Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 129 - Managing Your Campaigns

How do you actually manage your Google Ads? 

I know that might seem like a silly question at first, but so often I talk about strategies and tactics and troubleshooting and “how to know if this is right for you” and “what to do if this goes wrong.” 

But what about just the day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month management of Google Ads? What should that look like?

I was on a Google Ads coaching call yesterday with a new client and he asked me, "What should I look for on a weekly basis to maintain my campaigns?" I realized that the answer I usually give is no longer the answer I wanted to give. So Austin, this one's for you! 

I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working with big brands at Google and now I work for you. 

This is Inside Google Ads, Episode 129: Managing Your Campaigns.

Let's break this up into three scenarios. 

1. The first scenario is when you launch a brand new campaign, the things you're going to do in the first couple of days, weeks, or months are going to be really different than the things you're doing with a campaign that's already been live for a while. So that's category one, how to manage a new campaign. 

2. Then category two is how to manage a campaign that's working. The campaign's working well. What do you do? 

3. And then category three, how to manage a campaign that's not working well and how to fix it. 

I'm going to give you specific steps to take in each of these three scenarios in this episode.

1. New campaign Scenario

If this is sort of a smaller budget for Search or Shopping - if we're in Search, it's Exact Match - Yes, we're leveraging Smart Bidding - then for the first few days, I'm going to recommend not looking at your campaign at all. If it's easier, just put your hands under your butt and sit on them! 

But then after 2 to 3 days, I would start by looking at three key things: click-through rate, Search Impression Share, and search terms.

Not the three you expected, right?

Let's start with click-through rate. The reason that's so important is because in order to have a click-through rate, you need impressions and clicks. So, that's the first barrier, right? Are your ads actually serving and are people clicking on them? 

For a Shopping campaign, about 1% CTR is the benchmark I'm generally looking for. For non-brand Search, I'm usually looking for 5% to 7% CTR, unless you're in an industry where local services ads are running, in which case maybe you'd be more like a 3 %to 4% CTR. And then for branded search, I'm looking for a 35% to 40% CTR.

If your CTR is a lot higher than that or a lot lower than that, it can be a red flag. And this is something Google Ads practitioners often miss. If your Shopping ads only have a 0.2% CTR, yeah, we've definitely got an issue there. But if your Shopping ads have a 5% CTR, there's probably also an issue because it's just too high. It's not feasible. It means you might be opted into Search Partners, it's only serving on your brand, or you're attracting the wrong kind of traffic that's not qualified, because perhaps your titles or images are not correctly reflecting your product. So, a “too high” metric is just as much cause for investigation as a “too low” metric. And sometimes results really are that good, in which case, congratulations. But usually it's a red flag.

Then I'm looking at Search Impression Share because I want to understand how much of the market we are capturing. Are we at less than 10% Impression Share after the first couple of days or are we already at 80% Impression Share? That tells us different things about the opportunity size. How our budget's doing. How our bid strategy is doing. And how our keyword or product selection is doing.

And then third, the search terms. But importantly, I am no longer recommending that you go into the search terms and start adding negatives right away. If there's a search term in there that genuinely has nothing to do with your business and you would never want to advertise to the person who would search for that thing, then sure, add it as a negative, but then your job's not done. Then you need to figure out why you serve on that search term in the first place. 

If it's Shopping, for example, you don't get to pick your search term. So, you might want to look into that product or products that triggered those irrelevant search terms and figure out why that happened. Or maybe it's because you're using click-based bidding and not conversion-based bidding. And so, Google is going after the cheapest possible search terms that can get clicks even if they're unlikely to convert. These things are all related.

On the keyword side, in Search, if you're seeing a lot of irrelevant search terms come in before just adding negatives, look at the keyword those search terms are matching to. You might need to add the keyword column to your Search Terms Report in order to do that. And it may turn out that you have perhaps a Phrase Match keyword in there that's just bringing in a ton of irrelevant search terms. So you might just want to pause that keyword rather than playing constant whack-a-mole. 

These are the things to be focusing on in Search or Shopping with a smaller budget.

If it's a larger budget campaign, things like conversion tracking and all that are set up well in the account, then I would still just leave it alone. Even if you see seemingly irrelevant search terms coming through, even if it's starting to prioritize products you don't think it should, if you have the right conversion tracking in place, the right bid strategy in place, and sufficient budget, it will figure it out. So only intervene if it is genuinely going off the rails. That's how I recommend thinking about managing a new Search or Shopping campaign.

If you have launched a new Performance Max campaign, obviously even more differences there with more automation coming in. You don't get to control it as much. So again, feel free to take a look at the Channel Performance Report. Feel free to take a look at the Search Terms Report, but don't go in there and start adding exclusions or changing your assets. Give the thing time to learn. Wait until it has conversion data so that you (and the PMax campaign) can both learn what's working and what's not and then move on from there. 

If there are a bunch of search terms it's serving on that don't convert, it's going to stop serving on those on its own. You don't need to proactively get in there with the negatives unless, again, it's something genuinely irrelevant to your business-  in which case check your assets, check your landing page, figure out why it decided to serve there in the first place.

For a more visual campaign like Demand Gen or Video, we're not dealing with keywords here. Instead, we have placements, our audiences, topics, things like that. So again, not much to do in those first couple days. Both the campaign and you need it to learn. 

One thing I will check frequently is the Placements Report just to see if we're showing on a lot of kids and family content. 

If you're running a Video Views campaign, for example, then that means you're optimizing for views. And guess who views a lot of ads? Kids who don't know how to skip them. But again, that doesn't mean the campaign's not working. It's doing exactly what you told it to do, just maybe not what you want it to do. And so, yes, maybe you need to add exclusions or change your content suitability settings. Or maybe you want to try a Demand Gen campaign instead of a Video campaign so that you can optimize for clicks or conversions instead.

2. Campaign Performing Well

All right, now that we know what to keep an eye on for our new campaigns, let's talk about how to manage a campaign on an ongoing basis that's performing well. And here is the maxim I want you to remember: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. 

I know, especially if you're a business owner watching every single dollar go out or an agency trying to justify your fees, it's tempting to fill up that “change history,” to be doing things. But if a campaign is performing well, just let it keep performing well. 

That doesn't mean you do nothing, by the way. But it means instead of spending every single day hitting refresh, refresh, and refresh. “Oh no, why did that one single search term have a high CPC?” Back away! Think about the things you can do that would have a bigger impact.

So, for example, on a monthly basis, you might want to review your overall asset performance to see how your headlines and descriptions and images and videos are performing and maybe test some new creative. 

Or maybe you want to zoom out a bit and check your overall audience insights and see if that gives you ideas for new campaigns to launch. 

Maybe you want to analyze your Search Term Report by search term match type. This is something I show you how to do in my course, Inside Google Ads. More info at learn.jyll.ca. But that's a really great way to understand if you need to change the keywords you're using or reorganize your ad groups or structure your campaign in a different way.

So for campaigns that are working well, let them keep working well and then think about ways you might improve performance further. Whether improving performance means getting more volume in which case you might be adjusting your budget or bid strategy or conversion actions or targeting. Or maybe performing better means getting more efficient, getting a lower CPA or a higher ROAS, which again may be looking at levers like Search Lost Rank, adjusting your bidding, changing your creative, testing new segments, etc. 

Perhaps in a keyword-based Search campaign, you want to deep dive into Quality Score and pick one area to focus on. Perhaps in a Demand Gen campaign, you want to look at all your different image assets and you find, hey, you know what? I don't have any of the 4x5 orientation and why don't I add a few more there to see if that opens up new opportunities. 

Smaller tweaks and tests you can do to try to improve performance, or zooming out to think “what are bigger picture new campaigns or new strategies I can launch to build on what's already working well?”

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

That means if your campaigns are performing well, you might be checking your Google ads regularly, but you may not make a single change the entire month. That doesn't mean you're not working or thinking or strategizing or planning or analyzing. But after doing all that work, if you determine there's nothing to be done at this time, then there's nothing to be done at this time. That is a-ok. And honestly, a sign of true expertise and confidence in Google Ads if you know the best thing to do is nothing at all.

3. Campaign Not Performing

Now, what about that third scenario where things are not working so well in your campaign? This is what I talk about in a lot of episodes, in my newsletter, on LinkedIn. So, I'm not going to go too deep into that third one today. 

But what I do want to share is you want to make sure you find the root cause. Most of the people who book a Google Ads coaching callwith me do so because of this third reason. Something's not working and they're not sure how to fix it. So, when that happens, you want to make sure you're diagnosing the root cause, not slapping a band-aid on top of a symptom.

What do I mean by that? 

Some clients come to me because they say, "My CPCs are too high. My CPCs are climbing, climbing. They're just too high. It's not profitable anymore." 

Okay, first we look and see, is that actually the case? And let's say that it is. Why are CPC's climbing? And why is that a problem? 

So, to the first question, why are CPC's climbing? CPCs do tend to go up over time, but I'm going to want to look at things like click-through rate, because the higher your click-through rate, the higher your ad quality, the less you have to pay per click. 

I want to look at Search Impression Share. If you have a 60% Impression Share on non-brand Search, yeah, that's inflating your CPCs. 

I want to look at your bid strategy. Are we using a Maximize bid strategy or a target-based bid strategy?

Have the keywords changed? Have the negatives changed? Has the location targeting changed? Have the conversion actions changed? All these things can cause CPCs to increase. So that's one piece of it. Finding the root cause of why that's happening.

But then we go to the second part. Remember: high CPCs are not the enemy, low quality traffic is. So the second part, which my client usually doesn't ask me, but I have to ask them, is why is the high CPC a problem? 

If CPCs are increasing, that means we need to either increase our conversion rate if we want to keep CPA constant, or increase our conversion rate or Average Order Value if we want our ROAS to remain constant. So in the time that CPCs have been going up, have we been able to increase conversion rate to match or not? 

Why not look for the root cause of the problem, so you can fix it at the source, rather than doing what I've seen a lot of clients do unfortunately before they come to me which is try to slap a band-aid on top like “oh, reverting to manual bidding because CPCs got too high.” That literally does not help your problem. That just means you're now spending less on people who are less likely to convert. 

Or they use a portfolio bid strategy and put a bid cap in place. Okay, now you're just cutting off the most expensive users, which probably includes some of the people who are most likely to convert.

I actually had two different clients this week show me something in their Search Terms Report and say, "Look how high the CPC was on this search term! Oh my gosh, I can't believe I paid $100 for this click!" 

Here's what I showed both of them that helped change their perspective. Maybe this will be helpful to you, too. 

Fine. Go ahead. Go to that Search Term Report. Sort descending by CPCs with a filter for “clicks>1.” For anything that at least got a click, what's the highest CPC? 

And in both these scenarios, when we did that, we saw among all these super high CPC clicks there were a handful of the conversions in their campaign. So yes, they paid a lot for some of these clicks, some didn't convert, but then some really did. 

And then I asked them to click on the average CPC column again, which now sorts it descending. We could see the cheapest clicks they got. And what do you know? There were a ton of cheap really below average clicks as well (not that they had focused on that part) and no conversions to show for them.

So this confirmed for me in both scenarios that Smart Bidding was doing exactly what it was supposed to do. It was swinging and taking bigger bets and bidding more for things that it thought were most likely to convert. And of course, not every swing panned out, but a couple of them did. And then, conversely, for things that they thought were not as likely to convert, it bid a lot less, a bit lower. And what do you know? Those things didn't convert. 

Google Ads will do exactly what you tell it to do. No more, no less. So, while yes, rising CPCs may be concerning, it's not necessarily a problem that needs fixing. Focus on your end goal, which usually is either a volume goal, getting more conversions or more revenue, or an efficiency goal, getting a lower CPA or a higher ROAS.

I know it's easy for me to just say that to you. That's a really hard thing to do. And for people who are perhaps just picking up Google Ads today and seeing all the automated features like auto apply recommendations, AI Max, PMax, auto bidding, and auto targeting, this sounds great. Those things can be great. But the problem is when those things don't do what you want them to do, you still need that foundational Google Ads expertise and understanding to understand why the system's not doing what you want it to do, and then what you can control to fix it. 

If that's something that you feel like is missing in your own knowledge, in your organization's knowledge, you can book a coaching call with me via my website at jyll.ca. That's J-Y-L-L dot C-A.

To wrap things up, whether you're managing a brand new campaign, managing an ongoing campaign that's performing well or trying to troubleshoot a campaign that's not performing well, there are a few key things you need to remember. 

First, don't make changes to your account or campaigns just because. Anytime you're going to make a change, think, why am I making this change? What is the output I'm expecting to see from this change? And then make a note of it so you can go back in a few weeks and see if the result was what you expected. If you're not sure how to fix a problem, don’t throw spaghetti against the wall. Google Ads does exactly what you tell it to do. So if it's not doing what you want it to do, you need to modify your instructions to align them better with what you need.

Second, high CPCs are not the enemy. Low quality traffic is. That doesn't mean high CPCs are a given, by the way. I've worked with lots of clients who have said, "Oh, I have high CPCs." And it turns out there was some other issue going on in the account, but you know what? We were able to do something to either keep CPC's flat or bring them down. Usually by changing their bid strategy or improving Quality Score. And I don't mean reverting to manual. I mean adjusting to a target-based bid strategy or adjusting the targets or addressing Quality Score issues.

And third, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Sometimes the best thing you can do for your campaign performance is nothing at all. But if it is broken and you're not sure how to fix it, give me a call or visit jyll.ca.

I'm Jyll Saskin Gales and I'll see you next time inside Google Ads.