I’m curious about people who have worked with Google Ads and Google Analytics for a while now. If you had to start over and learn these platforms again from zero, what would you do different this time?
What mistakes would you skip?
Which areas would you spend more time on early?
I’m wondering if there are things that turned out to be time wasters or dead ends that beginners like me should avoid. On the flip side, what core concepts or techniques should someone master first to get good results faster?
Also interested in any tools, courses, or learning methods that really made a difference for you. Share your thoughts on what you learned the hard way so others don’t have to make the same errors.
Manual campaign optimization was my biggest time waster. I’d sit there all day adjusting bids, pausing keywords, and tweaking ad copy every time performance shifted. Complete madness.
If I could start over? I’d automate everything from day one. Set up automated rules for bid management, budget allocation, and performance monitoring. Build workflows that pull Google Ads data, analyze it against Analytics goals, and make adjustments automatically. Saves massive amounts of time.
I also wasted months manually syncing data between Google Ads and Analytics for reports. Now I use automated pipelines that pull from both platforms, clean the data, and push it wherever I need it. Total game changer for understanding the customer journey.
Manual work made me reactive instead of strategic. Automate the repetitive stuff and you’ll actually have time for audience research, creative testing, and campaign strategy.
Most people still do this manually because they think automation’s complicated. It’s not. Modern no-code platforms make it simple to connect Google Ads and Analytics with your other tools. You can drag and drop these workflows.
Start with automation mindset from day one. Your future self will thank you.
Totally agree! Learning to analyze data right from the start is crucial. I spent way too long on trying to optimize ads without understanding the metrics. Focusing on a handful of campaigns first can clear up a lot of confusion!
Biggest mistake? I jumped straight into creating campaigns without understanding attribution models first. Spent months using only last-click attribution, which completely warped my view of what was actually working. Turns out I was killing campaigns that were crushing it in the upper funnel - only figured this out after switching to data-driven attribution. Also didn’t set up proper conversion tracking from the start. Thought I’d fix it later, but you lose all that historical data. The algorithms need conversion data to learn, so waiting months basically meant starting from scratch. Another thing - I should’ve mapped out audience overlap way earlier. Burned through budget running campaigns that were just bidding against each other for the same people.