Every few months, someone sends me a “Google Ads best practices” checklist — and every few months, I ignore half of it on purpose. Not to be contrarian. Most of these rules were written for an average account that doesn’t actually exist. Yours isn’t average. Neither is mine.
Here’s what I do differently, and why it holds up.
I don’t run Display ads. Ever.
I’ve never seen a Display placement outperform an intent-driven channel for a new brand. That budget goes into Meta first. Discovery only gets a look once there’s enough brand signal built up for it to convert — not just show up.
Performance Max gets used, not worshipped
PMax isn’t the villain some threads make it out to be, but I don’t hand it the keys either. Sometimes it runs next to Standard Shopping, sometimes it doesn’t — depends on whether I can actually tell what’s driving results. Trusting a black-box campaign just because Google recommends it is how budgets quietly disappear.
Negatives aren’t a “set once” task
On bigger accounts, I’m touching negative keywords every other day, usually with scripts doing the heavy lifting. Most advertisers set them up once at launch and never look again — then wonder why a fifth of their spend is going to searches that were never going to convert.
I check Merchant Center before I touch anything else
Half the accounts I audit have Free Listings or Dynamic Remarketing quietly switched off. Nobody notices because nobody’s looking. Turning them on costs nothing and often unlocks reach that was sitting there the whole time.
Broad match isn’t dangerous — unstructured broad match is
I use broad match plenty. The difference is I pair it with tight negatives and real conversion signals, not just cross my fingers and hope the algorithm figures out my business. Broad match with no guardrails is how people learn to hate broad match.
I check the checkout before I touch the campaign
Before optimizing anything, I go through the buying process myself. More often than I’d like to admit, the ads are fine and the checkout is the actual leak.
None of this is contrarian for its own sake. It’s just what happens once you stop treating “best practices” as universal law and start treating them as a starting point you’re allowed to question.
Related reading: