Top 5 Essential Google Ads Tasks For Car Dealerships

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

1. 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

Example of Paid Search CPA Performance Month over Month:

2. Day & Hour Parting

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.

3. 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”.

 Filter keyword performance by status “low search volume”

4. Low Quality Score

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

5. 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.

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