Part 1: A word of caution about paid search "audits"
Some “Google Ads audits” are nothing more than sales pitches in disguise.
Many agencies employ sales people who are not full time marketers, but they know where to go in Google Ads to find trivial but interesting data, cherry picked to make eyebrows raise. Their goal is to create doubt with the current state of management, most free audits are not doing real analysis and sizing up where there was inefficient spend or missed opportunity.
Cherry picking data and conveniently omitting context.
The search term report is a great place to find opportunities, while there is less data available now than in prior years which is a topic for another day. A media manager may find more keywords to target or negate using search term data. These are not the keywords used for showing ads, these are the queries actually searched.
The truth of it is that there will always be 2 flavors of interesting but trivial details. You will likely find high converting but very long tail, lowly searched keywords. And on the other hand you may notice a minority of keywords that perhaps have unusually high click costs.
What sales auditors will do is cherry pick long tail winners and say “Wow this term has such high ROAS but only a small <4% of spend, implying that opportunity was missed”
Or they will myopically focus on the minority of search terms with unusually high CPCs, literally zero on just the click costs themselves omitting context like the number of clicks and any revenue driven and say something like “These terms had CPCs over $10, caps should be put in place”
When you’re using Automated Bidding with a ROAS target, campaign level performanc can still be there but sometimes one has to take the good w/ the bad. You get the convenience of automation but not uber specific control. While one can technically implement a bid limit using a Portfolio Bid Strategy, that’s often impractical and not the right move for just 1 campaign.
The Automated Clicks strategy does have campaign level bid limits but other automated tactics do not. Max Clicks w/ limits is a great starting strategy for new accounts and new launches. Target ROAS would be preferred once a campaign has enough volume.
Here’s what this looks like in real life. If I wanted to be a jerk and back stabber, I could use this. BUT, I have to stand behind my audits and get results. I’m not driving material cost savings or revenue but trying to “optimize” things that account for less than 1% of total campaign cost. That’s penny wise and dollar foolish activity.
I’ve seen real life agencies do this. So called “award winners,” where they find a minority of keywords that are outliers on a cost per click basis. They then ONLY focus on just the click cost. When other metrics are included for context it’s a different story.
With this view we notice much more than ONLY their click costs. We see they drove a little revenue – $1500 and the total clicks were 153, meanwhile there were nearly 300,000 clicks for this campaign within the given date range. It’s pretty much deception at this point.
For additional context, I’m not the first person to think most audits are a bit sleazy
Check out this post from AdvenutrePPC CEO – Patrick Gilbert – LINK
