Google Ads Ads Account Audit with Recommendations
457-988-2870 CareVoyant
Look Back Period: 2021 – Present
Summary
As presented the account has generated 15.9 million impressions during the look back period which goes back to January 1 2021. Those Impressions resulted in 29,100 users being brought to the website from Google Ads with 66 conversions recorded. Total advertising cost during that time was $73,000.
Secondary metrics here are coming out to a 0.18% click-through rate and a 0.23% conversion rate. For reference, we like to see a minimum click-through rate of 2% for search based Google Ads and typically 1% for display based Google Ads.
Conversion rates vary wildly by industry and business however, 66 conversions over a period of almost 3 years seems like a very low overall conversion rate. I would suspect that we are either missing some conversions in the account or we are dealing with some display heavy campaign structure which are causing us to serve ads but maybe not necessarily to the right audience to get them to convert into buying your product.
Campaign Structure & Bid Strategies- Campaign structure includes three search campaigns with one responsive display campaign. Budgets are fairly evenly distributed with ~$26,000 in the responsive display , $24,000 in the Home Care Search campaign. We also see $20,000 in ad spend in the private duty nursing software and another $2,400 going into branded keywords.
All search campaigns are set to maximize clicks bid strategy and we see click-through rates on the search campaigns varying from 1.99% all the way up to 21% for your branded campaigns.
The Home Care campaign is getting a 5.36% click-through rate which we would categorize as good and it appears this campaign is likely taking advantage of Phrase or Exact match keywords to reach this high click-through rate.
The responsive display campaign is a little more concerning; it served approximately 15.6 million impressions to generate 14,690 clicks, that’s coming out to a 0.09% click-through rate with an average cost of $1.82 per click. That seems like a very low click-through rate, even for display, and it immediately makes me want to investigate what topics, content and placements are enabled for this responsive display campaign. If none of these options have been enabled, it means that these campaigns have been running in the wild without direction or restraint and is likely a key reason why it’s generating such an ineffective click-through rate.The Private Nursing Duty software campaign is opted into Google search partners. We see that ad scheduling is set to run all days, we have active bid adjustments for devices on two of the search campaigns and we are currently targeting all devices.
Recommendations: one of the most important recommendations to make is that we need to upgrade conversion tracking with Google Analytics 4. A complete suite of tracking would include, form submits, phone number clicks and email clicks from users who visit your website from Google Ads. It is critical to feed this conversion data of user actions back to the Google Ads account so that the system can record the demographic and contextual information around these users who click and interact with your website, so that that data can be leveraged in the account in the future.
Our next recommendation is to standardize some account optimizations. For instance we would like to see you switch to maximize conversion bid strategy. This will allow you to generate the maximum number of conversions possible in the search market on any given day. This is typically the best strategy for lead generation.
We would also recommend removing Search Partners from the private duty nursing search campaign. Search Partners sounds like a great way to increase potential traffic however it typically increases clicks without any actual conversions coming through.
We would also recommend putting a search first strategy in terms of Networks and budgets. If you absolutely want to remain on Google display networks we would recommend doing so with a Performance Max campaign.
Networks-Network data supports some of our recommendations that we have made so far. For instance, the graph below is a great visual indicator of the efficiency of Google search over the Google display network. You can see that Google search has generated only 1.1% of impressions in the account however those impressions yielded 39.8% of all clicks and a staggering 80.3% of conversions recorded so far in the account. Obviously this data contrasts sharply when you compare it to the display side of the equation. here we see that display has eaten up approximately 98.7% of all Impressions generated in the account during the look back period. That resulted in roughly 52.8% of clicks to the site and no conversions attributed to display.
Secondary data also supports this you can see that Google search has an approximate 6.41% click-through rate while displayed network is registering 0.10%
Conversion rates are so low here it is difficult to glean any meaningful data from them however we stand by our assertion that Search Partners should be removed in that search should be the sole focus with some supporting display.
Recommendation: We recommend focusing specifically on Google search to pair your product with users who are actively searching for keywords that describe your product in real time. We would recommend having a Performance Max campaign also up and running if you wanted to continue to use display and video.
Devices- Device data indicates that computers are slightly more efficient at generating traffic and conversions then mobile devices. Computers commanded approximately 21.6% of Impressions during the look back ,however, that resulted in 27.9% of clicks and 37.9% of conversions. Anytime we see this increasing waterfall we know that we have a more efficient medium. Compare this to mobile phones where we see 71.4% of Impressions resulted in 64% of clicks and only 57.6% of conversions.
Secondary data backs up these assertions, we’re seeing a 0.24% click through rate on computers and a 0.16% click through rate on mobile phones. Likewise conversion rates are slightly better on desktop at 0.31% versus 0.20% for mobile. again assuming that these are valid conversions.
Recommendation: The maximize conversion bid strategy does not allow the use of bid adjustments because it is attempting to generate all of the conversions possible on a given day. if at some point in the future you move to Target return on ad spend or Target cost per acquisition bid strategy we would recommend putting good adjustments on computers since they do seem to perform better for you, a 10% to 20% positive adjustment would be recommended for computers if we switch bid strategies at some point in the future.
Location Targeting-Location targeting has been set to the United States for all active campaigns search and display.
Recommendation: We have no further recommendations at this time. This seems to make the most sense for what you guys are trying to do.
Ad Scheduling- No ad schedules are enabled on any of the active campaigns in the account. The first graph below shows click traffic by times of day and days of week. We actually see a preponderance of traffic early in the morning starting about 5:00 and 6:00 a.m. This traffic Trails off significantly and by 7:00 or 8:00 has dropped off completely. When we add conversion data to that we see that users are converting in the middle of the day between 6:00 a.m. and approximately 4:00 p.m. each day.
Recommendation: We recommend a 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. ad schedule just to be a little cautious and make sure we’re not excluding anyone who would be a converting audience for this account.
Bid Adjustments –. We see one Advanced bid adjustment for phone calls on the account for the Home Care search campaign at +5%.
Recommendation: As stated previously, the maximize conversion bid strategy does not include the bid adjustment function in its algorithmic calculations. if you switch to another bid strategy at some point in the future we would recommend bit adjustments for your ideal audience.
Audiences, Placements, Topics – No add topics or placements have been found enabled on any of the active campaigns in the account. we see one audience segment enabled for the display campaign which is a custom segment entitled competitors. this is probably a key reason why you have not seen more clicks and conversions out of the display campaign. without setting this data and giving the system something to Target in terms of audience and interests the ads have been essentially running without any guidance.If you are wondering where your ads did display from the response display ads I have included that screenshot as the third one below. we can see that a website called blitz.gg serve the most Impressions with approximately 416,000 which generated one click. We can see that the website webmd.com generated 362,000 Impressions resulting in 166 clicks. After that we see three mobile apps, myfitnesspal, news break, a ABPV?(Americas Best Pics and Vids) commanding approximately 900,000 impressions resulting in about a thousand users brought to the website. After that we have pch.com, foxnews.com and another mobile application.
Recommendation: Our recommendation is to stop all display campaigns and trade them out for a performance Max campaign. Performance Max is an AI heavy Campaign which utilizes an all of network approach including search, display, email, YouTube and Discovery Networks which will outperform any given display Networks possible performance.
Performance Max uses audience signals which incorporate many of the placements, audience segments and topics which were missing from the display campaigns now.
Keywords – There are 60 enabled keywords in the account.We do not see any broad match keywords and in fact all the keywords in the account are phrase match. It’s been a while since I saw an account that didn’t have any broad match keywords in it. Great job! This explains why you’re generating Some solid click-through rates on your brand and product campaigns.
Negative Keywords?There are 91 negative keywords enabled on the account.
Recommendation: We don’t have too many recommendations here. You are utilizing both negative keywords and also phrase match keywords with medium and long tail search queries for terms that are germane for what you’re doing.
The best recommendation that we can make is to review the Search terms report for your search campaigns on a regular basis and if you haven’t done it for a while go back 6 months and look for any terms that have generated conversions or significant clicks but are not included in the account. I would include those as active search campaign terms. Likewise you could also review The Search terms report for keywords that have generated a lot of Impressions but not conversions and exclude those. I would caution against carrying out the last half of this recommendation and until you have two to three months of good conversion data with updated GA 4 tracking in it. if you do it before you could be inadvertently excluding keywords that are good for you but you just didn’t know it because you didn’t have a full suite of tracking set up.
Conversions – Conversion data sources include the website, calls from ads, and Google hosted actions. we do not see any Google analytics for data being fed into the account.
Recommendation: Not trying to beat a dead horse here, however, we do need to upgrade to GA-4 tracking.
Ads – Responsive search ads are doing some of the best work in the account. Your branded search ad is generating a 21% click-through rate which is great performance. We see a 2% click rate on the Private Duty Nursing Software campaign, all the way up to the 6% rating on the Home Care campaigns. Landing page optimization scores range from six-seven out of 10. There does appear to be some opportunity for improving the overall Ad Rank by improving landing pages. We see ad strength for most of these responsive search campaigns is good with one rated at Excellent. There may be some small opportunity for improvement in headlines and descriptions to get those ads ranked good to excellent.
We also see responsive display ads with three images and five videos. This specific ad has generated 12.8 million impressions resulting in 12,459 clicks to the website.
Recommendation: We recommend keeping responsive search ads, improving headlines and descriptions so that they are ranked as excellent. we’d also recommend reviewing your landing pages to see if you can improve their mobile rank.
We recommend removing the responsive display campaign from the account and replacing it with the performance Max campaign. We will then see a Performance Max ad in here which leverages all of the network including, YouTube , however it does so using AI based algorithms with a much more sophisticated targeting package then we have been leveraging so far.
Extensions – We see a wide variety of assets currently being leveraged in the account. these include image assets, business name assets, business logo, site links, call outs, structured snippets and finally the call asset. We believe this represents the full Suite of possibilities that you could be leveraging extensions for. Great job keep it up
Recommendation: We can’t think of any other assets that make sense to add to the account that you don’t already have in place.
Search Impression Share – Search impression share during the look back. it shows less than 10% of the market being commanded by your account. We do see some potential competitors here, maybe you’ve heard of alorahealth.com, software-device.com or capterra.com.
Recommendation: The only way to increase search impression share is to reduce the geographic target that you’re competing in or increase the amount of ad spend that the account is utilizing.