Google Ads – Common mistakes to check in your google ads account

This is the checklist of commons mistakes we see in most ad accounts:

· Are your campaigns over-segmented? Do you have too many campaigns broken out? The quickest way to tell would be if the status of the campaign shows “limited by budget” this may indicate the budget is spread too thin

· Do you have bid modifiers set at the keyword or call interactions that are inflating CPC costs? In some cases, you may want to do a day-part analysis to ensure you set the right bid modifiers for the most in-demand search traffic for your ad performance.

· Check to make sure the location targeting is not constricting your search volume. If targeting is set too small, it will lower the available traffic to bid in auction.

· Does the account have negative keywords? Are there enough keyword lists associated with each campaign? Search query mining (The process to find irrelevant negative searches) is the best approach to create a proprietary negative keyword strategy for your ad account

· Is your ad copy stale? Does the quality of the current ads exceed “good” and better? Increasing the quality and relevancy between ad copy and landing page will increase CTR and lower overall CPC.

· Do you have the appropriate bid strategy for the business outcome? For example if the goal is to drive as much traffic as possible, using a max clicks strategy may work best for the campaign.

Performance Tasks

 Conducting performance tasks and analysis often will ensure improved performance across all digital marketing channels.

Overall Performance Topics:

· Check for ineffective Ad Groups

· Are your max/min bids being hit?

· What time are bids being placed?

· Are there any out of Position/Guardrails set? (Think about competition and brand terms)

· Campaigns with time of day and day of week modifiers

· Low search volume keywords

· Ad relevance and quality score

· Conversion rate optimization and CPA Analysis

CPA Analysis

CPA (Cost per Acquisition) is one of the most important indicators to measure when optimizing paid search performance and spend efficiency. This metric will help you and the team decides how to throttle bid adjustments to achieve conversion goals and yield success as they pertain to the business KPIs.

CPA analysis is a very flexible analysis and can be calculated and analyzed in conjunction with a slew of segments within your Google Ads account. This includes calculating CPA at the campaign, ad group, keyword, demographic, and geo level.

CPA = Cost/Conversions

Day & Hour Parting Analysis

The Day & Hour Parting Analysis is a foundational analysis to drive better cost efficiency by setting bid adjustments in place to capitalize on the conversion rate and overall conversions during a particular time of day and week. Similar to CPA analysis this can be analyzed at many different levels. We recommend capturing the analysis on at least a 3-6-month time horizon.

 If you have access to traffic performance outside of paid search i.e. Google Analytics, we encourage to pull conversion rate data for all traffic as the analysis will become more accurate with the inclusion of more data.  Not all days and hours perform equally, and search intent can change drastically based on a multitude of factors we encourage to keep a close eye of this strategy as seasonality and competitive factors may influence this performance over time.

 Low Search Volume

It is very common to come across “low search volume” keywords over the course of an account’s lifecycle. It is important that as keywords are added and paused that you continue to audit for low search volume keywords at least on a monthly cadence.

The main issue with low search volume keywords is that they may in fact affect the overall quality score of the campaign they are in and potentially drive unnecessary volume.

In what event would you keep a low volume keyword?

If the keyword is considered a “long tail” keyword which although low volume drives quality traffic and “high intent” users. This case could be a situation to keep a potential keyword with the status “low search volume”.

Low QS Audit

Quality Score is Google’s rating of the quality and relevance of both your keywords and PPC ads. It is used to determine your cost per click (CPC) and multiplied by your maximum bid to determine your ad rank in the auction process. 

The Low QS Audit is important to identify because it will affect your overall spend efficiency due to its relation to your max CPC bid. Improving your quality score will in turn help drive lower CPCs and better ad rank. Although at times we don’t have the “secret sauce” to project the impact our optimizations have on quality score we can at least start to outline which keywords, ad groups, and campaigns are underperforming and identify a game plan to improve quality score.

Factors that affect Ad Quality Score:

1. CTR

2. Ad relevancy

3. Landing page experience

Search Query Mining

The goal of search query mining is to ensure that the queries your ads appear on are relevant to the traffic you need for your business. This exercise is one of the most commonly executed tasks as queries and intent change every day. The goal for search query mining is two-fold. SQM drives overall efficiency by negating irrelevant keywords and increases overall traffic quality.

Steps to SQM

1. Select all keywords within the ad group you are looking to optimize

2. Begin analyzing which queries are relevant or likely to convert vs not

3. Negate and add these keywords to a list or directly as an ad group level negative.

Query Mapping Audit – Every Other Week

Similar to search query mining query mapping helps identify which keywords are influencing the queries your ads show up on. Where the SQM exercise exclusively focuses on negating keywords, query mapping allows you to keep a strong pulse on new keywords, paused keywords, and overall efficiency.

Impression Share Audit - Weekly

Impression share audits are key to evaluating overall competitive and landscape changes in the search environment. Analyzing your campaign and ad group impression share and auction insights will help further contextualize full funnel performance.

In order to effectively review impression share we recommend leveraging the following metrics:

1. Search Impression Share – Overall impressions registered relative to budget, rank, and competition

2. Impression Share Lost due to Budget – Impression share lost due to overall Max CPC and overall budget

3. Impression Share Lost due to Rank – Impression share lost due to overall Max CPC, quality score, and competition