Getting the most out of your Google Audit with the Diginius Google Audit Tool
Our Google Audit tool displays a carefully curated set of metrics that enable you to assess how your Google ads are really performing. The next step to our tool is a Microsoft Forecast, the tool takes these metrics from the Google Audit and forecasts what you’d expect to see with the same campaign on Microsoft Advertising. At Diginius, we’re always advising our clients to diversify their campaigns, specifically allocating budget from Google to Microsoft and helping break the age-old debate of Microsoft vs Google, having them work alongside each other.
This Diginius tool has been designed to cut through the noise, not overloading you with peripheral data sets that look impressive but say little.
However, simply seeing these metrics won’t improve your performance – you also need to understand them.
Our Diginius analysts are here to help with a brief reminder of what each metric is as well as a couple of handy tips to boost your performance in each area.
Yet, this data is almost meaningless if you don’t view it through the lens of your goals; and adjusting to improve in one area could lead to worse outcomes elsewhere. Therefore, first step of this audit our forecast tool cannot help you with and you need be firm in your understanding of your ad(s)/campaign(s) aims and where your priorities lie. In doing so, you enrich this data in a way no audit tool can.
The explanations and advice offered below will also then be exceedingly more helpful and present you with real opportunities for improvement.
Spend
The total amount that you have spent on your ad.
Starting off with the essentials never goes amiss and it is always handy to know how much your ads are costing you.
If you want to lower the number or know how best to spend any remaining budget, then read on.
Revenue
This is simply how much money your ad has brought in.
Revenue is also rather self-explanatory. To improve the revenue, once again comes from an accurate diagnosis of the problem and other metrics are more suitable for doing that.
We take it that generating too much revenue is not a problem. If it is, you’re on your own with that one…
Impressions
This is the number of times your ad appears.
Impressions give you an insight into how many people are viewing your ad but it is worth keeping in mind that the same person can give you multiple impressions.
This is a very useful metric if brand awareness is a major priority. It also plays a crucial role in understanding the whole picture and diagnosing issues. For example, a good impression rate but a low number of clicks may suggest that your CTA could be stronger.
What can you do to increase your impressions?
Increase your budget
Typically, more money means more views. Try adjusting bit-by-bit until you have a good balance between the amount you are spending and the number of times your is displayed.
Broaden your targeting
This might seem to counter all the standard advice but you could consider widening your targeting approach. The more you expand your net, the more people will be caught.
Broaden your keywords
As above, by going for looser keyword match types, such as broad or phrase, you’ll find you ad is more relevant to more people.
Clicks
The number of times that someone has clicked on your ad.
It is rather pointless to say that clicks are important, after all we are talking about pay-per-click advertising. To better judge the traction and cost, the metric below gives you such insight.
Click through Rate (CTR)
This metric offers direct insight into how effective your ad is. It is calculated by dividing the number of clicks on your ad by the number of people who saw it, i.e. impressions, and is expressed as a percentage.
CTR = Clicks/Impressions x100
This directly shows you how well your ad is doing its job by giving you the percentage of people who are clicking on your ad after having seen it. Good CTRs vary depending on the industry so if you feel like your percentage is low, don’t panic yet. The graphic below offers some insight into the average CTRs per industry which goes some way to helping you place yourself on the scale of dismal to PPC Grandmaster.
Please note though that these are here for guidance and should be taken with a pinch of salt. Not only are these benchmarks from 2022, but they are also only an average and simply there to provide some contextual basis.
What can you do to improve click-through rate?
There are two main causes of a low CTR: your bid strategy that isn’t working or your ad copy/ images aren’t enticing enough.
Ad copy/ images
It is always worth A/B testing different copy, headlines, images and CTAs to see which resonates best with your audience.
Bid strategy
The next question to ask yourself is about how low your impressions are. A low CTR could be caused by your ads ranking lower in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) meaning fewer impressions and less of a chance that your ad is reaching enough people who will click-through. Your ads could be reaching your perfect customer, but they are simply not seeing them. If you are operating on a manual bidding strategy, try raising your bids and see if this makes a difference. However, if you are using automatic bidding, it might be worth changing your strategy to maximise clicks.
A word of caution – it is easy to get carried away and place too much importance on clicks alone. Remember that clicks don’t always mean conversions, so it is always best to take a holistic view of your performance.
Average Cost per Click (CPC)
This is the average price you pay each time someone clicks on your ad:
CPC = Total spend on your ad/ Number of clicks
If you just had a heart attack looking at your overall spend, then CPC is one of the metrics which are best placed to help you diagnose the issue. First though, a little extra knowledge never goes amiss:
Help! My CPC is too high!
Bidding again. It all comes down to your bidding strategy. If you are managing your ads manually, lowering your individual bids is the obvious next step but there are other things you can do in tandem to help – see below.
With an automated strategy, similar action can be taken by lowering bid caps/ goals. However, you could also have the wrong strategy for your current business and marketing goals. By carefully reading through the aims of each strategy and paying particular attention to what it prioritises, you should be able to find an approach that is better suited to you.
What else can you do? The first thing is to pay attention to your Quality Score (more on that later): the higher the score, the less Google charges for a click – all in the name of, you guessed it, quality (or more accurately, ad standards). Finally, depending on the size of your account, you could try pausing less valuable ad campaigns to lower your spend. This is a good approach if you have one or two extremely effective ads with a bidding strategy that brings in lots of clicks but Google is draining your wallet in the process.
Conversions
The number of people your ad has converted, be that by filling in a form or buy a product.
Having set-up your campaign, you’ll know that a) conversions can mean different things to different businesses and b) what a conversion means for your campaign. If you can’t remember exactly what that was, it is worth checking before we delve into the more useful conversion tracking metrics.
Conversion Rate (CVR)
This tells you how likely someone is to convert after having clicked on your ad.
Another important metric to pay attention to – as if any aren’t a lot already! This shows you how successful your ads are and how much business they are generating. Again, it is difficult for you to judge your performance without some rough benchmarks. Once again, though we believe these benchmarks have their place, it is even more important with conversions to not fixate on comparing yourself to them. One of the great things about conversion metrics is how much you can tailor them to your business, and it seems like everyone else is doing the same….
I wish my CVR was higher…
The best way to realise this dream is looking at the sales funnel as a whole and asking yourself the following questions at each step.
Are your ads reaching the right audience?
This is about tweaking your ad to reach people who have intent to buy. The easiest way to achieve this is by carefully monitoring your keywords and thinking about the action behind the search. Over time you should monitor your keywords and potentially add negative keywords to ensure that your ads are reaching the right people.
What is the customer journey like?
Is the journey from ad to purchase easy to navigate? Persuasive?
By bringing in other metrics here, such as clicks and impressions, you can gain useful insights into where the problem might lie and where your potential customers are dropping off the funnel. Adjusting ad copy and images has already been discussed but another key aspect to this is what the customer’s journey looks like from here.
Whether it is a landing page, form or something else, you should think carefully about whether this is the right place for ad viewer to end up. Especially if your audience is headed to a landing page, you need to optimise it to make sure it aligns with the ad and pushes your customer further down the funnel.
Do I have the right bidding strategy?
Yes, bidding again. There is no point repeating what has been written elsewhere but the same applies here too. Bidding strategy is essential to ensuring that your ads achieve your goals.
Cost per Acquisition (CPA)
This is how much you are paying for a new customer. Acquisition can refer to various actions from becoming a new lead to making a purchase. You may be familiar with this term under a different name, such as cost per actions, cost per conversion or cost per lead.
CPA = Total spend on your ad/ Number of acquisitions
Another vitally important, spend-focused metric. It could even be the most important metric in your account.
Unfortunately, there are no handy benchmarks to help you understand how well you are performing in comparison to others in your industry. Given how customisable conversion-centric metrics are, it is futile to try and draw out meaning in this way.
How can you lower your CPA?
It may seem silly to reinforce this but there are two aspects to this metric and so two broad ways that it could go wrong – spend and number of new customers. Therefore, improvement in this area comes from balancing reduced costs and boosted conversions.
Rather than repeating the advice given above which largely all applies here, it is more constructive to focus on best practices.
Scrutinising the minutiae, all the way down to individual keywords, is the only way build out a functional solution to your PPC problems. Having found exactly what is responsible, you are now better placed to tweak your approach focusing either on reducing spend or finding ways to convert more people (have another read of the CVR section above).
Conv/Value
This gives you an average of how much your conversions are worth.
Conv/Value = Total conversion value/ conversions
This is another way of looking at how much money your ads are generating for you. However, it’s not only important to track the number of conversions but also to assess the value each conversion brings to your business. This is where conversion value metrics come into play, helping you measure the monetary impact of those actions. By analysing both the quantity and quality of conversions, businesses can gain deeper insights into their ROI and optimise their strategies for higher value outcome
Return on ad spend (ROAS)
This tells you how much revenue you are earning for each dollar you spend on advertising.
ROAS= Conversion Value/Cost
This is a metric you cannot overlook. It gives you a much broader picture of the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns than anything else covered above. Most importantly, it considers the value of the conversions themselves.
For example, ads can have the same CPA but vastly different ROAS. The one with the higher ROAS tells you that something in that ad is successfully encouraging customers to spend more without costing you any more money to acquire.
With profit being the drive, the higher the ROAS value the better. Unfortunately, there are no useful benchmarks to offer you as once again this is a very personal metric that is given meaning when compared to your budget and profit margin. So, while the general rule that a higher ROAS is the goal, expenses and business health plays a very large role in determining how high is feasible.
Average quality score
This is Google’s evaluation of your ad quality. It is measured on a scale of 1-10 with a higher score suggesting that your ad is more relevant compared to competitor. It is calculating my combining the performance and these three components:
Quality Score (QS) = Expected CTR + Ad relevance + Landing page relevance
This metric represents in numerical form a key takeaway from this blog – everything is interlinked. QS both reflects and impacts how well your ads are performing. For example, a good score means that your ad has performed well and because of this Google gives it more visibility and reduces the CPC.
A good QS depends on the type of keyword you are targeting:
- 9-10: Ideal for keywords specific to your brand, name or products.
- 8+: Ideal for commercial intent keywords.
- 6-7: Ideal for low-intent keywords.
It should be noted that Google doesn’t give each of these factors equal weight. However, given that the best way to improve your quality score is overall improvement, there is little point fretting about what Google could possibly be favouring and to what degree.
The point of an audit such as this is to equip you with the necessary information in an easy to grasp format – no skulking around the recesses of your Google Ads management platform. What you are now able to easily see are the areas that demand the most improvement. By looking at all the aspects covered here and working to optimise and improve, your QS score will go up with it.
What next?
Getting the most out of your PPC budget means seizing all the opportunities you can. The first step you can take is by looking carefully at your forecasted results on Microsoft Advertising available on our Google Audit tool. Not only are there many benefits to Microsoft Advertising and Performance Max on Microsoft , these are features that differ from Google but diversifying your campaigns can make a world of difference to your ROAS.
If you are looking for further insights into your digital marketing and manage your advertising in-house, discover our Diginius Insight Platform boosts your ROI. If you’re a marketing agency head to this page to explore our Diginius Agency Partner Program.
