How We Audit a Google Ads Account & Make Recommendations

(Include Clients Logo at the Top of the Document so they feel like it was done just for them, because it was.) 

Google Ads and Analytics – CLIENT NAME HERE (XXX-XXX-XXXX)

(Include the Platforms that were looked at in the analysis, State the Exact Google Ads Account Name and CID so that everyone is on the same page as to what account was audited. This is even more important with nested accounts in MCC’s or large corporate accounts or accounts with Local Ads Accounts attached to them. Don’t make the mistake of auditing the wrong account.)

Prepared by David Becklean, Director of SEM at Music City Digital Media

Jan 25, 2022

Analysis Period: January 2021-January 2022

(State the Name of the person(s) and company that prepared the accounts. States the date the audit was started, this will likely be a few days to a few weeks earlier than when it is delivered. State the Analysis Period, be sure you are looking at the correct timeframe and/or looking at a period that will provide statistically significant data. There may also be times when the account was under management by different persons or had different campaigns running. The point is to make sure your looking at the right data or everything else is a waste of time.)  

Special Questions: ( During the interview process, be sure to ask your potential client if they have any specific questions they are trying to answer from their data. State those questions here and provide a summary answer, supported by specific data from the audit below)

1. Tracking Issues: Yes, there do seem to be some tracking issues. The Google Ads and Analytics Remarketing lists are not being populated and have flags to be reviewed. Conversion Data is non-descript and vague as to what actions are actually being taken on the website. Nothing is clearly defined as being a form submit or other usual lead action.

2. Signs of Structured Testing?: No obvious signs of testing have been found. Specifically there are no duplicate campaigns with names indicating tests of any Variables, No alternate landing pages, nor are there are listed Experiments listed in Google Ads. 

Google Ads

• Structure, Networks & Bid Strategies – Account Structure is one of the most important and subjective parts of a successful google ads campaign.  As presented the account contains over 42 campaigns, all but 3 are search campaigns with those 3 representing 2 Display and 1 Smart campaign. The majority of the spend has been concentrated in Neon – Vetter US ClinDev  resulting in ~1,800 conversions. Other Neon Vetter Campaigns make up the remaining spend and conversions. 

• Bid Strategies are primary Maximize Conversions – Target Cost Per Acquisition (TCPA) and Maximize Clicks. TCPA was set to between 1 to 20 Euros. 

• Google Search Partners was found to be enabled on the majority of search campaigns. 

• Recommendations:  In terms of structure, depending on your immediate objectives, we suggest continuing structuring your campaigns with products and lines of business offered on the website, specifically, Clinical Manufacturing, Commercial Manufacturing, and Packaging & Assembly. Target CPA can be a great tool for scaling an account but the market can be highly variable. Fixed CPA’s that fall below a rising Average CPA would result in a decrease in quality and volume of leads coming in. Consider Max Conversions as the Bid Strategy and see what a new average CPA is after 3-4 months without CPA restrictions. Finally, Google Search Partners is great for increasing reach and brand awareness but as far as conversions go they do not actually add much to the bottom line, we recommend limiting the network to Google Search Only for Search Campaigns. 

• Location & Ad Scheduling- Location and Add Scheduling are a critical part of a good account. Without going into the bidding rabbit hole, the most important thing is to stack our bid adjustments for the best areas and times of day to maximize our opportunities during these times. If you look at the graphs below you can see that there are clearly days and time of the day where more conversions happen. 142 Locations were found as GeoTargets. San Francisco, Germany and the UK represented the Top 3 locations for conversions. No Ad Scheduling was found in use on the account and ads are running around the clock. There seems to be a concentration of conversions during normal business hours however, not as much concentration as is normally seen in a typical B2B account. Wednesday and Thursday are the top converting days. Account Time Zone is set to GMT +1  Central European Time.

• Recommendation: Locations and Ad Scheduling offering several opportunities to make the account more efficient and increase the overall volume of leads being generated. Bid Adjustments applied to peak production days are going to be the #1 recommendation for this account. Specifically, +10% Adjustments Monday – Friday with another 10% for peak hours 8AM – 8PM. Locations can also increase production by placing adjustments on top producing locations and known client “Hot Spots” like San Francisco. The Top 10 locations for Pharma and Medical Devices would be worthy of a test campaign to see if they specifically produce consistent leads. 

• Bid Adjustments – Bid Adjustments have not been found in use anywhere in the account, including Advanced Bid Adjustments, Devices, Ad Scheduling, Locations, Audiences or Demographics.18-24 Year olds were found in Targeting for almost all campaigns.

• Recommendation: Bid Adjustments are approved increases to our maximum bid in the google auction sequence for targeting criteria that better align with our idealized demographic profile. These include Location, Ad Schedule, Audience, Device, Conversion Type et al. . By putting positive bid adjustments on the demo segments we want and negative adjustments on the ones we don’t want, we can guide Google’s AI to targeting the best user for our objectives. We should also remove 18-24 and possibly 25-35 Year olds from targeting. 

• Audiences & Placements – Audiences are using observational targeting and applied haphazardly to the campaigns. Current Audiences include Avid Investors, Enterprise Software and Staffing and Recruiting. No consistent methodology with audiences is   being observed. Typically we would see an account like this targeting Business Entities of certain sizes using Employee Size. We could also utilize Healthcare Industry Targeting.

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• Recommendation: Remove Audiences that don’t make sense and replace them with ones that do. Healthcare and Business Size are the two that make the most sense but some time and research can discover other. We can test Observational and Direct Targeting in different campaigns inthe account to see which one offers more efficiency. 

• Keywords – Top Producing Keywords are variations of Product Category and General Description: “Pharmaceutical Manufacturer” , “cdmo”, “biotech manufacturing companies” and “Contract Manufacturing”. 

• Recommendation:  There may be an opportunity to discover new keywords but the vast majority of production will come from keywords already established in the account. Specific Lines of Business can also get tested. 

• Conversions – Typically conversions include Form Submissions, Phone Calls, Email Clicks, Directions Clicks and other affirmative actions that show a website user doing something to engage with the business. We are seeing Outbound Clicks, Button Consult Pages and Scroll Depth being counted as conversions. Also, the Google Ads and Analytics Remarketing lists are active but not connected and therefore not building any remarketing lists. 

• Recommendation:  We should fix the Ads and Analytics retargeting tags so that we can resume building retargeting lists and activate display retargeting campaigns to users who have visited the website previously. We also recommend a conversion overhaul to make sure we are tracking the form submissions or at least define the conversions for what it is if already tracking these. As a general best practice, we recommend offering potential customers as many ways to interact with your business as possible. LiveChats, Email Address, Phone Numbers and Maps are all great ways to increase user engagement. For instance, we have seen most websites that install a LiveChat function generate a 1% higher overall conversion rate.  We do understand that this is not always possible due to security or operational limitations. 

• Devices-  Devices data may yield the single most important discovery of this audit. Like many businesses, where your ads are seen and where they are engaged with are two different places. Mobile Ads traffic seems to be consuming 65% of impressions and 56% of clicks, however it only yields 31% of conversions. Contrast this to Desktop traffic which consumes 32% of impressions and 42% of clicks but yields 67% of all conversions. The account is upside down on devices. 

Recommendation: Desktop targeting is critical for you as it is for most B2B and Industrial accounts. We live in a mobile-first world but we forget that first look is usually speculative or a “quick glance” to see if something exists. It is once we return to our desks that we are actually doing work and more likely to engage with the website and fill out the form . Positive Bid Adjustments for Desktops and Negative Bid Adjustments for Mobile Devices will help make the account more efficient by targeting the higher converting traffic and spending more of our budget there. 

• Ads & Extensions –  Sitelinks, Callouts, Image and Dynamic Extensions were found in play on some campaigns but not all. We would revise and add more of the Current Extensions, in addition to Structured Snippets, Lead Forms and Call ( if possible). 

• 2,931 Ads were found in the account which is far too many to individually review in a 5 hour audit. There were however, some clear winners and losers in the Ads themselves. Many Ads are Expanded Text Ads, which have been phased out for 2022, but there are also Responsive Search Ads. Average Conversion rate is 20% which is an good rate and shows a functional sales funnel with strong correlation between keywords, ad copy and service offered to searchers. 

Recommendation: We recommend using  RSA’s allow you to utilize many permutations of headlines and descriptions that are driven by google’s machine-learning. They test and run the best performing ad copy to the best possible targets in real time. We also would utilize the full range of extensions available, specifically Lead Form Extensions which allow us to capture searcher information off the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for the same cost as a click to website. Structured Snippets are also a great way to get the ad to take up more digital real estate on the SERP and usually results in higher CTR’s. 

Google Analytics 

There were 346K users to site with 566K Sessions , indicating definite repeat traffic to the website from the same users. Bounce Rate is a typical 47% with average session duration of 2 Minutes and 7 Seconds. Traffic seems to be trending upward in the last half of the year, however all KPI’s were showing a negative Year over Year trend. 

Analytics data is atypical. The vast majority of site traffic is categorized as Other but actually contains a variety of traffic sources from Google to Social. This looks like someone tried to put custom definitions on traffic but this structure makes analysis confusing at best. Organic Search is indicated at 25% of traffic, but the vast majority of  traffic in Other is from Google, so I am hesitant to confirm that as a legitimate search percentage, it maybe in fact be much higher (50+%?). Paid Search Volume is consistent with Adwords showing 22K clicks and Analytics showing 19.1K.  Referral, Direct , Display and Social Traffic are all contributing traffic sources. 

We are also seeing events being recorded in the Events overview section. Perhaps the Download Event and Form event should be defined as a goal and imported to analytics in addition to any other user-actions that are already being recorded ( Get in Touch, as a mid level metric).