Goggle (self serving) Best Practices

Here’s a screen grab of a typical Google Best Practice deigned to help me optimize my Google Ads account. This ones all about ad testing (or research):

• Test one variable at a time.
• Use a 50/50 split to reach statistical significance faster.
• Avoid making changes while the experiment is running.

This (elementary) advice is so biased and self serving it’s painful.

• While testing is the best way to improve the poor online advertising response rates (and ROI) many companies experience, Google does NOT tell you that you should have done a lot more homework before setting up your online advertising campaign. Before you turn to any media vendor, you should already have research at hand that tells you which medium or media will provide you with the most effective response rate – not the cheapest one. There’s a difference.
• The Google Best Practice advice is, by any professional standard, entry level advice – good enough to get you started but not insightful enough to help you win the race. Google’s Best Practices are not the profound or insightful musings of an advertising research director. Most are really not worth reading - unless you're just starting out. And if you're starting out, this stuff will stunt your growth and education. 
• Google’s Best Practices help keep Google top of mind by giving itself another seemingly legitimate reason to send you a push notification – encouraging you to think about using more Google products and services.

The best thing you can do for yourself, your agency and your clients is to learn to think for yourself. To sort out what’s most important for the brands that you represent and to do so by exploring all viable communication options – not just the cheap and convenient one – the one that’s just a few key-strokes away.

REMINDER . . . Alexa is not your friend – she’s owned + operated by Google.