What 1,700 Hours of Teaching Google Ads Reveals About How People Actually Use It

After spending roughly 1,700 hours coaching individuals and businesses on Google Ads—jumping into their accounts, making adjustments, and hearing their real frustrations—Chris Schaefer has identified eight patterns that appear almost universally. The insights are less about technical fixes and more about how people think, trust, and make decisions when they're inside the platform.

People Explore Instead of Improve

The single most common behavior Schaefer observes is that people tend to set up new campaigns rather than improve existing ones. When something isn't working, they start over. They create a fresh search campaign, a new display campaign, or a video campaign instead of tweaking what they already have.

Schaefer understands why. "You don't really know what's wrong," he says. "So it's easier to just start over and go with what you've learned so far." But this approach has a cost. Google Ads relies on historical performance data to optimize. When you scrap a campaign, you lose whatever learning the system had accumulated. A campaign that worked the first time may not work the second, and one that worked the second time may fail the third. The results become unpredictable.