Google Ads Audit for Wellness Center
Google Ads Ads Account Audit with Recommendations
898-965-3006 Art of Living
Look Back Period: ~2 Years
Summary
The lookback period for this audit is 2 years although it is really the last 15 months that have seen significant increases in Ad Spend and Ad Delivery. As presented, we have an account that generated 12.1M Impressions which resulted in 516,000 clicks to the website at a 4.27% Click Through Rate. Of those clicks, 56,000 Conversions were generated for a conversion rate of 9.21%. Ad Spend during this time was $857K.
Cost Per Conversions is sitting at $15.31 with an average Cost Per Click of $1.66. Search Impression Share was 17.26%.
While these numbers reflect a healthy Ads account on the surface, further drilling down shows significant opportunities to increase overall conversions and existing conversion rate by optimizing structure and specifics of some campaigns as outlined below.
Campaign Structure & Bid Strategies- The overall account structure is solid in that the majority of your campaigns are search campaigns, with a supporting display and video campaign included in the account. With that said the existing search campaigns are opted into Google Search Partners and in some cases Display Networks. These options allow responsive search ads to be reformatted into display ads and served on the display network. This is not the best use of search ads or search budgets, using these networks tends to increase the overall number of Impressions served while reducing CTR and conversion rate in most cases.
We also see a variety of bid strategies in use on the account. Target return on ad spend (TROAS), manual cost per view, maximize conversion target return on ad spend, as well as maximize conversions. The return on ads spend targets for these campaigns are set in a somewhat haphazard manner in that we see values from a low of 240% to a high of 1600%. For reference, system wide ROAS is 2:1. Campaigns seeking a 1600% return on ad spend may be unable to meet these goals. A healthy and well performing lead gen account is 3X+ ROAS
I would point out that some of these campaigns were started back in 2017.
Ad scheduling is set to all days for most campaigns with some campaigns utilizing bid adjustments but not all. This is another example of haphazard campaign optimization. Your historical account provides insights into the times of day that users are most likely to result in a conversion action, we will review that data further below.
Bid Adjustments are applied for some criteria but not others from campaign to campaign.
Recommendations: Without having a more-robust understanding of the use of the display and video campaigns, the following should be considered best practice advice for Google ads. It would be possible to consolidate your video and display campaigns into one performance Max campaign, this campaign type was launched over a year ago and is primarily used to generate brand awareness in an inexpensive and highly automated way. Performance Max is eligible to run on the entire Google marketing platform including search, display, youtube, email and the discovery network. If your objective is brand awareness and covering all of your bases within the Google marketing platform this is a great option to do that. It is also inexpensive with display level cost per click.
Optimizations to the search campaigns should include opting out of Search Partners and Display Network for all existing search campaigns. We should also consider what bid strategies we would like to leverage on the campaigns moving forward. Depending on your objectives I would suggest maximize conversions to generate the greatest number of conversions possible from the system on any given day. The downside of this is that we are permitting the system to spend up to twice our daily advertising budget in order to reach these conversions. If your primary objective is to control costs and cost per acquisitions then obviously the target return on ad spend or target cost per acquisition bid strategies make a lot of sense for you. I would test return on ad spend versus cost per acquisition to figure out which one to use long term.
Double check ad rotation optimization is enabled for all campaigns.
Regarding the original start dates of several of these campaigns, it may be a good idea to start fresh with some of these search campaigns simply because they were started a very very long time ago. With over 7,000 ads in the account and only 5 hours to review it, I can say that there are indeed some expanded text ads still in the account however I’m not sure if they are enabled or if they have been replaced with responsive search ads. To elaborate, expanded text ads have been deprecated from the system and are no longer eligible to have copy or landing pages updated in them. If you have any ad groups or campaigns that are using exclusively expanded text ads they need to be replaced with responsive search ads.
Ad scheduling can also be improved and we will go to that and further detail below but there’s definitely a trend that aligns with more day to day activity in order to leverage more conversions out of the account.
Finally, bid adjustments are not used uniformly from campaign to campaign. There’s a clear opportunity to increase the overall optimization of all campaigns by utilizing good adjustments consistently from one campaign to another.
Networks- Network data has some interesting insights to share with us. The graph below outlines the waterfall or the flow of users through the search funnel from impressions to clicks to bottom line conversions. You can see that the majority of Impressions on your account, 50.6%, were generated on the Display Network during the last two years. Compare that to 37% coming from Google search indicated in blue below. Of those Impressions generated, Google search resulted in 89.5% of the clicks while the Display Network generated just a 5.1% of all clicks during the same time. This data should be striking for a variety of reasons and it indicates clearly that you can run all of the display ads you want but you will always get a fraction of the traffic compared to that of search. That also rings true with the conversion data below you can see that the vast majority of conversions came from the search side of the equation with 94.3% versus 3.3% conversions coming from display. This is a great piece of evidence in support of a search first strategy.
Recommendation: Your account is already more or less configured in a search first structure, however, you can see that your video and display campaigns are generating a serious number of impressions but are not that effective in clicks or conversions. You only spent 5.5% of your budget on the Display Network during this time so it is proportional to the clicks at a one-to-one ratio at the very least. It’s up to you and depends on your objectives and budgets as to keep this structure or replace it with the aforementioned Performance Max campaign which does a lot of the same things as video and display but in a broader, more targeted way.
Devices- Insights from device data are not as clear. The account generated 58.7% of impressions for mobile devices with 38.7% coming from computers. obviously a slight bias towards mobile phones, however, given your vertical in the mobile first nature of our current world this is not entirely surprising and consistent with most accounts. We also see a positive waterfall in impressions on mobile devices in terms of Impressions to clicks with 68.9% of all clicks coming from mobile devices versus 29.1% coming from computers. From that perspective it does seem like traffic coming from computers is less likely to come to the site. at the bottom of the funnel we see 55.4% of conversions coming from mobile devices compared to 43.0% of desktops. It’s clear that users that do visit from a computer are more likely to convert and that is a piece of useful information that we can use moving forward.
Recommendation: Bid adjustments on users from computers would probably be a good idea in the 10 to 15% range since they are more likely to result in a conversion action and therefore revenue for you. Other than that we can’t discount that the majority of users are searching for us on a mobile device and need to remain competitive in that realm as well.
Ad Scheduling- There are 301 ad schedules enabled on the account. It looks like they all need to be gone through and revised to better align with the times of day and days of week that users are more likely to result in an actual conversion action for your company. Looking at the data below we can see some overlaps in terms of ad scheduling on some campaigns. specifically the campaigns outlined in red below show a 5% and 10% adjustment on Wednesdays at different times of the day. not really sure why this overlap is here however that is not the typical way that bit adjustments are applied to an account.
8:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. seem to be a consistent overperformer in conversion production for the account.
Recommendation: We recommend starting fresh, removing all active schedules and implement a 7AM – 11 PM or 8AM to 10PM Schedule with a 10-20% bid adjustment.
Audiences, Placements, Topics – While we do see about 167 audiences enabled on the account for various campaigns, we do not see any placements, display keywords or topics that have been found in use on the account. Typically when running display or YouTube ads we layer in audiences that we want to see the ad, placements or websites that we want to see the ads show up ( including YouTube channels), and topics related to the subject matter in the videos.
Recommendation: Assuming you don’t switch to Performance Max which automatically includes a more robust targeting solution and the form of audience signals, we do recommend adding topics, placements and display keywords for all relevant campaigns.
Keywords – Branded keywords seem to be the major drivers of conversions within the account. We do see that most of the Branded keywords have been set to pause and are no longer included in keyword targeting but historical data indicates they have done well for you in the past. Other than that we see terms like wellness retreat, yoga retreat, Meditation Retreat as well as weekend relaxation Retreat as a line of business and product description related keywords in the account.
Negative Keywords? There are 38 negative keyword lists in the account.
Recommendation: The Search terms report provides invaluable data as far as what users are actually searching to get our keywords and ads to pop up on the search engine results page. We recommend reviewing the Search terms report for new ideas and applicable keywords that we can enable on the account to drive future conversion production.
We also recommend sticking to Exact and Phrase Match Keyword Match Types.
Conversions – There are conversions enabled and being recorded in the account and it also looks like you have conversion values being passed back.
Recommendation: TBD
Ads –Top performing Search and Display Ads are Screenshotted out below. Top Performing Ads in terms of traffic are RSA’s and 1 Retargeting Video Ad. RSA’s represent 4 of top 5 Ads. The RDA on the account has a 0.46% CTR which is low even for display. If its primary focus is brand awareness, it is doing its job, if its conversions, there is opportunity to improve.
Recommendation: Search, Display and Video Ads are performing on par with expectations in terms of CTR and overall conversions rates.Best Practice for Display is to use laser-guided audience retargeting and not carpet-bombing of cold audiences .As long as you understand how it is currently being utilized and are okay with it. We don’t have any major recommendations here. Good Job on the Ads!
Extensions – We do see some extensions enabled in the account. Specifically we have site links, call outs, structured snippets, calls, prices, and finally promotion extensions enabled on the account. They all have some fairly decent click-through rates with a low of seven and a high of 10% ctr. details of this are presented Below in a screenshot.
Recommendation: Recommendation here would be to review the account for uniform application of extensions across all active campaigns. also check any new extension types that have recently been released and see if they’re applicable to any of these campaigns. I did notice that image extensions are not enabled in image extensions or dynamic image extensions are one of the best ways to increase click through rates and overall conversion rates by presenting a visual image in an otherwise text only environment.