Michael F. Esan
Facebook(Meta) & Google Ads Expert | AI Automation
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I'll change the way you think about Google Ads...
Don't be GOLD FISH, read it through!!!
A friend called me recently in a total panic. He'd just spent $3,000 on Google Ads and got absolutely nothing back. Zero leads. Zero sales. Just gone. And of course, his conclusion was "Google Ads is dead."
I hear this a lot. And honestly, I get why people believe it. But let's actually talk about what's true here, because there's a real difference between "Google Ads doesn't work" and "MY Google Ads didn't work", and almost everyone mixes those two up.
Here's the honest part first: Google Ads has genuinely gotten harder. More competition, higher costs per click, way more automation, less manual control than it used to have. If you're running it the same way you did 5 years ago, you will lose money. That part is real, not made up.
But here's what actually happened when I looked into his account, and it's the same pattern I see over and over:
→ No conversion tracking set up at all. Google was spending completely blind, no idea what was actually working.
→ Broad match keywords on a tiny budget, so ads were showing to people with barely any relevant intent.
→ Generic ad copy, the kind that could describe literally any business in any industry.
→ Zero negative keywords, zero ad extensions.
→ The campaign ran for 6 weeks and nobody had looked at the search terms report once.
None of that is Google's fault. That's a setup problem, and setup problems are fixable.
Here's the thing that really gets me: most people who say "Google Ads doesn't work" tested one bad setup, once, for a few weeks, and quit. That's like going to the gym twice, not seeing abs, and telling everyone fitness is a scam. Nobody thinks that way about fitness, everyone accepts it takes skill and consistency. Google Ads is exactly the same. It's a skill. It can be learned. It just LOOKS deceptively simple from the outside, and that's exactly what traps people.
And honestly, some of what Google's automated over the years is genuinely good, smart bidding can process signals no human could ever track manually. The automation isn't the problem. The problem is people hand control over to the algorithm before giving it anything useful to actually learn from. Like hiring a great chef and handing them an empty fridge.
Here's what we actually did to fix my friend's account, none of it cost extra:
✓ Set up proper conversion tracking for the first time
✓ Went through the search terms report and built a real negative keyword list
✓ Rewrote the ad copy to speak to an actual specific problem, not generic fluff
✓ Tightened match types
✓ Added sitelinks, callouts, a location extension
Same budget. Same platform. Within 6 weeks, more leads than the previous 6 months combined.
The platform didn't change. The approach did.
Here's the real takeaway: if you tried Google Ads once and it flopped, don't write off the platform, write off the version of yourself that ran it that first time. You know more now. Most competitors are still stuck obsessing over match types and bid tweaks while ignoring whether their offer or landing page is even any good. If you're willing to actually understand this at a strategic level instead of just clicking buttons, you're already ahead of most people running ads right now.
Follow along, more real breakdowns like this coming. 👀
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Running Meta Ads is EASY Once You Understand This
With everyone's feed getting flooded with obvious AI-generated content, there's one strategy that's actually working better than ever right now, and it's the exact opposite of AI slop: using real creators in your ads.
Here's why this matters. Nobody's favorite creator is AI-generated. People trust real humans they already follow, not generic content. So instead of fighting that, you lean into it, you partner with creators who already have your audience's attention and trust, and you use that in your ads.
The ad format for this is called Partnership Ads. It's when a creator's profile and your business's profile are both tied to the ad, so you're tapping directly into their audience, the people who are already primed to pay attention because it's coming from someone they follow.
And the data backs this up hard: partnership ads see a 13% higher click-through rate and a 71% higher brand lift compared to regular ads. That's not a small bump, that's a meaningfully different result.
Here's how to actually find the right creator and make this work:
1. Know your audience first, then match the creator to them
Don't just pick whoever has the biggest following. Pick someone your specific target audience already follows and trusts for that topic. A creator can have millions of followers and still be the wrong fit if their audience doesn't overlap with your buyers. Relevance beats reach every time here.
2. Use the Creator Marketplace to shortcut the search
It analyzes your business account and suggests relevant creators automatically. Start with the ones already actively doing partnership ads with other brands, they're more likely to respond, and if brands are already spending budget with them, there's a good chance it's working.
3. Send outreach through the platform, not cold DMs
Generic "we'd love to work with you" messages get ignored, especially by bigger creators drowning in inbound. Messaging through the Creator Marketplace routes into a separate inbox that creators actually check for business inquiries, way better response rate.
4. Get usage rights, not just a post
This is the part people skip. A creator posting once to their own audience gets you a short burst of visibility, most of the value disappears within 24 hours. But if you negotiate permission to run their content as paid ads, you can keep leveraging their trust and face for months, sometimes years. Often costs little to nothing extra to add this in.
5. Work with a few creators, not just one
Results can vary creator to creator. Start with 2-4 rather than betting everything on a single partnership. Increases your odds that at least one significantly outperforms your standard ads.
6. Be specific about some things, flexible on others
Be crystal clear on the call-to-action and the hook structure (ask for multiple different openings/hooks so you get more usable creative variations). But let the creator write their own script and delivery, they know how to talk to their own audience better than you do. Don't over-direct the creative itself.
One more thing worth checking before you partner with anyone do your due diligence. Have they talked about your product category before? Was it positive? Any past controversy that could reflect on your brand? Worth a quick check before committing.
Bottom line: in a feed full of obviously-AI content, a real trusted face recommending your product is one of the strongest scroll-stoppers left. Worth testing even with a modest budget.
Follow along, more of these breakdowns coming. 👀
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This is not about a targeting fix or a bidding hack, it's about something a lot of advertisers refuse to consider. Let me tell you about a client I took on.
This business had ads that used to work really well. Solid return on ad spend, consistent sales, all built around one product, a bestseller that was great for bringing in new customers. Then slowly, over time, results just... died. Not overnight. Just a steady decline until they were unprofitable across the board.
The obvious answer would be "ad fatigue, right? Just refresh the creative." Except they'd already done that. New ads, new angles, tested regularly. Still declining. So something else was going on.
Here's what I found when I actually dug in: the reviews for that hero product weren't great. Not terrible, just... "fine." "A bit disappointing." "There are better alternatives." And they had direct competitors selling something very similar, with better reviews. That gap was quietly killing their ability to acquire customers, no matter how good the ad creative was.
So here's the uncomfortable truth in this: your ads don't operate in a vacuum. People don't just click and buy blindly anymore. They check reviews, they ask a friend, increasingly they'll even ask ChatGPT "is this actually good, or is there something better?" And your ad is only as strong as what happens when someone goes looking for a second opinion.
There's also a compounding effect most people don't think about, negative word of mouth spreads faster and harder than positive word of mouth. One bad experience gets told to friends, who tell their friends. It snowballs quietly in the background while you're staring at your ad account trying to figure out why performance dropped.
The real question isn't "is my product good?" It's "is my product better than the alternative someone can find in 30 seconds of searching?" That's the actual bar.
So what do you actually do if this is happening to you?
→ Go straight to your reviews; the bad ones AND the good ones. Bad reviews tell you exactly what to fix. Good reviews tell you what to lean into and emphasize more.
→ Don't scale spend on a product with mediocre feedback. It just accelerates the negative word of mouth. Fix the product experience first, then pour fuel on it.
→ If one part of your range has strong reviews and another doesn't, consider shifting your ad budget toward what's actually earning trust, rather than what's just good at grabbing initial attention.
In this case, the fix wasn't a new campaign structure or a smarter bid strategy. It was telling the client to stop aggressively pushing the one product with weak reviews and shift toward products people were actually raving about. Painful short-term call. Completely turned the account around.
Sometimes the biggest lever in your ad account isn't in your ad account at all.
Follow along, more real breakdowns like this coming. 👀
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The BEST Way To Scale Google Ads in 2026
Okay, this is one of my favorite Google Ads strategies because it's basically hands-off scaling, you set it up once, and your budget grows automatically as long as your results actually stay good. Let me walk you through it.
Inside your Google Ads account, at the campaign level, there's an option to create an Automated Rule.
Here's the setup for scaling UP:
First, name your rule (something simple like "Budget Increase 3%"). Select which campaign(s) it applies to. Then set your condition, this is the important part. Pick a metric that reflects actual performance: cost per conversion if you run leads, return on ad spend if you're eCommerce. Let's say you know from your numbers that anything under £30 cost per lead is genuinely profitable for your business. You set the rule: "if cost per conversion is less than £30, increase budget."
For the actual increase, go with a percentage, not a fixed amount. Why? Because a flat £2-3/day bump becomes meaningless once your budget scales up, a percentage keeps increasing proportionally as you grow. 3% is a solid, conservative default. You can go more aggressive if you're trying to capitalize on something time-sensitive, like a seasonal sale or a promo that's crushing it right now.
One setting people get wrong constantly: the data timeframe Google uses to evaluate your condition. Don't leave it on "all time." If your campaign performed great for two months and then conditions changed recently (seasonality, fatigue, competition), an "all time" average will mask that and keep scaling even when current performance has actually dropped. Set it to the last 7 days instead, so the rule reacts to what's happening NOW, not historical performance. If you're getting tons of conversions daily, you can shorten this window even further. If you're only getting one conversion a day, you might need it slightly longer for the data to mean anything.
Also worth doing: set an upper spending cap so you don't wake up in a few months having scaled way past your actual budget comfort zone.
Now here's the part that makes this strategy really powerful, the reverse rule.
Create a second automated rule that DECREASES your budget when performance drops. Same logic, opposite direction: if cost per conversion goes above, say, £40, decrease budget by 3%. This way you're automatically spending more when things are working and pulling back when they're not, without having to babysit the account daily.
Leave a buffer zone in the middle (like £30-40 in this example) where nothing changes. That gives your account some breathing room instead of constantly adjusting on every small fluctuation.
The real value here: your budget starts responding to actual, current performance automatically. You're not manually checking in every few days trying to decide whether to scale, the system does it for you, based on rules built around your actual numbers.
And you're never locked in, you can always override manually. Big news event nobody's paying attention to your ads because of? Pull the budget down yourself. Seasonal sale about to pop off? Bump that increment up temporarily.
This is genuinely one of the lowest-effort, highest-leverage setups you can put in a Google Ads account.
Follow along, more scaling strategies like this coming. 👀
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