"Google doesn't work in Egypt."
A line repeated by media buyers and business owners who had genuinely bad experiences. It's wrong, but the mistake is understandable.
The cause isn't the platform. It's a set of shared problems we find in most accounts we audit.
The first thing we look at isn't the campaigns. It's the business's numbers over recent months. When sales figures make no sense against spend, ROAS 30 and similar, there's no point continuing inside the account. Go straight to tracking.
And we found the thing we see in 90% of accounts: every event marked as primary.
What does that actually mean? There should be one primary goal, and in e-commerce it's purchase. When everything is primary, a user doing a page view counts as a sale, and Smart Bidding learns on that signal. You're telling Google to bring you people who do these things, and it does exactly that, very efficiently. Just not the thing that sells.
That's where the complaint comes from. The account spends, the on-screen numbers look good, and no money arrives. You also can't tell good campaigns from bad ones, because the whole measure is contaminated. On top of that, the running campaigns were Pmax with weak assets.
So the fix started with tracking, through Tag Manager. Only once we'd confirmed it was working correctly did the structure get built: a brand-name campaign with one Arabic and one English ad group, Pmax focused visually on offers and USPs, standard Shopping, and headlines written against the audience's pain points and their actual search terms rather than the brand talking about itself.
The result: more than $75,000 USD in November.
Google Ads produces millions in Egypt, once the fundamentals are right.
If an account has more than one primary conversion, the account is lying to you, and every decision after that is built on the lie.
The lesson
One Primary conversion only
