Knowing if your Google Ads campaign paid off, in the end, is essential to shaping future digital marketing endeavours, but newer advertisers have some troubles figuring out what are the signs they should look for.
Most of the information you need will, fortunately, be found in one place: your very own Google Ads account. Let’s look at some of the metrics you should keep a close eye on, and what they mean.
1. Tracking Your Goals
Your ad campaigns likely have a specific goal, such as:
● Return on investment
● Brand awareness
● Traffic to your site
● Sales and conversions
Each goal comes with its own list of metrics marketers need to analyse their ad performance. For example, if you are running an Adwords campaign with the purpose of increasing traffic to your site, then you should check the ad’s click-through rate, as well as the traffic sources in your Google Analytics.
If you’re monitoring the conversions, then you’re interested in the cost per conversion, as well as the conversion rate, to see exactly how your ads are helping you meet your goals.
2. Analyse Your Quality Score
Look at your ads’ Quality Score components to see if the ads are helping you get the results you want. The elements that signal your keywords may not be helping in the endeavour include:
● The Quality Score – it’s a mark that estimates how relevant your ads, keywords and landing pages are to a user who sees the ads. Low-Quality Scores affect ad delivery and may even increase your costs;
● Landing page experience – estimates how relevant and useful the landing page is for users who click on your ads, and looks at everything from page copy to navigation;
● Ad relevance – looks at how well your keywords match the ad copies. If this score is low, it generally means your ad text is not relevant to the query;
● Click-through rate – how likely a user is to click on your ad if they see it in the result page.
3. Review Your Keywords
Additionally, you should also find out if your ads are being delivered for a set of keywords that are not really relevant to you. Look at your search terms reports to see what keywords trigger your ads. If your offer excludes certain queries, make sure to add negative keywords to your ad campaign to prevent Google from delivering your ads to those search queries.
4. Review Ad Extensions
Ad extensions are designed to help your ads convert easier. For example, if your goal is to get people to call your business, then you can use the direct call ad extensions that will display your phone number. Instead of making users click on a link to a landing page, someone who views your ad can click the call-now button directly.
However, the wrong ad extension can have the opposite effect, or your audience may not be ready to take such immediate action. Either way, if you do have ad extensions, it’s important to review them separately to see if they’ve helped you promote your products or services.
Get an Adwords Account Audit
Another way to evaluate your campaigns is to get an AdWords account audit by hiring a professional team to check the nooks and crannies of your ad accounts. This helps identify any issues with your account or campaign at any level, as the auditors will take an in-depth view of your data and come with recommendations for improvement.
Usually, ad accounts auditors will:
1. Check If Conversion Tracking Is Set up Properly and Working Accurately.
Sometimes, the tracker may not be properly installed, in which case all the gathered data is not an accurate reflection of ad performance. Signs of this include:
● Identical click count and conversion count
● Low sales numbers and high conversion rates
● Suspiciously low conversion rates.
2. Review Targeting Settings
Targeting is essential to a Google Ads campaign, and choosing the wrong audience, for instance, can lead to disastrous results. An auditor will check your targeting across all your campaigns and identify any major flaws that could affect performance.
3. Check the Ad Group Situation
Having just one ad in each ad group means you are not testing ad variation, which is likely why you are not seeing good results. On the other hand, having multiple ads per ad group can also be detrimental, as they can be competing with each other and still lead to bad results.
Your AdWords auditor will analyse your ad groups and come up with some optimisation suggestions.
4. Review Keyword Match Type
Google Ads have different forms of keyword match types available, such as:
● Broad
● Modified broad
● Exact
● Phrase
Each has its pros and cons and can be suited for specific situations. Knowing whether you’re better off using the broad or exact match, for instance, depends on a lot of different factors, like your goal, target audience, or even the keyword itself. An ad account auditor will also analyse the match type used in campaigns to determine if there are any problems in this area as well.
There may be other elements of your Adwords account analysed, such as how you’ve set up budgeting, landing pages, or even ad text.
Over to You: Improve Your AdWords Results with Us
If you’re not sure what’s causing your lacklustre ad performance, Australian Internet Advertising can help. We can take a closer look at your AdWords account and spot the key issues that are affecting your results, as well as design a good strategy that will maximize your return on investment.
For more information about how we can help your business, book a free 30-minute strategy session now or call us at 1300 304 640.
