Google Ads Account Audit with Recommendations
Prepared By David Becklean
princess center dentistry 112-660-5645
Look Back Period: Jan 2021 – Present
Special Questions:
Summary
During the look-back period the account generated 1.36 million impressions which yielded 61,000 Clicks to the website. Of those users brought to the website, 13,300 resulted in a conversion action at a total cost of $174,000. Click through rate on the ads was 4.5% during this time , for reference, I like to see a minimum 2% click through rate and conversion rate from anything Google ads related. Your conversion rate during this time was over 5%. Average cost per conversion was $13.06 with an average cost-per-click of $2.85. For your vertical the cost per click and cost per acquisition seem reasonable.
There is a notable period In the graphs below you can see that impression shares spiked sharply over the last year as well as decreasing click-through rates in conversion rates during the same time. It looks like over the last year it has shifted more towards a YouTube campaign structure rather than a search-based structure.
- Campaign Structure & Bid Strategies- Of the 12 active campaigns in the account, 11 are search campaigns with 1 video campaign. The search campaigns appear to be targeting specific Geographic areas for dental staffing-related keywords. Interaction and conversion rates seem to be very healthy with low cost per acquisition.
I do see multiple search campaigns that have Google Search Partners as well as Google Display Network enabled. This is one of those things where Google says this is a good idea however practical application dictates otherwise. Running search ads in a non-search environment such as the Google Display Network and on Partner websites is a way to increase overall Impressions and Clicks marginally, however there is no real benefit in terms of conversion production from having these enabled on the Campaigns.
Bid strategies are set to a variety of objectives. We see everything from maximize conversions to maximize conversion Target return on ad spend to maximize conversion value. The maximized conversion value is interesting to me. We typically see that in ecommerce with product value or lead generation when we know that customers are worth a certain dollar amount based on an average ticket. I’m interested to see what formula and metrics you are using here in order to Value the applications from the employee as well as the employer side.
- Recommendations: In terms of account structure I agree with the overall design and implementation. I like the search first strategy as that is what I recommend for my own clients as well.
- Pending my understanding of the valuation of the maximize conversion value strategy, I may recommend switching to maximize conversions across the board. Other than that I do recommend abandoning the Google search Partners as well as Google Display Network for all search campaigns. Bid adjustment should be applied on a case-by-case basis across the board for all criteria that matter in terms of the auction process. Those recommendations will follow in the section below.
- If you do want to diversify your network traffic the Performance Max campaign is my number one recommendation there. It works across the entire Google marketing platform from search to display to video to Discovery in email, this campaign uses headlines, descriptions, videos, and still images to provide Dynamic ads across the complete Google ads inventory. It falls somewhere between a search campaign in a display campaign in a video campaign all wrapped up into one if that makes any sense at all.
- Call only ads and ad groups may be a viable option to add to the campaign to increase the overall number of conversions produced. -Not Advised
- Networks- It appears that the vast majority of your activity has been on the Google search side. This is what I like to see as many times I come into an account that is display and cross-network heavy and the client can’t figure out why they are not getting the results they want. You do seem to have some activity on the YouTube side of the equation eating up about 50% of our overall Impressions served during this time, which produced 6.4% of all clicks during this time and 0.7% of all conversions. Obviously when contrasted that to search eating up 90% of clicks and generating ninety-eight percent of conversions
- Recommendation: I recommend staying with a search first approach in terms of campaign structure as well as budgets, you may want to diversify your overall strategy with a performance Max campaign. I do like the video campaign and I think that is a good addition as long as it has fresh assets, Is short and delivers a pithy call to action.
- Devices- Device data indicates a slight bias towards computers. We see that overall, the waterfalls are equal between mobile devices and computers however 31% of your clicks came from computers which resulted in 33.3% of all conversions. That’s the slight bias I’m talking about, mobile phones generated 67.4% of all clicks but only 66% of all conversion actions indicating a very very slight negative trend.
Recommendation: I would recommend a bid adjustment on computers since they appear to be yielding at a slightly higher rate than mobile devices. A 10% to 20% adjustment would be appropriate however obviously mobile is still producing a generous amount of your overall production and it may be worth while to add a bid adjustment there as well in order to outbid your competitors on mobile devices.
- Location Targeting- Location targeting is being utilized in all of the campaigns however what is interesting to me is that no bid adjustments are being utilized. Bid adjustments are a great way for us to let Google know we are willing to pay more for users in a specific geographic area. This can help us increase our overall conversion rate by outbidding the competition and getting better quality traffic.
- Recommendation: I recommend a minimum 15 to 20% bid adjustment for all geo targets.
- Ad Scheduling- Ad scheduling is being utilized in the account however I do not see bid adjustments in use. Bid adjustments are a great way for us to let Google know we are willing to pay more for users searching at a specific time of day or day of the week. There are some clear trends in your Google ads dashboard that indicate when users are more likely to result in a conversion action. There are two red rectangles in the graph below. This graph is showing conversions by time of day. There are two times of interest that I have highlighted, the first is 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. which seems to be the primary concentration of conversion production however there is also a slightly broader secondary concentration slightly outside of those times between 6 a.m. and 4 p.m.
- Recommendation: I would recommend putting bid adjustments between 10 – 20% on these times of day to let Google know that we are willing to pay more for these users that are more likely to convert because of the time of day that they’re searching.
- Bid Adjustments –. Bid adjustments can be placed on a wide variety of targeting attributes Within Google ads. These attributes include audience, location, time of day, day of week, geographic location, action type, age, gender, income status and more.
- Recommendation: As stated above we need to enable Bid adjustments everywhere it makes sense too. These adjustments layer on top of each other or “stackable” to use a video game term.
- Audiences, Placements, Topics – One important thing to point out is that the account is using exclusive targeting, this is different from observational targeting in that it only shows your ads to users who fit a specific criteria which you’ve designated within the audience targeting section. It appears that business professionals identified by their lifestyle and hobby preferences have been the number one producer of conversions with a 32% conversion rate. I would like to point out that bid adjustments are not enabled on these exclusive audience targets. It would make sense to review these from top to bottom to make sure that we’re including employment-related criteria which should maximize the built-in data that Google analytics and Google ads has in order to find the best candidates for your open positions. Likewise we can also Target employers with the same criteria people that own businesses or that generate a certain level of Revenue.
The screenshot below outlines placements, this is where video and display network-enabled search campaigns have served ads with their relative results. You can see that the YouTube conversion campaign obviously has deployed mostly on YouTube with which makes sense however you can also see that many of your search campaigns such as dental jobs Seattle have been appearing on a variety of websites that may or may not be employment or down related. The complete list of these web sites, which is hundreds if not thousands is available within the Google apps dashboard.
- Recommendation: I recommend reviewing both exclusive audience targets as well as bid adjustments for these targets and their specific campaigns. Obviously there’s a difference between attracting potential employees and employers and will require different audience targets. In addition to that I would review the placements and topics that we are targeting for video and any display related assets to make sure we are lining up with our best potential audience.
- Keywords – Not surprisingly, top-producing keywords are related to dental staffing. There may be opportunities for other specific keywords by reviewing the Search terms report going back at least six months. Other than that, it’s not rocket science and what we’re looking for, the names of the positions combined with Geographic locations or “near me” appended to the end of search results are going to be the primary drivers of conversions here.
Negative Keywords? An extensive list of 7,200 negative keywords is in use on the account.
- Recommendation: With a negative keyword list that large it seems like you are well on top of your negative keyword implementation.
- I would recommend reviewing the Search terms report going back 6 months and seeing if there are any other ideas that can be generated or ideas that need to be excluded or added to the negative keyword list.
- Conversions – Conversions are present in the account and being actively reported back. The vast majority of conversions appear to be the candidate completes profile and employer completes profile highlighted in green below. There also appear to be some other conversion actions including phone calls from ads and phone calls from websites. I’m interested to know which one you value more and if you’re still accepting phone calls or if these are from past campaigns.
- Recommendation: If your conversions are not broke then I don’t have any recommendations to fix them.
- Ads – Surprisingly your highest performing ad is a dynamically generated search ad. This is fairly uncommon to see as typically a responsive search ad is the number one producer of conversions. There are several very productive responsive search ads in the account as highlighted below. Conversion rates for all of these ads are extremely high in the 20s and low 30s.
Recommendation: Depending on your overall objectives I may recommend the addition of some call only campaigns to your overall account structure. This would enable you to field a wider variety of phone calls and qualified applicants more quickly over the phone directly. I do see the phone call conversion did produce some data in the account above however I am not certain if you are still using these or if this is just more something on the side. The vast majority of your conversions do appear to be coming from the forms submissions.
If Dynamic ads are working for you I see no reason to change that I would apply the same bid adjustments, audience targeting, ad scheduling, etc are these campaigns as applicable.
- Extensions – Extensions are present in the account however I only see 4 extensions enabled at the account level. The rest of the extensions are enabled at the campaign or ad group level. This makes sense if you have specific offerings for specific campaigns however from an account management perspective the more extensions that we can enable at the top of the account the easier the account will be to manage. We see call outs, structured Snippets, sitelinks and call extensions.
Recommendation: I recommend utilizing all extensions which makes sense for you. The four account-level extensions are a good starting point however there are also location extensions which might make sense for you, as well as image extensions and Dynamic image extensions which are great for increasing your click-through rate and overall conversion rate. I’d recommend images of dental hygienists and dental assistants working in their field to accompany all of your search ads.
- Search Impression Share – Search impression share for the look back period was less than 10%. This is the frequency at which your ads showed up compared to your competitors. At less than 10% Google’s telling us that they don’t have enough data to provide this information.
Recommendation: The only way to generate this data is to reduce the radius that we are competing in or increase our advertising spend to the point where we are taking up more market share and Google has data available for us.