bad-28018.html After I did that interview, a manager from Google called me and apologized. The problem is that outsourced reps (especially Teleperformance) have KPIs they need to meet so they are really pushy on a lot of irrelevant suggestions. Do you agree that their main goal is to push new features onto you that aren't necessarily in your best interest? Mostly, yes. The good news is, you can actually send an email to the Teleperformance rep asking them to remove your accounts from their "support services". They have a process they'll go through to basically put you on their no-call list and you'll stop getting so many annoying phone calls...you know, the ones asking you to auto-accept recommendations. More on reddit.com

Google defaults to allowing search and display to be served together. It's one of the most unethical things Google does IMO - when people build a search ad, it should be search only and vice versa for display. Lots of confusion and most people new to Ads end up serving trash display impressions with text ads. I see it just about every account I take over that was self-managed. On the above, Google defaults to audience expansion in display/video/etc. campaigns. Not nearly as bad of an issue, but more often than likely you are using large audiences in your ad groups and it's better to remove audience expansion so you can clearly see which audience is driving results in your reporting. Then you carve it into its own ad group and turn on expansion. Otherwise it can be difficult to see where that audience is coming from. More campaigns give more control over budget, performance, targeting, etc. As spend increases, the granularity of your targeting and reporting should as well. Using the campaign-level settings for control is a tool that many beginners ignore because they feel that multiple campaigns is messy - quite the opposite. Labels, naming structure, grouped budgets, etc. can all make it incredibly simple and effective. On the above, get really comfortable with match types. Understand campaign structures like Alpha/Beta that will let you fish for search terms with broad match keywords and pull them over to exact and phrase campaigns. You'll drive more efficient traffic much faster. Automate any repetitive tasks. A couple of hours of upfront work will save you countless amounts of time. Automated Rules are your friend, scripts are even better. It's almost always preferable to remove search partners. Add it back in as a test once you have a clear understanding of your performance on Google's network only. 80% of your time in the first couple weeks of a campaign's life will be looking at search terms reports and using negative keywords to make sure you're driving relevant search. It's critical to the success of any search campaign. Work to assign values to all of your conversions before you actually start running. What is a call or email worth to you/the client? You should know that, and have it as the conversion value before you run the campaign. Most companies aren't e-comm only and those other actions have value - they should be tracked as conversions, and assigned some standard $ so you can see if what you are doing is profitable or not. Spend time understanding statistical significance. If you have one keyword that has 14 impressions and 4 clicks and another that has 33 impressions and 22 clicks...that info is irrelevant because you're working with tiny datasets. A good understanding of how to actually find significant data and make decisions on them is going to be far more impactful for your optimization efforts than going in and randomly deciding to turn off underperforming keywords/ads/etc. You don't need to be statistically significant all the time, especially on small accounts, but understand what constitutes directional info vs. what is just noise. More on reddit.com

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