Essential Tips for Auditing Google Ads Accounts
One of the necessary procedures for the smooth running of your campaigns is to conduct Google Ads account audits. A detailed Google Ads audit not only recognises weak points, but it also benefits you by tuning up your Google Ads account to create more income and profit, but with less investment in less time.
Google Ads is one of the most complex programs in all digital marketing platforms. You have to handle endless tools, ad formats, channels, reports, and different methods to expend money. Even a small mistake can create significant impacts when the bottom line of your company is at risk. It may lead to bankrupting your marketing budget in no matter of time if you don’t keep up to date with your account. But if you take good care of your Google Ads account by executing regular audits, it won’t happen to you.
Carrying out a Google Ads audit means doing a comprehensive analysis of your account and campaigns. You should go in and identify where your money is being used, where outcomes are materialising from, and how it can be reformed overall for greater efficiency.
Audits can disclose where ads failed and can help you to develop different campaign ideas. Also, audits are remarkable for making your account system clean and smooth to navigate, essentially benefiting you by reducing the amount of time you invest in it daily. The better the arrangement you have, the easier it is to get the expected outcome. Below we provide some essential tips for auditing Google Ads accounts.
Reviewing Performance Trends
The first thing you need to understand is the performance trend lines. Analyse how much has the performance changed and over what period. You should avoid considering a very short date range (a few days or 2-3 weeks) since there won’t be adequate data to get detailed conclusions from.
It’s best not to aim for a long period either, being 3+ months. Better you should review your performance in between one month to three months to get the exact data. Too many factors and variation can influence performance in that time frame.
Campaign Themes
Executing an outstanding campaign needs segmentation so you can understand data precisely and make the appropriate adjustments. Campaigns should be divided depending on the theme, services, location, or targets. Trying to put all of the ad groups into one or two campaigns won’t allow you enough control.
Segmenting your campaigns can give you a firm control over your budget and settings along with providing a logical hierarchy to your campaigns.
Location
You should verify that your ads are targeting the appropriate countries, states, cities and regions. It is always great to organise your campaigns at a country or, as a minimum, continent level for more segmental control.
You have to be extra careful with the “location options” under advanced settings. You can utilise that to target customers who are in your area of focus.
Language
Always try to use the language your target customers speak. Setting your campaigns to “All Languages,” will build up your impressions, because Google Ads will utilise the browser language settings to decide which ads to display. Thus, if a user’s browser setting is set to Spanish, your English-only campaign won’t show up.
Negative Keyword List
Negative keywords restrict impressions and clicks from users you are not targeting, so you can improve first-rate traffic and raise your ROI. Assess your query reports to see exactly which keywords have been triggering your Google ads, spot ones that don’t deliver the right traffic, and add them to your negative keyword list.
Delivery Method
The next thing to keep an eye on is your delivery method. You can pick from two options: “accelerated” or “standard.” If your objective is to gain the maximum number of impressions, you should select accelerated. If you are seeking to flatten your budget over the day, you can go for standard to have Google Ads gradually reduce your ads occurrence.
Conversion Tracking
Conversion tracking is one of the most important tools for auditing your Google Ads account. If your conversion tracking set up is not verified perfectly during your Google Ads audit, practically all of your account data will be worthless. This is because you want to see where your potential customers are clicking. Unfortunately, it is quite common for conversion tracking to be set incorrectly.
Conversion Volume
You must recognise which conversion exercise you are tracking before you can identify how many conversions you are making regularly and from which campaigns they are getting from. If you are not increasing your conversion volume every regular period then your business is inactive.
Budget
You can set a budget you want to invest on a per campaign basis, but you have to deal with the budget strategically. It needs to be clear if there are any high performing campaigns within your budget. If a campaign is not working well for you you should not turn down the budget, unless you are working to stabilise your budget portfolio.
If a campaign is not performing well, you need to work on it. Spending less cash is better than wasting more, but you should recognise the issue, not just cut the budget.
Count
The count factor can be very crucial. If you run an e-commerce store and you facilitate the same user to execute a conversion action more than one time, then you need to count each conversion. Lead generation customers usually prefer to count only one submission or call from the same user once, however it clearly defines the terms of your count with your customer ahead of time.
During a Google Ad audit, concentrate on detecting areas of overspending, determining new opportunities to explore, upgrading your management technique, obtaining audience insights to update your whole marketing, and validating assumptions.
An audit of your Google Ads accounts should be an essential part of your marketing strategy. It helps you to refocus on the relevant phases of your campaigns, tune up your ads and assists you to notice things that can be easily ignored during everyday management of the accounts.
