030. Auditing Your Google Search Ads Campaigns

Hello everyone. This is Emilio Garcia. Welcome to another episode of Demand Gen Studio. It is a pleasure to have you here today. Today we are going to have a very interesting conversation, something that I routinely have come conversations about with prospects and clients related to auditing your Google search ads accounts or campaigns. It's going to focus on Google Ads, but especially is going to focus on search campaigns which have their own nuances when you are auditing. So I'm very excited. It's a topic that I really like and I hope you find value on it. So let's start right away. The first part of our conversation will be the general idea of, you know, exploring the account and the campaign structure. Probably that is the first place you want to start. You have your account. And the first thing that I usually look like is how it's organized. Now everybody has a different idea on how those campaigns should structure and that's perfectly fine. But here are some ideas. If you have no idea on how to structure them, obviously you can start with a very simple one based on the type of products that you have or the regions or locations that you want to be in front of. That's a good start. The one that I like the most is one based on the company itself and the brand. And in that sense, I usually separate the idea of advertising for the brand. What I will call branded terms like whatever company are you running or being part of the marketing team. All the keywords that describe your brand and the products, I will have them separated from other keywords or terms that define the category of the product or service that you offer, but it's not your own brand. And that's important because the performance of keywords that relate to your brand is usually going to be higher than than the rest because the person doing the search already know about you. So a structure that I like is lumping together brand terms, including products, and then creating one or multiple campaigns around generic terms or terms that relate to the category of the product but not the product itself. And finally, I will lump together all the terms that relate to the brands of your competitors, if you are interested on that too. And so that's the usual basic structure that I like, but you can come up with different ones and obviously you can break it down into more specific ideas like devices, locations and similar concepts. Right? Remarketing audiences, all that. There's also another one that I like a lot which is related to low intent, separating high intent keywords or the ones that have commercial intent out of the ones that have very low intent. There are More navigational or for people that is just searching for ideas. I don't usually do campaigns or paid search campaigns where you are targeting terms that don't have commercial intent right away. But for those of you that do, that is usually preferred to separate them. So again, you can have a clearer idea of where you want to accomplish. So that will be probably the first place that I will start. The general concept here, the general practice that I'm trying to convey is that you need to have a structure. Even if you change it over time. The worst thing that you can do is just have one campaign where you lump together in just one ad group all the concepts or keywords that your interest, right? Your brand, your category, keywords from your competition. Because imagine the kind of ads and the landing pages or pages that you're going to send people to, they're going to be all mixed up. And even if you are successful, you will have a hard time understanding what works and what doesn't. So having that the right structure from the beginning helps you to separate what's working from what's not. Now, once you have that structure defined, and if that's something that is okay, the next key element is understanding what are the goals of the campaigns that you have there. So in the past, usually on Google, you will have like something around the idea of just getting traffic. Usually that was the general concept. Nowadays it's completely different based on tracking, conversions and the different ways that you can bid. But the general idea here is that it isn't about the kind of goal that you have. It's okay if you have, you know, awareness or consideration or even conversion goals. It's more about being aligned on the things that you want to accomplish. If your marketing efforts for search, for paid search, are heavily focused on getting leads and business opportunities, then it will be a bad idea to have campaigns that have goals related to just traffic or brand awareness. Just being on the top of the search results. Those are fine, but they usually do not correlate well with results. Right? If you are going after traffic, you will get inexpensive visits, but not necessarily leads. Or you can be at the top of the results, but not necessarily getting traffic and or conversions. You will get exposure, which is not bad out of itself, but it's just simply that it's not aligned with the goals of the business. So the other thing that I usually do on those audits is asking the marketing manager or the owner what are your expectations of these campaigns or of this account. And if those expectations do not match the goals of the campaigns, then there's something that needs to be fixed. It will vary, but just pay attention to each of the campaigns. There's a section on the settings where you can go and see what is the goal. It also impacts impact the kind of recommendations that Google offers you to improve the account. So for those many reasons, it's important to just make sure that we have the right goal. Right. So the next area of opportunity, a big one, is conversion tracking. So some accounts are usually that's an area that is very, you know, it's a big highlight of our audits and is that I go into campaigns where conversion tracking is not set up that probably is the worst scenario or where the conversion tracking is set up but it's not working properly or it's not aligned with the goals of the business. So, for example, the first opportunity of course is you don't have the right goals or you don't have the right conversion tracking. And what happens in those situations or those scenarios is, is that there's no way for you to know if you are being successful with your goals. So the only information that you will have available will be impressions and maybe clicks. But if you are having success on forms being filled or people is purchasing, you have no idea if that's going, if that's happening because the account will not reflect it. But more importantly, if you want to optimize based on that, there's going to be no indication on the account and you will not be able to take advantage of that. So that's another great area of opportunity. Obviously you need to set up conversion tracking in the right way. And in order to do that, you can start with some simple definitions that for B2B usually are around ideas like forms being filled. That's a basic one. Another one will be tracking phone calls. And I cannot stress enough how important is to track conversations or phone calls, especially for B2B, because sometimes just a lead can become a large opportunity. And if you miss out of those data points, you might not be looking at the data in the right way. So conversion tracking for forms, conversion tracking for phone calls, conversion tracking even for chat conversations, if you have a web chat, are important. And as I was saying, it's not just about having the data available. It also helps you to understand what terms are working and which ones are not, which ads are working and landing pages. And also very importantly, allows you to work on optimization. Once you have those data points, you can start optimizing for conversions. And even better for some E Commerce implementations, if you have data for the value of the conversion, then you can maximize conversions just based on the value of the revenue that the ads are bringing. So there are so many benefits to that. The other great opportunity is usually that conversions are set up, but for whatever reason they got updated or change and it's not reflected on the platform. So there's no results. And, and that's also relevant, right? So check that your conversions are set up and if they are set up, that they have triggered recently and if they haven't, then dive into either tech manager or Google itself or your website and make sure that you test and that they have the right conditions. Right. On terms of attribution, your conversion window, all the different parameters that you can go and look at conversions. So it's really important to have that. Now once you have defined the right structure campaign and that you have set up your conversion tracking, then you can go into your bidding strategy. So in this case, in the past usually bidding was mostly manual in part because the bid, the platform had some limits on the technology itself, in part because relying on Google itself was not a good idea usually because, you know, the machine learning algorithms that they use were not sophisticated enough in the past. Nowadays they have got really sophisticated. And while I know companies and agencies that still rely on manual bidding, for most people I would recommend automatic algorithms for sure. So what's important though is to make sure that you pick the right one. Right. So if there are different situations which each of them makes sense. For example, our regular strategy that we use at the beginning is if we are in a brand new account with no conversion information, even if we have compression data, then we usually want just traffic to get a sense of the kind of queries that we are getting to get a sense of the kind of cost or average cpc. So maximizing for clicks is a great start. It's not something that I want to keep for the long term, but it's something that gives us a sense of how much can you get for a given budget. So that's a great strategy to start with. Start with maximizing clicks to get a sense of the traffic that you will get and, and from there you can divert into maximizing conversion or maximizing revenue. If you have conversion tracking, then the system will auto suggest over time that and even if you, if you don't want to maximize for conversions or you don't have a target cpa, what it's called, it's just how much are you willing to pay for a conversion, is it still important that you, you know, set up conversions that I was saying before. So the data will start fitting in and you can make changes even if you are not automatically optimizing for one or the other outcome. So in any case, it's important that you review again your business goals. You match that to your campaign goal. And if your campaign goal is to for example, increase awareness and exposure, then impression share will should be your goal instead of just traffic or conversions. And your bidding strategy should be around target impression share, right? It's the percentage of the time that you want to show up in the top of the results versus other occasions. If you are more about making sure that people understand your offer and explore your website and spend time on them rather than converting or just being aware, then probably traffic itself, right? Maximizing clicks will be a great goal. Or if you have some micro conversions set up on the website, like time on the web, on the, on the page or page being review per session, or even just making sure that people scroll to long pieces of content, those might be good conversion goals, micro conversion goals that you can try to target on a campaign. And finally, if you are really after business opportunities, leads with commercial intent, phone calls with commercial intent, or even chat conversations, then definitely you should bid for maximizing conversions. In the special case of E commerce efforts, mostly for B2C but it applies to B to B, B2B too. Definitely you should work on at least maximizing revenue. And if you have a target for your the cost of acquisition, then you can target for, you know, a target of a target that you have for, for the cost of acquisition of a purchase or a lead. If that's the case and you have a a hard ceiling on that, especially when you have products, they have limited profit, you know, not profitable, then you can set up that limit. And even when you lose some of the opportunities to show up, the ones that you show up should be profitable for you. So definitely explore and understand and test. But in general, I would recommend that you match your bidding strategy to what you want to accomplish. Now, another big point on optimizing or auditing Google Ad campaigns is understanding the role of search terms. This is something that creates a lot of confusion, especially on people that are advertising for the first time on Google. Because most people think that when you set up a keyword on the account, that is the only phrase or word that you want to show up for. And nothing could be far from true, right? If you for example, are advertising for your company or for your product category and you think that, for example, let us say that you are in the, in the Software development world and you want to advertise for software developer company, you don't necessarily need to add the idea of software developer, provider or partner or firm because those ideas will be included on a software development company. So Google is smart enough that it will change some of the words in your phrases for other words that it deem similar or that convey the same intent or idea. So most people worry about not having enough keywords, when in reality what probably they need to do is to restrict the amount of queries that they show up. And the place where you can go and see that at least partially is search the search terms area. It's very important look it up on Google. How do you get there? But the general idea is that there you will get a sample of what people actually type to find your ads and click on them and you will be amazed of the difference between the keywords that you think you are bidding for and the queries that you are really paying for. You will find. And let me put you some examples. Imagine that you are bidding for your brand. And so if you have your brand and price, or your brand and alternatives, or your brand and hire, if that's the case, then you get a good idea that people have commercial intent behind your brand. But you can show up for something like your brand stock or your brand career or your brand, I don't know, investors. And while those are related to your company, they have a completely different intent. And probably you don't necessarily want to pay for showing up for those queries, right? Probably you need people to work with, you need talent. But that will be of interest for the hiring department, for the human resources department, not for commercial intent. And the same goes for investing, right? Probably you need investors or if that's the case, if you are a public company, but. But that will be the interest of the investor relationship group or people and not for people that is looking or the marketing team necessarily. So in any case, even if that is the, if the case that you are interested in those audiences, you will want to show up an ad that really caters to that intent, right? Maybe something related more to hiring, something related to investing itself. So you will discover for any keyword that there are these variations that are really not related, that don't have that clear commercial intent or they have a lower intent or people researching and that will be better served by a piece of content that is more into like investigations or something like that. So pay attention to the search terms and find if whatever you are bidding for matches what people is actually searching now, another area of opportunity that sometimes you can explore is an area called Auction Insights. And this area, what it shows is for a given time frame, shows you other advertising that is showing up along with your ads. And the way that I use that is it has competitor metrics, right? Allows you to understand if you are showing up on top of or below off or how much overlap do you have. But in general, you will discover two interesting things. One is that what you deem your competition in the real world might be very different from what you find on the digital world. And that will alert you from companies that probably you don't have on the radar, that are doing great work or that are overlapping with your efforts they were not aware of. Right? So that will improve the understanding of your competitive landscape. But the other thing that it does, especially for B2B, it shows you in a very similar way to the search terms if you are bidding for the right intent or you need to be more specific on your keywords. One of the things that I find all the time is that we discover that our company or the company of the client's company is showing up for queries that also match more residential or consumer oriented queries. One example, for example, is that you start competing with Amazon or you start competing with Walmart or another company that is in a completely different industry. And that's unexpected. And that's usually a signal that your keywords are not really the right intent. Maybe you think they are showing up for B2B intent keywords, when in reality maybe you're showing for residential. And so making small changes on the keyword itself will, will show you if that effect is happening. So one quick example that I have for a client that we actually help is the difference between the idea of waste compactor and garbage compactor. So waste compactor is usually a word that is used in the industry and signals a company trying to search for a product that is, you know, commercial link intent. But Garvish Compactor is more about residential homes. And so you will compete with Lowe's and Home Depot versus other providers in the industry. And so that's really revealing. So in general, my recommendation is go and explore the Auction Insights and see if the competition that you're seeing is what you expect. And if it's not, it can be either because there are competitors that you were not aware of and it's important to add them to your radar, or you're really competing in a different space that you are not intended to and that signals that you need to go and Take a look at your search terms and see if there's opportunities there, right? If you don't have the right intent. Now another area of opportunity, especially in terms of ideas, is setting up the integrations available for Google Ads that you can take advantage of. Some ideas here is that you can integrate with search console so you will have the data coming from Google from the organic side. Usually that's helpful because it gives you the opportunity to understand how much are you showing up on organic results and how much are you showing up for pay results for a given query or term. And that allows you to understand if you know the percentage are what you intend, right? How much of your queries are showing up for branded terms, for example, that usually come up organically versus the ones that you're paying. And if that is the mix that you want, also gives you ideas into potential terms that you can start paying or using for paid or the other way around, right? If you are paying for a queries having a lot of success and you have a good opportunity to showing up organically, then probably you need to start developing content so you can take advantage of the granular results and obviously reduce the spending on that given query. So those ideas are really relevant. The other big integration that you can take advantage of is Google Analytics. And in that case what that will give you is more information about the campaign beyond impressions and clicks and even conversions. Because then you can draw data from analytics in terms of pages per session and obviously related to time on the website and all the information that you can gather from analytics that can be seen on Google Ads directly. So you can make a better decision in terms of what ads and keywords works for you. And it works the other way around. You can take that info and look at it on Google Analytics so you can explore the data there too and take advantage of all the demographics that Google Analytics also can complement on the data that you have. And finally, the other big integration that I usually recommend to some extent it varies, but it's integrated with your CRM. And that integration goes again in the same case two ways. Either you bring the data from CRM in terms of conversions that you see there, right? If you get leads or qualify leads, or you see opportunities or even deals, or you send the data to the CRM so you can start discover what happens after a conversion, right? And what campaigns and keywords are closing deals or influencing deals. And that's usually the case for long sales cycles anyway. And you can make better decisions. So those are the three basic ones you can explore More there's also the one from YouTube. The other big advantage of integrations is that you can import or sync audiences, right? So you can sync audiences around subscribers or your database or customers. And you can use that to segment your campaigns and have better performance for those groups because you will have better campaigns that are geared toward those groups in particular. Now, another big area of opportunity, of course, are ads. And while I have made some episodes where I explore in details the recommendations on how to set up successful ads, the general idea here that I'm looking after is that for each of the ad groups, I want to see more than one ad. That's usually the biggest opportunity. We go into campaigns and we find that there's only one ad, so there's no possibility of testing best performance. So if you still have expanded ads or the original text ads that Google has had for a long time, well, at least I want to see three or four of them so you can have a good comparison, especially if you're optimizing for something like conversions. So you can test which combination of headlines and description works the best. But nowadays really looking after responsive ads, which are the format that I think Google will, I don't think it's actually the format that Google is actually kind of like giving more impulse nowadays actually is going to pause or suspend or eliminate extended ads and just keep the responsive. Because you have so many combinations available there, right? You can have 10 or 15 headlines where you can combine features, call to actions and different ideas around your product. And also you have four or I think a little bit more descriptions that you can add. So you have the possibility of hundreds of combinations. And if you have a lot of budget to spend, then it's very easy to find a combination that work the best for each use cases, right? And actually in this world right now, I don't think there's accurate to say that there is like the best performing ad. Rather I will say that there's the best ad for a person or a group of people. There are some combinations of headline and description that cater to some audiences and there are other ones that cater to other people, right? Some of the audience of your audiences or your cohort might be looking for a good deal. Some others might be looking for reducing risk, some others might be looking for features. And for all these different groups, you can have different combinations that cater to those ideas. And in that way you have something that is pertinent to each visitor or searcher. So but the general idea is if you are still using expanded, you should have at Least three or four. But if you are using, if you are using responsive, have you know, a good amount of headlines especially and descriptions so you can test combinations automatically. Now the other area that is usually misunderstood or not people don't take advantage of is ad extensions. And it's important because these are the few things that Google Ad, when you are paying that is very hard to control and manage on organic. With extensions you can show up additional links to your website. You can show your phone number, pertinent locations. Nowadays Google is even adding images that you can manually select or that you can let the algorithm decide which one to show and test performance. So extensions are great because they increase the real state of your ad and give you the opportunity to add more information about your company than just headlines and descriptions. And they can increase the conversion rate and definitely increase the CTR to some extent. So take advantage of them. The general recommendation here is to have the right ones, right? If, if your business is not location driven, then you don't necessarily want locations. But if you take care of people over the phone, then definitely add the phone. Or if you have there are some kind of businesses that have categories or differentiators like free shipping or you know, refunds or a good return policy or something like that, then it's definitely worth adding them and testing. If you have public pricing or offers, extensions can help you to highlight that too. So in general, the idea is take advantage of them. Make sure that each campaign have the, they have the one that matter to it and that will definitely help you to perform better. Now in the area of locations, the largest opportunities here revolve around not being specific enough, right? So targeting just the whole country when you might be more specific to some cities where you have sales presence, for example, or you're robust in your offering or something that makes you better. So that will be the first opportunity. If you target the whole country. But you really want more leads from a specific location, you're missing out because you're letting Google to decide where to show up. So maybe you want to break down the campaign into locations that matter to you and the rest of the country, for example, so you can dedicate more budget to it. The other big opportunity is to make sure that you are showing up for people that is actually there physically and not just to have shown interest on the location. Nowadays happen less than in the past. But I remember that usually the default selection is just people that is that lives on the location or that have shown interest and what ended up happening is that your ad starts showing up in different countries that you didn't target. And so some people resolve that by just excluding the countries themselves. But you know, it's a battle that is not necessarily to have because you are just targeting one country and now you will have to exclude all these other locations around the world. The right thing to do is to just show choose, you know, people that is physically there. There are some situations where you want people interest on the location, but those situations usually apply to someone that is in the, you know, like travel industry where maybe someone wants to travel to the US but they are not physically there. Then you want to show up for someone that is not in the US at the moment that that will make sense. Or for people that is just in transit from one location to another. But for most situations you really want people that is physically there and have been there for a long time. So just pay attention to that. Make sure that if you are intending to just show up to people that is physically in the location they intend to target, that your campaigns have that selected already that that will be the biggest opportunity there. Now in a very similar fashion the other opportunities languages here the recommendation is the opposite. Most people for example will select something like you know, I'm in the US I will select English or I'm Spain, I will select Spanish. But unfortunately, especially, especially for for areas where more than one language is spoken, you run the risk of not showing up to someone that is actually doing the query in English even when you know they understanding, they understand it. And the reason is because the way that Google select that language is by the settings on the, on the browser, right? So there's a lot of people that change their. For example in the, for English speaking there there are some people that change the language of their browser to another language, but they understand English anyway and the query is in English, so you should show up. And the other way around, if you go to places like in Latin America, especially for example the case that I have in my mind Mexico, there's a lot of people that don't change the default setting and maybe their browser is in English and if the query is in Spanish, they will understand it. They speak the language, but it will not show up because you select only Spanish. So my general recommendation here is go for a language unless you have a very specific reason not to do so and just let the query trigger the ad, right? If the query is in English, then it really doesn't matter the language of the browser, that person understand it because they started the search in that particular language that you're you know that you have your campaign for. So that will be probably the biggest recommendation that I have there now for devices nowadays is becoming less and less important, but this is still relevant the fact that mobile especially behaves a little bit different than desktop, usually in terms of CTRs, in terms of conversion rate. So if mobile, the distinction between mobile and desktop is important for you, then by all means you can create separate campaigns where you create a specific ads or even landing pages for mobile devices versus what you have in desktop. But if not, at least it's important to understand the difference on performance, right? And you can make some adjustments on that. I remember back in the day when mobile devices were pretty much excluded. I don't think that's happening anymore. More and more traffic comes from mobile. And I will argue that nowadays you need to optimize or have the mindset of mobile first rather than the other way around. But still you want to understand that use the segmentation on the campaign and understand if your cost per click is higher or lower, if you have a better or worse CTR and especially conversions, right? So probably the changes that you need to do are not at campaign level. Probably what you need to do is change or make sure that the experience that you have on your landing page is the same or better for mobile users than what you have for desktop, right? So pay special attention to the layout, to how easy to fill a form or start a phone conversation or even start a chat because obviously your real state on the page is smaller than for desktop, right? So that will be the biggest recommendation. Now another area of opportunity will be at schedule. And here is very similar to the idea of language. What matters is the support and and the ability you have to respond if someone ask you or reach out out of your business hours, right? So for example, if you don't really have a voicemail or someone that takes care of that after 5 or 6pm in your time zone, then definitely you shouldn't have ads running late at night. Or the same goes for the chat, right? If you have a chat that you take care of Life and after 6 or 5pm there's no one there to answer or you to have set up some automation so they can be asked their email and follow up later the next day, then the same don't send traffic after hours. But most of the time nowadays people have voicemail or companies have voicemail and they have different means for people to reach out and someone to follow up later. So there's not necessarily a restriction on ad schedule, especially if you're optimizing for conversions because most of your budget will be spent on the time of the day where you are most successful. However, if you still want to limit by that, just be mindful of the time zones. Time zones for your business. The largest or the biggest example that I have is for the US where you have this, you know, four hour zone. So if you say, well, I don't want to take care of business beyond 5 or 6pm Consider your time zone where you are and that way you can decide if you want to extend that time frame a little bit more after hours and also in the morning. Right. If you don't, if you want to start exactly at 8am or a little bit earlier, that will be also important to understand. Now that's probably for ad schedule for the other big idea is around the date of the week. I don't feel strongly about this one unless just for whatever reason you really don't want to show up on the weekends where usually you will not have the same level of responsiveness for your potential leads. But understand, go there understanding, accumulate data. Especially you need, you know, weeks and months of data to get a good sense of the conversion rates that you have. And if your budget is limited, you can reduce or even, you know, completely exclude showing up on those time frames for sure. Now in the area of demographics, while Google search is mostly about keywords that you use, there is to some extent some things that you can do on demographics. You have access to to some extent understanding the age bracket that someone belongs to. A searcher belongs to the household income, the gender and even their marital status. So it doesn't apply to all companies and it's less relevant to B2B. But if for whatever reason you have a preference there or you start seeing performance differences between the brackets, then it will be wise to start either adjusting the bidding on that particular case or excluding a bracket if it's not providing the results or if you, you know, for whatever reason you cannot take care of whatever bracket is showing up in the results to just go to the demographic section and pay attention to those performance metrics and decide what is best for your company. Now in a very similar manner, you have audience segments and on audiences. The important thing here is that you want to understand if, if you have in market segments that might be interest on some of the results that you're showing out there. For example, one example is that over time you will get suggestions for in market segments that are, you know, interact with your ads more than the rest. The other big Area of opportunity here are remarketing audiences, because in those you have the opportunity to be more relevant. Now, my general recommendation here is that you just go into observation at the beginning, so that way you can get a sense if you're having a better performance. For any specific in market segment. There are some cases where actually you want to exclude yourself from some of them. The example that I was using for hiring, where you want to necessarily show up for people that is looking to work for you. So in those cases, maybe you are suggested that audience and you observate over some period of time and you decide that you want to just not show up for that and you can exclude it. So there are many different combinations here. The general recommendation is go to your audience segments and figure out if there are some of them that you want to have on observation and maybe improve your bidding and if there's some of them that you really want to exclude at all. And for the final one, I have landing pages. In this case, for landing pages, my general recommendation is it's hard to start with a campaign where you have multiple landing pages for each of the ideas that you have. It will be very intensive for work. So it's acceptable if you have a campaign that at the beginning uses your regular web pages, right? Your homepage, your service pages to be the landing page for your campaign, that's fine. But as you start building up traffic and start building up conversions, it will be unwise to not develop landing pages where you can better response or better answer to the query of your of your searchers. And landing pages have specific best practices around the way that they present forms and call to actions and the way that they present testimonials and the way they focus the user into taking action. So why sotl they work and it's important to have them so here in general, my recommendation is it's again, it's okay if you don't have them at the beginning, but once you have enough data, focus on the offer or the campaign or the ad groups where you have the most success and start building landing pages there until you cover the whole of the campaign, if that makes sense. And after that then you can start the process of testing and seeing if you can make changes on the headlines or the descriptions or the forms so you can perform, you can improve performance even, even more, right? So those are the recommendations that I have for you all. I hope that you find value into it and as always, I invite you to follow up the series. So if you don't want to miss the next one and get notified. Visit Boundify Demand Gen Studio or just follow us on social media and you will find the right channel where you can get invitations to to get into the next event. I'm really happy to have the opportunity to talk to you today and until the next one. Bye bye.