Six Google Ads mistakes in almost every South African account

1. Broken conversion tracking. The most common problem by far. Accounts tracking page views or button clicks instead of actual leads, or double-counting the same conversion. "Your data looks super great" while measuring nothing.

2. Bidding strategies optimising on bad data. A direct consequence of the first. Google's AI thinks it's doing a great job — because you told it the wrong definition of success. If it can only see add-to-cart, it buys you add-to-carts, not purchases.

3. Disapproved merchant feeds nobody noticed.

4. Fifty to a hundred keywords stuffed into one ad group, where best practice is 15–20 high performers.

5. Targeting all of South Africa on a budget that could properly cover the southern suburbs or Sandton.

6. Accepting all of Google's recommendations. Dean's warning here is the one to frame:

"Google's ultimate responsibility is to make revenue for their shareholders — not to the advertiser using the product. Take those recommendations with a pinch of salt and only apply the ones that will actually make a difference."

The budget maths, in rand

Dean's baseline for a small business: aim for at least 10 clicks a day per campaign. At an average first-page bid of R5, that's R50/day — roughly R1,500 a month per campaign. Five campaigns, R7,500. Two rules wrap the number: never allocate more than you can afford to lose in the early phase, and treat the first three months as a paid data-collection period, not a results period. "Data is gold. Use it to guide you — otherwise you're making irrational decisions."

The work happens outside the platform

Dean's keyword process starts on the client's website, not in Keyword Planner. Match your paid search terms to the SEO already on the site (it drives cost-per-click down), check what competitors' ads promise, and decide where traffic should land before deciding what triggers it. His line:

"Your website is the only salesperson that grafts for you 24/7. You can write the best ads in the world, but if people drop off your site, it doesn't matter how good the ads are."

His learning method for beginners is just as practical: build a dummy account with no credit card linked, rebuild problems you find on Reddit, and put every campaign in a spreadsheet before touching the platform. And always start with the bread-and-butter service — "become a bigger fish in a smaller pond."

Try this week: audit your conversion tracking today. Dean finds this broken more than anything else, and everything downstream — bidding, budget, reporting — depends on it. Then count keywords per ad group and prune to the performing 15–20.

Sourced from recorded, on-the-record interviews on the South African Digital Marketing Podcast. Every practitioner quoted above is named in the text.