Being surrounded by branding geniuses isn’t easy for a Google Ads guy. They love to remind me that brand building plays the long game, while I spend my days in the short-term. They tease me about chasing clicks and conversions when they’re out shaping culture and planting flags in memory.

It makes me think of Billy Joel’s lyric: “You may be right, I may be crazy.” And of Niels Bohr’s paradox: “The opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.” Both lines capture the tension perfectly.

Les Binet and Peter Field showed that both long-term brand building and short-term activation matter. One without the other leaves the strategy unfinished. Long-term builds trust and preference; short-term delivers cash flow and momentum.

Google Search Ads, for better or worse, sits firmly in the short-term camp. But that doesn’t make it shallow or disposable. Done right, it requires discipline. Two things in particular: focus and patience.

Focus. You need absolute clarity about what you want. Is it a lead? A purchase? A booking? Once you know, you set up conversion tracking so you can see when it happens. Then you decide how much you’re willing to pay Google for that result. Without this clarity, you’re throwing darts in the dark.

Patience. Smart Bidding is powerful, but it doesn’t work on command. It needs data to learn. Give it 15 to 20 conversions, then step back for two or three weeks while the algorithm sharpens its aim. If you demand instant results, you’ll pull the plug before it has a chance to show its value.

There’s one more wrinkle: privacy laws, consent pop-ups, and ad blockers. Google only shows about 60% of your total conversions. The rest are hidden, not gone. If you panic when the dashboard looks light, you’ll miss the real performance happening behind the curtain.

That’s why running Google Ads feels, at times, a little mad. You need to trust what you can’t always see, stay patient while the machine learns, and keep your focus sharp when everything around you pushes for more, faster.

So, if you’re looking for an effective Google Ads campaign, don’t expect a straight highway or instant arrival. Like the Camino, it asks for clear direction and steady steps. And when someone doubts the short-term path, remember Billy Joel—“I just may be a lunatic you’re looking for.”

Latest posts by Luis and Daniel Castaneda (see all)