Google Ads Audit for Charter School





Google Ads Ads Account Audit with Recommendations 

Horizon Charter Schools   909-808-7474

Look Back Period: July 2022-April 2023

Special Questions: None asked. 

Summary

As presented the account has generated 2.66 million impressions which have resulted in 24,400 users being brought to the website. That comes out to 0.92% click-through rate which immediately tells me that the account has been using display and/or Cross-Network campaign types, in addition to search, at some level to be determined. Of those 24,000 users, 96 resulted in a conversion action which comes out to a 0.39% conversion rate. Just to jump ahead it looks like all of the conversions came from the search campaign with nothing coming from display in terms of conversion production. Total advertising costs during this time period was $11,500 with an average cost per conversion of $120 with an average cost per click of 47 cents.

 For reference we’d like to see a minimum of 2% click-through rate and 2% conversion rate with any account running Google ads. 

  • Campaign Structure & Bid Strategies- We can see one active display campaign and one Active search campaign in the account. The performance of the display campaign is typical of display with about 2.5 million impressions served with 15,900 clicks to the website, that comes out to 0.64% click through rate, which is fairly decent performance for a display campaign. The key takeaway here is no conversions were recorded from this. This could be for a variety of reasons including the lack of conversion tracking on your website with that data being tied back to Google ads. Nevertheless the interaction rate speaks for themselves, if we look at the search Campaign which generated 169,000 impressions and 8,474 clicks to the website we see that that is roughly a 5% click-through rate and significantly better than what display was producing. We also have 96 conversions recorded from search, these are calls from the ads and it looks like this was the only conversion action that was in the account. both campaigns. We also see that search partners and Display Network are opted in to the current active search campaign. 

  • Recommendations:  We have several recommendations to optimize the account and generate the most number of leads for the lowest cost per acquisition. The first of which is to remove Search Partners and Display Network from search campaigns. These add-ons are great ways to increase overall Impressions and clicks, however, they typically do not increase overall conversion production from an account. We would also recommend  a complete Suite of Google tag management/GA4 event tracking be installed on the website and tied back to analytics. This account has only been recording conversions from the search engine results page and calls placed from mobile devices from users using search.Typically we track phone calls from the website, form submitted on a website, newsletter sign ups on a website, and many other website centric events that we are sending the traffic to. 



  •  Networks- Network data supports our observations listed above. You can see by looking at the blue Google search area on the graph below that the vast majority of Impressions went to the Display Network. 0.9% of Impressions were generated on Google search resulted in 11.7% of total traffic and 100% of total conversions recorded in the account thus far. Display on the other hand is presenting an decreasing waterfall, consuming 98.1% impressions but only producing 68.3% of Clicks in an unknown number of conversions. 

  • Recommendation:This date is going to shift over time as we get good accurate conversion tracking data in the account and reporting back. Once we know what the display campaigns are doing over time, we can make further adjustments to further optimize them in an effort to decrease cost per acquisition and increase overall conversion production. 


  • Devices- Device data supports our earlier Observations. we see that the majority of Impressions generated so far came from mobile devices at 55%, what is odd here to see that 43.3% came from tablets.  We typically see tablet volume anywhere from between 1 to 3% of device volume, so that is unusually high. With that said, the mobile device waterfall continues generating 73% of all clicks and 100% of known conversions. 

Recommendation: No for the recommendations at this time however if you have any idea why you have so much tablet traffic coming to your website we would be interested to know why. Likely has to do with using tablets in the classroom and users visiting the school website. 





  • Location Targeting-Location targeting shows a gerrymandered map of cities, postal codes and also radiuses being used for geotargeting. Typically we would see a radius  dropped around a specific area with keywords driving activity. There may be reasons for targeting these specific areas that we are not aware of. 

  • Recommendation: We need more information before we can make recommendations for location targeting. Typically we have a fixed location with a given radius around that location to generate potential leads. 



  • Ad Scheduling- Ad scheduling is not enabled on the account. 

  • Recommendation: There may or may not be a case for ad scheduling on your account. The education niche is different from many other Google ads verticals. it may make sense to run ads around the clock. 




  • Audiences, Placements, Topics – The screenshots below outline topics placements that the account has been targeting so far. We do see topics listed under display campaigns however there were no placements enabled on the account. Placements allow us to tell Google exactly what websites, applications and YouTube channels we want our ads to show up on. With that information in mind I have to report to you that the majority of clicks and Impressions generated from your display campaigns came from dating applications, you can take a look at the exact websites below.  

  • Recommendation:  Depending on your objectives these websites may or may not be relevant to your goals. We require further information to understand what these goals are before we can recommend what types of websites to place ads on. 


  • Keywords – Keyword data is very consistent with what we typically see and Niche accounts. Brand names as well as service description keywords resonate throughout the account typically in phrase or exact match configuration.

Negative Keywords? There are extensive negative keywords enabled on the account. 

  • Recommendation:  We have no further recommendations on the keyword front, part of our best practices and ongoing Services regularly reviewing the Search terms report to include and exclude keywords from the account based on Performance. We also recommend keeping negative keywords in an account-level master negative keyword list and apply this list to all campaigns evenly. 


  • Conversions – The only active conversion in the account is the “calls from ads” listed as a primary conversion action with no recent conversions listed. 96 conversion actions associated with this conversion action. We also see some other conversions in there however there are no active data sets for them.


  • Recommendation: As stated previously we need to make sure that we are tracking events that happen on the website in addition to events happening on the search engine results page. Google analytics for and Google tag manager combined will allow us to have a 360° view of traffic and events happening on the website. This data will be presented back in Google analytics and also piped back to Google ads so that we can close the loop on what is happening from traffic sent from Google ads. 




  • Ads – We can see the success of responsive search ads in the screenshot below, interaction rate here, as stated previously, is at 4.99% for this responsive ad group with an average cost of $1.12 per click and an overall conversion rate of 1.13%. That is a fairly decent conversion rate for this ad group and this ad set. The average cost per conversion is $98.66. We can also see some display ads which had varying levels of effectiveness and their associated advertising costs.

Recommendation: We don’t have very many recommendations here Other than to follow known best practices, typically we have one to two responsive search ad groups running at any given time, so our recommendation here is to add another responsive ad group, typically we like to do some testing as far as targeting specific personas and or different ad copy tests. 

In regards to your display ad creative, we try to stay away from white as much as possible. High contrast, high-dynamic range images are typically best for display because when we consider the environment of websites and applications that ads are going to be displayed in we have to stand out and what is usually a very busy and dynamic mobile device screen or desktop monitor. 


  • Extensions – We see site links, calls and location extensions enabled on the account.

Recommendation: We recommend utilizing the full array of extensions available on any account. Site links calls and location extensions are a good start however there are call out extensions , business name, business logo, structure snippets, lead forms and dynamic image extensions that can also be enabled on the account. 



  • Search Impression Share – Search impression share for your account during this time was 13.25% anything under 10%, Google will not let us know what the actual value is but you cross that minimum threshold and you are competitive within your Market compared to other known advertisers. You can see connectionacademy.com and k12.com are the only two websites with a larger market share than you.

Recommendation: The only way to increase impression share is to increase your budgets and/or decrease the radius that you are competing in. Depending on your budgets we may or may not recommend increasing your targeting radius to be a consistent given radius around a fixed location, which will impact search impression share. 



Landing Pages: 

https://horizoncharterschools.lpages.co/high-school


homeschoolsacramento.org