Google Ads Audit for IT Staffing
Google Ads Ads Account Audit with Recommendations
843-594-7895 Remote Team Sol
Look Back Period: 2019- 2023
Special Questions:
Summary
As presented the account has generated 364,000 Impressions during the look-back period. Of those ads served, 14,400 users brought to the site resulting in 462 conversion actions. Total cost during this time was $49,600 with an average cost per conversion of $107.
Click-through rate for the account during this time was 3.95%, for reference we like to see a minimum of 2% click-through rate and conversion rate for everything Google Ads related, even more so if it’s primarily search campaigns which your account is, so that’s definitely a good indicator of a decent correlation between keywords and Ad copy.
Bottom of funnel conversion rate registering 3.21% which I would also categorize as a good result for the account assuming that these are valid conversion actions that are being accurately recorded. Average cost per click is $3.45 which is typical for this vertical and well within reason.
Campaign Structure & Bid Strategies- We like what we see here, there is a strong focus on search campaigns that appear to be well segmented. We also see that ad rotation optimization is in effect for all active campaigns. We do see that ad schedules are somewhat variable. We have three campaigns running Monday through Friday and then 4 campaigns running around the clock. In our experience this vertical can have variability and back side of the clock activity that does not happen between the 9 to 5 hours, so we typically like to keep ad schedules as flexible as possible. We see targeting is open to all devices and we only have a couple bid adjustments for devices and locations on three of the seven total active campaigns. Bid strategies are set to maximize conversions across the board and we agree with this strategy for lead generation as it allows you to maximize the amount of leads you generate on any given day depending on organic search volume. With that said, we do see that search Partners is enabled for the search campaigns. We typically like to see search limited to search engine results page results, search partners includes Google partner websites as well as phone-based applications and other digital locations that may not be specifically a search engine results page.
Recommendations: The most important recommendation here is to remove Search Partners from enabled search campaigns so that all of our ad spend, impression share and clicks are coming from users coming from the search engine results page.
Networks- Network data supports some of the recommendations that were already made above. You can see that traffic coming specifically from Google Search is more efficient in terms of activity through the funnel. 40% of overall Impressions coming from Google Search resulted in 60% of clicks and 70% of overall conversions. If you compare this data to the search partners activity you see that 60% of your impressions were served on search Partners websites however that only generated 39% of clicks and 30% of all conversions during this time. All things being equal, if all of your ads were served on the Google Search side of the equation, you could have expected 10% more conversions at the very least.
Secondary data also supports these recommendations. If you look below you can see that the click-through rate on Google Search is averaging 6%, which is three times the minimum threshold versus search Partners which is 2.58% which is just over the 2% minimum threshold which I mentioned at the beginning of this audit. Conversion rates are a little more closely aligned there: We see 3.7% conversion rates coming from Google search traffic while we see a 2.43% Conversion rate coming from search partners traffic.
Recommendation: we recommend focusing exclusively on the Google Search side of the equation and remove Search Partners from existing search campaigns. If you do want to diversify top of funnel activity and maintain brand awareness across all of the Google Marketing Platform, we recommend the Performance Max campaign. This campaign is designed specifically to do this for businesses.
Devices- Device data is screenshotted out below and while not as clear cut in terms of differences of device traffic moving through the funnel, we do see some indicators that there are differences in quality of traffic coming from different devices. This account is moving at a very consistent one-to-one ratio throughout the sales funnel for users coming from mobile phones and computers as well. The only real drop in activity seems to come from tablets which generated just a tiny fraction of overall clicks and no recorded conversion actions during the lookback.
Typically we see higher click rates and conversion rates for users coming from computers and desktop devices, however, this account we’re seeing a slightly more efficient or at least equal performance coming from mobile phones. We also see a fairly significant increase in average cost per conversion and users coming from computers over mobile phones, this does not indicate that we shouldn’t be targeting users coming from devices but in our experience , those users are typically better sales qualified leads.
Recommendation: While both platforms appear efficient and generating traffic and bottom of funnel conversions, clearly desktop devices are more expensive we would like to review more information from Analytics and also any back of house customer resource management software for qualitative differences before we can make for the recommendations here.
Location Targeting-Location targeting is fairly straightforward; we see 5% adjustments on two of the campaigns and no bid adjustments on the others. All campaigns are targeting the United States of america.
Recommendation: No major changes can be recommended here without having more information into your overall business goals and objectives it seems to be that National targeting for a somewhat specific niche makes sense for you.
Ad Scheduling- Set to GMT -5 Central . Ad scheduling data indicates a prevalence of activity between 6:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. however we do see some late night activity and back side of the clock activity happening between 12:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m.
Recommendation: We would recommend keeping your ad schedules open.
Keywords – Keyword data is showing some inconsistencies or irregularities in designated keywords. Some of the top 10 converting keywords highlighted in red below are very vague, even at the phrase match level of scrutiny. We see law offices, find attorneys and Outsourcing in Mexico as a top three lead producing results ,however, these terms are not entirely aligned with what you’re looking for or what you’re doing. We do see some good examples also in the account, “remote paralegal”, “it outsourcing”, “technology Staffing” and “IT staffing agencies” seem to be aligned to what you’re doing at the very least. We also see one keyword called “law law law” which is obviously not an intelligible search.
Negative Keywords? There are over 500 negative keywords in the account at various campaign and Ad group levels.
Recommendation: Keywords provide an easy opportunity for increasing the overall performance of the account. We recommend reviewing not only your keywords but also your negative keywords to make sure that you’re not accidentally excluding any viable search phrases in the account. As part of ongoing service one of the first things that we would start is a keyword review to make sure that we are targeting keywords that are relevant to your brand name and also the lines of businesses that you want to pursue. We would also recommend reviewing the Search terms report for ideas and new keywords that can be added to the account to generate conversions.
Conversions – We do see conversion data in the account however none of it seems to be coming from Google analytics 4. We only have a limited number of days before the Universal analytics GA4 cutoff on July 1.
Recommendation: We recommend upgrading the GA4 analytics as soon as possible.We also recommend implementing Google analytics for event tracking so that we can see a complete view of what actions users take on your website in attribute those actions back to ads.
Ads – Top performing ad copy is shown below. We see that responsive search ads are the top performing since those are the only types of ads that are enabled in the campaign. Review of your ad copy suggests that you guys are directly on target and have good messaging.
Recommendation: We have no further recommendations on Ad copy or structure, you guys are doing a good job there.
Extensions – We see business name, business logo, site links, call outs, structure snippets, calls and finally leave form extensions enabled on the account. This is a good variety of extensions.
Recommendation: The account is doing a good job of utilizing a variety of extensions however we do also recommend image or dynamic image extension. We would also recommend that they are in use across all active campaigns.
Search Impression Share – No impression share data is available during the look-back period
Recommendation: The only way to increase impression share is to reduce your Geographic Target or to increase your overall ad spend.