Google Ads Audit for Cash Home Buyers
Google Ads and Analytics – 917-481-1043 Express Homebuyers (Main)
Prepared by David Becklean, Music City Digital Media
9/16/23
Analysis Period: August 2022 – September 2023
Special Questions:
Google Ads
As requested we’re looking at the last year of account data going back to approximately August 2022. With that in mind, we can see that the account has generated approximately 446,000 impressions which resulted in 18,200 users being brought to the website. That comes out to an approximate 4% click-through rate at the account level.
For reference we like to see a minimum of 2% click rate and conversion rate for all things related to Google Ads, especially search and your account is exceeding this minimum. A 2023 benchmark of key performance indicators by industry is available from SEM Journal and I am including a link to it here for your reference.
Of the users brought to the website, approximately 2,270 resulted in a designated conversion action. That comes out to a conversion rate of 9.85%. Assuming the conversions that you have been recording in the account are valid lead capture conversion actions, this would be categorized as an excellent conversion rate. Average cost per acquisition is registering at $279, which is a fairly reasonable price to pay for the opportunity.
Total advertising costs during this time was $633,000 with an average cost per click of $34.86.This is a very expensive vertical in the cost per click is not at all surprising.
A couple other important metrics to look at are the overall search impression share which was 31.31%. That is an excellent search impression share considering most of these campaigns are competing in several large markets, Most notably Washington D.C. We do see conversion value being reported back into the account has registered $240,000 , however, it does appear that this is primary lead generation and all offline conversion data is not making its way back here 100%.
Campaign Structure, Networks & Bid Strategies –
There are eight active search campaigns and the account at the present moment. The account has three campaigns utilizing the maximize conversion bid strategy, three campaigns utilizing the maximize conversion Target Cost Per Acquisition (TCPA) strategy, and two campaigns utilizing enhanced cost per click bid strategies. We will discuss bid strategies more in-depth momentarily.
We like to see search campaigns as those are typically the ones that generate the best results from users who are actively searching for your designated keywords in your designated geographic areas. These campaigns have spent between $163,000 and $4,000 respectively over the look-back period.
Search impression share for active campaigns in the account ranges from a low of 36 to a high of 99. This represents some very healthy market shares for the geographic targets of these campaigns. One thing that I would draw your attention to is lost search impression share due to rank. You can see that the Baltimore-all devices-prospecting campaign has a 49% lost impression share due to rank, Washington DC-all devices -conquesting has a 31% lost impression share due to rank as well as some double digit losses for the Richmond-Petersburg-all devices-prospecting campaign and the Richmond-Petersburg-all devices-conquesting campaign. Typically we like to minimize lost impression share due to rank as it is something that we can easily control without increasing budgets. It seems like this account very rarely loses due to budgets and increasing ad strength by diversifying headlines would definitely serve the account.
Click through rate and conversion rates appear healthy across the board with mid to high double digit conversion rates as well as high single digit click-through rates on active search campaigns.
There are a couple campaigns currently opted into the Search Partners Network. The Search Partners Network represents other third-party search engines and search result providers that is not the same as the Google search engine results page. Ad rotation optimization is enabled for all active campaigns.
I wanted to take a second to talk about Target Cost Per Acquisition as well as Cost Per Click enhanced bid strategy. Starting with cost per acquisition, it appears that targets are set to approximately $487 to $500 per acquisition, in comparison to the account history which has a clearly defined historical average cost of around $280. I am wondering why the TCPA here is set to almost double what the account history says a realistic cost per acquisition should be. Also in my experience, you have more than enough budget to be generating quality leads at the $280 cost for acquisition level. $480 is closer to Personal Injury or other legal related CPA.
Talking about Cost Per Click bid strategy, to be blunt that is an outdated and antiquated bid strategy that does not take advantage of contextual data. If the computer does a handful of things really well it is managing the bid process in defining cost per clicks for us so that we can spend our time in more productive areas of account management. I recommend moving away from CPC bid strategy entirely using maximized conversion or a derivative strategy (TCPA).
Recommendations: Remove all active search campaigns from search partners and make sure that they are only serving results on the search engine results page.
I would also change bid strategies for any campaigns using CPC enhanced bid strategy to Maximize Conversions or Maximize Conversions TCPA.
I would also reconsider what my target cost per acquisition was designated at for those campaigns. It seems like a $280 cost for acquisition is what the account has been running for the last year, so I’m not really sure why it is set so high here.
Improving ad rank will help all of your existing search campaigns perform better and outperform the competition.
Ads & Extensions – The vast majority of Ad spend, traffic generation and conversion production is coming from a handful of responsive search ads as screenshotted out below. Please Note there are over 85,000 Ads in the account.
Ad strength ranges from average to good for the Top 10 Ads, although we do see some poor -ranked Ads in the account as well.
We also observed multiple assets being leveraged in the account, we see business name, business logo, sitelinks, call outs, Structured Snippets, calls, locations and finally prices enabled in the account.
Recommendation: The first thing to point out is that there’s over 85,000 ads in the account. That is categorized on the extreme size of account level management and probably overkill for what you’re trying to accomplish. It seems like there’s a lot of opportunity for consolidation, streamlining and minimization in this account to make it more efficient and easier to manage from the account management perspective.
You’re doing a good job leveraging assets/extensions in the account. Continue to use these across all active search campaigns to take up the maximum amount of real estate on the search engine results page and give users a multitude of options to engage with.
Increasing ad strength is a surefire way to increase overall account performance, decrease cpc, decrease cpa, increase overall conversion production and everything else we want. There’s no reason to have ads that are categorized as poor or average performance when the system will actively give you suggestions to include in the 15 responsive headline positions for responsive search ads that will increase your ad strength. Increased ad strength translates to better auction outcomes and therefore positioning, click-through rates and everything else that follows through the funnel.
Again due to the sheer volume of ads in the account I was only able to look at top performing ads and ad copy. Existing ad copy is doing a good job of speaking to the issues that your searchers are facing and providing them with clear and compelling calls to actions to engage with your business, i.e. sell your home quick and easy.
Keywords – Keyword data has exactly what you would think it would be in a well-optimized, Google search heavy account. We see the vast majority of Ad spend being located in exact and phrase match keywords related to: cash offer on house, sell your house for cash, sell house fast, we buy houses, selling a house fast, sell my house fast, how to sell your house fast. We also see one broad match keyword here in the top 10 with home buying companies.
We are seeing a lot of branded Search terms within the account for specific campaigns and only a couple campaigns using broader product service and description keywords
There were 24 negative keyword lists in the account. That seems like a slightly high number and may present an opportunity for consolidation.
Recommendation: Review of the Search Terms list on a regular basis is always going to be a solid best practice to stand behind. You will likely come across ideas that you would like to add to the account as well as keywords that you would like to negate from showing up on in the future. Outside of Google Ads reviewing your Google Search Console organic keywords list can also provide viable Search terms to include in PPC targeting.
For the most part you’re doing a great job on keywords.
Location & Ad Scheduling- The account is set to GMT – 4, United States Eastern time. You can see from the Conversion data below that there is clearly a propensity for users to interact with your website and result in a conversion action between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. Mondays through Saturday. This may represent an opportunity for you to increase your impression share and click through rate for users who are searching for your services during this time as your data indicates that those users are more likely to result in a conversion action during these times.
Recommendation: There may be an opportunity to increase conversion production in the accountant by applying ad schedules to the days of week and times of day where users are more likely to result in a conversion action. In your account this appears to be Monday through Saturday from 8:00 a.m. to approximately 8:00 p.m. Eastern time.
Location data is obviously correlated to where you want to focus your efforts. It seems like you have very specific targets and without having more information about your objectives it is difficult to provide location recommendations.
Bid Adjustments, Devices – Device data indicates that the majority of Impressions clicks and conversions are coming from users on mobile devices. We see a very small percentage of users coming from tablets with the remainder coming over desktop devices. Click-through rate data for the different platforms is all very similar ranging from a low of 3.74% for tablets to a high of 4.17% for mobile devices. There’s not enough variation within these metrics to indicate a preference of one direction or another.
Looking at conversion rates however we do see a little bit more information that is usable. Conversion rates from users coming on tablets are at 6.1% compared to mobile devices at 10.9% in desktop devices at 8.93%. Finally, if we look at our relative cost per conversion they’re all in the ballpark of $300 plus or minus 10%.
Recommendation: There may be an opportunity to improve the accounts overall efficiency by removing tablets from targeting. Both mobile phones and computers are going to be your primary device targeting
Audiences – Audience data indicates that converting users are between the 55 to 64 age range with a relatively equal distribution between males and females. This is based on 68% of conversion data being known in the account.
Recommendation: Audience data is very straightforward and with all search campaigns user defined search terms are driving results. If you were to move towards a Target cost per acquisition bid strategy at some point in the future it would be worth it to put positive adjustments between 10 and 20% on your ideal demographic, geotarget and Call Actions, however, I believe that your best bet is to stick with maximize conversions to field the greatest number of opportunities out in the market.
Conversions – This is an interesting time for conversion tracking for everyone in digital marketing. Obviously the switch over from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 has provided its own unique set of issues and I would recommend setting up GA4 and utilizing the Google Tag for event tracking as that is the declared best standard from Google moving forward.
With that said I would still like to look at primary versus secondary conversion actions within the account. I have highlighted a couple of conversions in the account, one for web form submissions which is designated as a secondary conversion action as well as multiple conversion actions for phone calls happening from the search engine results page and directly from the website. In my opinion, these should be set as primary conversion actions because it’s critical that the system keep track of which users perform a primary conversion action and that this data is recorded in conjunction with them, so that this data can be leveraged back to the system and an effort to find more similar users who will also result in a conversion action later on down the line. This is a critical part of any automated bid strategy that leverages contextualized” black box” data as part of an automated bid strategy such as Maximize Conversions and its derivative strategies(TCPA,TROAS). Having these designated as secondary conversion actions is very detrimental toward a lead generation account.
It does also appear that there is a strong salesforce conversion tracking setup integrated into the account. I’m not sure operationally how you are set up and what your primary lead generation actions are. Best practices is to cover all of your bases and tracking conversion actions from website, CRM specific landing pages and any other multi-channel medium.
Recommendation: Switching lead action items from secondary to primary conversion actions as our number one recommendation in the account. Obviously you have your Salesforce goals set up and Reporting back in there, no need to change anything with Salesforce ,however, I believe the system will provide better results when primary conversion action data from phone calls and form submits has been fed into the system.