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Why is Google Advertising needlessly complex?
Every other platform:
– Install our app on your Shopify.
– Create pixel.
– Auto-link products.
– Done.Google:
– Install our Google channel app.
– Install our GA4 app.
– Install our tags Manually.
– Connect them all together Manually.
– Still half my products have “missing GTIN” issue, that cannot be resolved via the Google apps, because all these Google apps don’t like talking to each otherAnd don’t even get me started on the attribution and audience mess ups.
Customer service? None existent, or gives ridiculous ‘advice’.
What is this? Trillion dollar company, or a three man start up?
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1 Reply
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Even if you were doing something for paid social, you should still have Google Analytics set up. It is not like you would only set up GA4 because you are running Google ads. You should have Google Analytics set up to know what is going on across a business.
As long as you install the Google Ads conversion tag, either manually or with the Google sales channel app, you don’t need to do both options. Google will show warnings if you install something manually and don’t use the app. It is how they set up their notification system, which has a clear flaws. Having to connect Google accounts together is like a 30 second job. No different then having to connect Facebook assets together in Business Manager.
GTIN is still something you can use with Facebook and Microsoft ads. Most ad platforms accept GTIN now as they took a page out of Google’s ad playbook. If you have GTIN issues, just add it to your Shopify store and that solves the issue. Having GTIN helps improve your shopping feed and shopping campaign performance.
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It’s one of the founding platforms, the bulkiness is built on years on sketchy development. You can’t expect anything to be that clean when it’s never started on a clean slate.
And it can’t start over either because it’ll cost too much so they just develop around the existing technology.
Note that I’m not defending it — they make freaking billions every quarter, it’s not going to cost them more than a few of these billions to review everything.
Other platforms came out with their solution years later and could afford to trim all the crap they didn’t need.
On the customer service, it’s gone to the gutter. The more money they have been earning the poorer it’s become. Absolutely ridiculous.
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Brrrruh you ain’t never lie smh
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Because they are designed for huge clients who need all of that. Such as Google themselves and huge corporate accounts who ask for and/or need those things.
I’m not saying this is good, I’m just answering your question.
AWS has the same problem. It’s extremely complex because customer number 1 is Amazon, they use all of that. AWS started and remains today their own internal tools. And the huge companies that pay them massive sums of money also need all of those things.
I repeat: i’m not defending the practice, I’m just answering your question. I wish both of those would make simpler products for smaller users.
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Googles platform is designed to be modular as a way to avoid anti trust scrutiny. So ads, GTM, GA all can theoretically be used independently with any other ad product. But the reality now you need 3 products to do something simple
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If you think it’s too complicated now, you should have been doing it 10 years ago.
Admittedly, there was better support back then because it was before any kind of simplified or AI powered functionality and Google still wanted to work with agencies rather than squeeze them out.
Most other platforms are easier to set-up, but that’s because their ecosystems are less complex and their are fewer safeguards in place for both advertisers and users – you can get something going fairly simply, but may not work to it’s potential unless you know enough to get under the hood and do a bit more work to improve performance. Google asks people to do more upfront because they need a higher standard of information to deliver their advertising services across a much more complex range of properties. The good thing about that is, if what you are doing is good enough for Google, it will probably improve your input for other platforms. Also, according to Google Marketing Live it looks as though product feeds are going to get a lot simpler over the next 12 months or so.
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In fairness, missing gtins isn’t a complex issue and isn’t a result of Google Apps not talking to each other.
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