Google Adwords: self-audit of advertising campaigns for beginners [checklist]

Checklist for auditing advertising campaigns in Adwords

1. Check that the campaigns are split

As we wrote in one of our previous articles (Google Ads: Common Mistakes for Adwords Newbies), setting up a google adwords ad campaign correctly is very important.

If your campaigns are divided for different product groups, you can set your bids correctly and conveniently and limit your daily budget. You can stop advertising for services that you temporarily do not provide in just 2 clicks:

Agree, it's much easier to stop one campaign or ad group than each ad and keyword separately. In this case, you will need to switch to the "Keywords" section, find all the necessary keywords in the list, mark them with a tick and select the appropriate action (delete / pause / enable).

The problem is that usually we are not talking about a few key queries, but about dozens. You will waste a lot of time, you can get confused and accidentally disable an important keyword. Therefore, one of the first commandments of a PPC manager is divide and conquer.

2. Geolocation

A common mistake when setting up google adwords contextual advertising is incorrect country targeting. Without knowing or not noticing, it is possible to advertise to the whole world when the services are provided only within Moldova. Because of such a mistake, the entire budget will be wasted, and very quickly. Only a few percent of referrals will be from Moldova, while the rest will be from Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and other CIS countries, if the ad was written in Russian.

You can check the targeting in the campaign settings by selecting the "Locations" item:

Also, the google adwords advertising campaign has a separate page for more detailed location settings, viewing excluded cities and statistics by country. It is located under the settings and looks like this:

3. Keyword analysis

Check the keywords in each ad group: see if they fit the subject of the ad, if the ads themselves are showing for your keywords (you can find out by hovering over the keyword status):

Analyze your keyword statistics and don't forget to adjust your bids for the required positions.

4. Negative words

Negative keywords can be added immediately in a huge list, or you can gradually add them based on search queries. You can view negative keywords on the keywords page by selecting the appropriate tab:

If you do not add negative keywords, you will again just waste part of the budget for unnecessary queries. For a new home appliance store, for example, it makes no sense to spend money on displaying an advertisement for the query “cheap used refrigerator”.

5. Ad extensions

But what's really good at increasing the number of relevant clicks is ad extensions. By adding a phone number, address and additional links, you can significantly increase the number of orders. At the moment, there are 10 types of extensions in Google Adwords:

1. Additional link - you can add 4 links under the ad to other pages of your main site:

2. Clarification - similarly located under the ad, but no longer clickable. In the clarifications, you can indicate the various advantages of your company for the client.

3. A structured description is a small text description that is used to list something. For example, “Services: website development website promotion, development of online stores, SMM promotion”.

4. Phone numbers are one of the most useful extensions. You can add multiple phone numbers to appear next to your ad. And if the ad is displayed from a mobile device, then a button "Call 060 106 666" will appear under it, when you click on it, the number is automatically dialed on the phone of the interested person:

5. Messages - adds a button with which the client can send you a message directly from the ad.

6. Addresses - a clickable address will appear next to your ad, and the distance to the office location will also be indicated from the phone.

7. Affiliate Addresses - If your product is sold in different stores, then you can specify where your product is in stock.

8. Price - prices for goods or services that you customize appear below the ad. The block consists of a text description, price and a clickable title that will take the client to the product of interest:

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9. Links to applications - a button "Download application" will appear in your ad. This is a very useful extension if you have a mobile app.

10. Reviews - reviews appear below the ad. You cannot write them manually, Google needs an authoritative source in order to check the veracity.

As you can see, there are many extensions and they are all needed for specific purposes. Combine extensions, track performance to get the most out of your PPC advertising.

6. Control analysis of the prepared ads

Review your ads before posting, do some basic analysis: check where the CTR is higher, which ads are most often clicked on, and experiment. Only by experience can you figure out which settings work best for your business.

A few words about linking Google Adwords to Google Analytics

For effective traffic analysis, you need to link Adwords and Analytics. If you don't, analytics will count ad clicks as organic traffic. Thanks to the linking, a UTM-tag is automatically created for each ad, which in Google Analytics gives separate statistics on Paid Search:

With linking, you will no longer be confused with Paid Search and organic, which will make it possible to quickly and accurately analyze traffic and other statistics on contextual advertising.