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This guide will help you identify areas that may be considerations in completing an effective audit so that you can ensure you are set up for success. It is also important to take a step back from accounts that you manage on a day to day basis and audit them periodically to ensure you are covering all aspects of campaign management.

Before getting started it is important to make sure you identify your marketing goals, audience, and the results you are looking to get from your PPC marketing efforts. 

1. Review Conversion Tracking Set Up

It is important to first understand the goals you want to achieve with your Google Ads campaigns. Once you have a clear understanding of the goals that you are looking to achieve with your campaigns you’ll want to ensure that your conversion goals in Google Ads are aligned to help you achieve the goals that you have set.

A few steps to follow:

1. Ensure your conversions are set up and tracking properly.
2. Give your conversion goals a value and set primary and secondary conversions.
3. Review your campaign goals and ensure the campaign goals align to each campaign’s objective. It is important that your campaign goals are set for the goals that are most important to that campaign. 

2. Check All Account, Campaign, and Ad Group Settings

When creating Google ads campaigns, there are some settings that you’ll want to be aware of.

Search Partners & Display Networks

Search Partners and Display networks are something that are opted in when creating a campaign and often these are left on. This allows your ads to appear on properties owned by Google, such as YouTube and Google Maps, other companies they have partnered with, and other websites that sell ad placements. While increased placements sounds ideal, there are drawbacks to consider, like lack of control and use of parked domains. 

In short, we typically recommend opting out of search partners and display networks as a best practice.

However, you can review the performance of search partners prior to making a decision by segmenting your performance by network including search partners.

Excluded Content

Review your excluded content settings and consider if the placements selected represent your brand. For example, opting out of placements that include profanity or are sexually suggestive may be a good idea for your brand identity.

Excluded Types and Labels

Exclude digital content labels that may not represent your brand well, such as mature audiences. Also, you should consider opting out of parked domains, as this could allow you to spend your marketing budget without a real person seeing your ads.

Campaign Goals

Review each campaign’s goal settings to ensure that they are in line with your business objectives. If you are using account goal settings, it is important to be sure that all of your account goals are relevant to your campaign. If all account goals are note relevant to your campaign, we recommend using campaign-specific goals and selecting only those goals that are relevant and top priority. Your campaign goal settings are communicating to Google which goals to optimize your campaign toward.

Optimized Targeting

Since the release of optimized targeting in 2021, many advertisers are unaware that campaigns are opted into this automatically. Optimized targeting looks to expand past your targeted audience. Optimized targeting is available in Display, Discovery, and Video campaigns and while this setting may make sense if you are trying to expand your audience and reach; it does not align with the strategy of a campaign intended for retargeting website visitors. Google has made this setting difficult to find and many accounts are running optimized targeting without knowing it!

To see if you are running optimized targeting you can first take a look at your audience performance. Here you can see that this retargeting campaign has spent 99% of their budget on optimized targeting vs. the website visitor audience. 

To turn off optimized targeting, you must go to the ad group settings. As shown below, the setting is not listed but you must click “edit ad group settings” in order to see the option to toggle the optimized targeting setting to off.

Sneaky, sneaky right?!  It is very important to know if you are using optimized targeting; especially in your retargeting campaigns.

3.  Review your keywords, match types, and search terms

First, do your own keyword research and confirm that you are targeting all relevant priority keywords in your campaigns. Consider removing keywords that are not relevant to your business objectives, or any keyword that is low priority but utilizes a high percentage of your budget. It is important to ensure your goals are supported by your keyword mix. 

Next, review the match types that you are using for these keywords. At Go Fish Digital, in most cases we recommend sticking with phrase and exact match keywords when working within a budget. Broad match keywords have the capacity to include searches that don’t contain the direct meaning of your keywords and in many cases can lead to wasted ad spend. For example, life coach as a broad term can pull in a search for a relationship coach, or marriage coach which is generally a different offering.

Google gives the example of lawn aeration as a result of a user searching for “lawn mowing services”; and while some companies may offer both services; a lawn mowing company may not offer aeration in which case this would be wasted ad spend if this user clicked on your ad.

Lastly, review the search terms that your keywords are pulling in and look for keywords that may be driving searches with misaligned intent. Again, looking for keywords that may be leading to wasted ad spend and either removing keywords that are causing invalid searches or creating a negative keyword list to eliminate the invalid searches. Also, review the current negative keywords and look for any conflicting negative keywords. We see negative keywords that conflict with keywords more often than you’d expect so it is something to always review when auditing an account.

4. Review ad copy, ad strength and landing pages

Great ads are essential to your Google account. Always aim for excellent ad strength, while this may not always be possible it is essential to get your ad strength as high as possible.

Some key elements to look for:

• Be sure your keywords are included in your headlines. 
• Utilize descriptions to highlight your business value, keywords, and a call to action. 
• Confirm ads are directing to a relevant landing page.

For additional ad copy best practices, read the Go Fish Digital blog “A Guide to Creating Responsive Search Ads.” 

For keywords with a low quality score, dig into why. Is your CTR low, are your ads relevant, does your landing page have a good user experience with relevance to your keywords? These are all important factors in maintaining a good quality score.

For display, review channel, website, and app placements in the retargeting campaign and exclude irrelevant placements

5. Confirm Target Geography

Confirm your target Geography is correct in all campaigns. Also, review your geography exclusions. One account we reviewed was utilizing zip code targeting, however someone excluded the city that hosted the target zip codes! You never know what type of mistake you may uncover so make no assumptions and review every detail.

6. Audiences and Demographics

Confirm your audience targeting is correct.

• Make sure any targeted audience is correct and large enough to serve.
• Look for observation audiences that can be added for learning.
• Confirm your demographics align with business goals; exclude any demographics that do not align with your goals or consider exclusions if certain demographics have much lower performance than others.

Lastly, confirm that the campaign structure is aligned to business objectives. There are many ways to set up your Google ads campaigns; for a full breakdown here is our guide to creating an optimal Google Ads Campaign Structure.

Conclusion: 

We recommend auditing your Google ads account quarterly, in addition to when taking over your account. There are tons of settings and optimization options and it is important to review all aspects of your account regularly. Little details can make all of the difference and one setting can change your performance completely. Go Fish Digital offers account audit support and is happy to help with the audit of your account. If you’re interested in learning more about how our Paid Media team can help your business, get in touch with Go Fish Digital today to get started!

How To Audit Your Google Ads Account is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Campaign structure is eminently important to your Google Ads services for many reasons. The structure of your account includes campaigns, ad groups, keywords, negative keywords, ads, and other targeting methods which will allow you to easily manage your ads account, run tests, and simplify reporting. There is not one magical way to structure your account, as each company and industry can vary, but following these guidelines can lead to higher quality scores and help you stay organized to better optimize your account.

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• Paid Media Advertising Services
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To start, you’ll need to identify the best way to create campaigns for your business. At GFD we recommend you keep your campaign structure as simple as possible to maximize daily budget within one campaign, better utilize smart bidding and make it easy to manage. If you need to segment campaigns, below are the factors to consider:

1. Budget Allocation

If you have a specific amount of funds allocated to marketing in a particular area, then you will likely want to create separate campaigns based on this. Spend is only controlled at the campaign level.

2.  Keyword Groupings and Keyword Traffic

Ensure the searches triggered by your keywords are relevant to your business by organizing your keywords based on product and service categories, as well as website structure. If you are targeting a variety of keywords and some have a high volume of traffic while others are lower in volume, you may want to keep these in separate campaigns. Otherwise, your campaign budget will be spent mostly by the high volume keywords and the little guys will never get their share. 

3. Your Location Targeting 

Your location is set at the campaign level, so if you are looking to target different locations for different products and services, you’ll need to separate those into different campaigns.

After setting your target locations by city, state, radius, or zip it is important to review your location settings.

Of the 3 options for target locations, we recommend at GFD selecting People in your targeted locations. Although it is not the recommended option by Google it is better targeted to people in your specific location. Although in some cases such as travel related campaigns the setting people in, regularly in, or who have shown interest in your target locations may be a better fit. It is important to think about your target user and select the setting that makes the most sense for your campaign objectives.

4. Language Targeting 

If you are targeting users in different languages, you’ll need a campaign for each language in order to designate keywords, ads, and landing pages to the user in each specific language. Select the language(s) that your customers speak and ensure your ad copy and landing pages match that language. If you are targeting multiple countries and your customers may speak multiple languages it may be best to select all languages to ensure you are showing to your users regardless of the language setting on the computer that they are using.

5. Your Brand

We recommend separating your brand keywords into their own campaign if possible. This can give you full control on how much of your marketing dollars are spent making sure you show up when users are searching for your brand. Always remember: If you are not at the top of the page, someone else will be. 

6. Bid Strategy

If you think a certain bid strategy will work well for a specific campaign then you may want to consider having it in a separate campaign. 

Smart bidding allows you to automatically bid on your keyword without a lot of manual guessing, and it can leverage adjusting your bids based on your goals while using data as the basis of the decisions. There are a few automated bid strategies available, but it’s important to understand how each one can impact results. 

We tend to recommend launching a campaign with enhanced CPC to allow a more manual effort for adjusting bids as needed and then moving to an automated strategy when conversion data starts to accumulate.

Additionally, we recommend using enhanced CPC for optimal results. Google will show a warning that setting bids manually may lower performance but rest assured this is a great place to start.

Once conversion data has accumulated and you have at least 50 conversions in a 30 day window, we recommend switching your bid strategy to Target CPA, Target ROAS  or Maximize conversions depending on your business objectives.

7. Campaign Settings

When creating Google ads campaigns, there are some settings that you’ll want to be aware of.

Search Partners & Display Networks

This is automatically something that you are opted in to when creating a campaign. This allows your ads to appear on properties owned by Google, such as YouTube and Google Maps, other companies they have partnered with, and other websites that sell ad placements. While increased placements sounds ideal, there are drawbacks to consider, like lack of control and use of parked domains. In short, we recommend opting out of search partners and display networks as a best practice.

Excluded Content

Opt out on showing your ads on placements that don’t represent your brand. For example, opting out of placements that include profanity or are sexually suggestive may be a good idea for your brand identity.

Excluded Types and Labels

Exclude digital content labels that may not represent your brand well, such as mature audiences. Also, you should consider opting out of parked domains, as this could allow you to spend your marketing dollars without a real person seeing your ads.

8. Quality Score

Quality score gives you an idea of how your ad stacks up against other advertisers. Higher quality scores can lead to lower CPCs and higher ad positions.

First, make sure you optimize for ad relevance. Be sure you have quality ad copy that matches the intent behind a user’s search and that your keywords are utilized within the ad copy. Utilize extensions, Google looks at ads and extensions when calculating the quality score. Be sure to take advantage of as many extensions as possible to secure more real estate on the SERP.

Secondly, optimize for landing page experience. Be sure your keywords and ads are relevant to your landing page to ensure great user experience. Ensuring that your keywords appear both in your ad copy and on your landing pages will help increase quality score leading to higher ad rank positions and lower CPC’s.

Summary

There are multiple ways to set up a great Google Ads search campaign and many considerations along the way. Be sure to consider what is best for you and what will help you hit your business objectives and drive results. Not sure where to start? Reach out to the GFD Paid Media team and we can help!

About Go Fish Digital

Go Fish Digital is an award-winning, full-service Google Premier Partner that’s ready to take your digital marketing to the next level. Our team of creative, technical marketers and industry-leading experts perform services in Search Engine Optimization, Digital PR, Online Reputation Management, Content Marketing, Conversion Rate Optimization, Website Design & Development, Paid Media, Influencer Marketing, and Copywriting for a wide array of different B2B and B2C clients.

How to Create an Optimal Google Ads Campaign Structure is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.