I am sure many of you find google ads complicated and frustrating to use. We have all learnt / Learned the hard way.
(I am an older Brit so I say Learnt, but I know that many people now don't like the old burnt meant learnt etc words)
Things to avoid
1. never leave a campaign running without checking the cost daily or at least two or three times a week. Reason if your ad gets better you might get more and more clicks but no conversions. This means you will reach your daily ad spend every day for as long as the ad in active. This equals big cost at end of month or payment cycle or reaching the payment to be billed freehold long before the end of the month.
2. If you can avoid say £50.00 per month = £50 over 30 days. When you first run an ad campaign you will not reach the £50.00 in a month assuming you set limit at fifty pound per month. But if you constantly adjust the campaign and it improves you can end up reaching a £50.00 spend on x hundreds or thousands of clicks after only one week. Your ad will be stopped because you reached your spend limit. But you will not know thinking ad is still running and then you get bigger bill than expect for no return.
3. Think carefully about accepting every recommendation or keyword from google. You don't want people to click on bargain holiday if you run a luxury cruise liner. Remove negative keywords from google and from your site.
4. Avoid a scatter gun approach and as soon as possible after setting up a campaign set areas you do not want to be found in
A good example would be with place names that appear in America also, as well as the in UK if you run a shop in Greenwich market London, you will need to stop people in Greenwich or Soho or Chelsea in New York America finding you and clicking, every silly click costs you money. Navigate to the map area and exclude any country town city or area you do not operate in, also add the same places name to the negative keyword list. If you are trying to attract American visitors to Greenwich market in London then this is fine. But if you are wanting more local or national visitors immediately it's expensive and wasteful to attract clicks from Greenwich In new York America, for a shop in Greenwich London. Exclude are via the map option and add New York "greenwich New York" as a negative keyword.
Google ads cost small businesses a heck of a lot of money during the learning process.
So if trying google ads for first time first thing to do is run campaign for a short test time only with a low affordable spend.
There are re other easier advertising channels available to small start up businesses.
If new to google ads run your first campaign "a test campaign" for maximum one month have affordable daily spend. You will not reach this daily spend initially unless you do a wasteful scatter gun approach. Calculate how much a month will it actually cost if you reach your daily spend, if you can afford that mount then fine. Go ahead but check your results every day or more than once a wok do not hesitate to halt campaign as soon as it appears to be going off track.
The majority of global internet searches come from America, if you don't want Americans to click on your ads and cost you money every time they click probably by accident. EXCLUDE AMERICA if you run a local UK only business. Without making Adjustments Google Facebook and others will have you getting over 75% of visits from America.
Although there may not be anything wrong with Americans performing majority of Internet searches. A small UK business can not afford to pay for wasteful visits and costly clicks.
