Audit Your Own Google Ads Account: The 4-Point Health Check (No Expert Needed)

Is your Google Ads account actually healthy, or are you being misled by vanity metrics and bad data? 

In this episode of the Google Ads Unleashed Podcast, host Jeremy Young walks you through a no-nonsense 4-point health check you can run on your own account, even without expert knowledge. From spotting duplicate conversion tracking and missing first-party data, to identifying messy shopping feeds and red-flag campaign structures. 

Learn exactly what to look for and what it means if it's broken. If your results don't match what your agency is reporting, this episode will show you why.

Get your free 30 minute strategy session with Jeremy here: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/

Scale your store with 1:1 coaching: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/1-2-1-coaching

Transcript

If you're spending money on Google Ads, then whether you're doing this yourself or whether you have a freelance or an agency, you should be able to answer one question. Is this account actually healthy? In this episode, I'm going to break down step by step what to look for to have a look at your own Google Ads account, even if you're not an expert, to see what on earth is going on and to spot some red flags, if there are any. Um, this is not a comprehensive list, but it's some of the things that I would have a look at in order to understand what is going on. Welcome back to Google Ads Unleash, guys. Hope everyone is doing fine this Easter Monday. Hope you had a lovely weekend. Um, hopefully your Google Ads performance isn't actually um upsetting you or has spoiled your weekend. If it has, then it's time to give it a full-on health check this week. And I'm going to tell you how you are going to go about this. Any Google Ads account essentially comes down to three things, right? You've got to have an architecture in place that shows the right person for the right search term, whatever they're looking for. for the right product, okay, at the right time. Sent you four things actually. Um, but basically the right ad, right time for the right person, right? Um, and how you achieve this is by putting an architecture in place that covers four bases essentially. All right. First of all, you uh your conversion tracking, what signals you feed Google ads is essential for Google to do its job to find other people who are like the people who are doing the thing that you want them to do, right? Whether it's signing up for a lead form, whether it's buying something, doesn't really matter. Depends on what you're tracking. Okay? It's also important that you use this data to then of course make accurate decisions on what's going on and if your campaigns are working or not. The second thing that you want to look for depending on the size of the business, not always is possible, is are we actually telling Google about our ideal customer, right? So, this is something that you'll always want to do because if you don't tell Google what your ideal customer looks like, who is it meant to show ads to? Sometimes it's not possible if you don't have a bank of existing customers, but you can even use conversion based lists, right? Get to that in a bit. Then, if you're running shopping ads, you need a squeaky clean shopping feed. So, I'm going to let you know about a couple of things that you may want to look at. um and uh see if uh yeah, everything is going okay there. And the last thing is is your ads. And there's a couple of things that are just absolute basics that need to be done. And if they're not done, then you should run. Let's dive right in. So, let's start with conversion tracking. The first thing that I want you to do is uh go back on the last 30 days. Go onto your main um sort of view. You go on to campaigns, campaigns, and then you see all um overview of your campaigns. I want you to hit the um segment button and go to conversions and then segment by conversion action. What you then see is what's active and what your campaigns are actively optimizing towards. Okay, this is sort of the first sort of signal that tells me if someone has mult multiple conversion actions running. Um, and this is usually a bad thing. So, it means for instance, you could be seeing if you have an e-commerce account that you're actually optimizing for page view. So, add to cardarts begin checkouts and purchases at the same time, which explains why you see so many conversions in the account. Um, and it also sometimes explains if you're a lead gen business and it says, oh, um, it says, hey, I've had this and this and many leads. says says the um Google Ads guy, but you say, "Hm, actually my phone hasn't been ringing or only had one or two people come through is because they might be optimizing onto a totally different thing such as for instance um page views of sorts um or maybe even um like some sort of uh location optimization um conversion action. By that I mean, you know, clicks on Google Maps or some something like that. So that's an indicator of what's going on. Your campaigns should be optimizing towards only one thing and one thing only and that's your business goal. Sometimes they are complex setups where it makes sense to send several conversion actions. Um this is extremely rare though and usually out of the ordinary 90 98% of you listening are optimizing your ad account usually for one thing and one thing only and that's usually purchases or leads. If you're tracking anything else it's watering down the data. You're making wrong decisions and also giving the algorithm wrong signals. Okay, so this is usually an indicator to see something fishy is already going on. And it also then tells you why the reports and whatever the agency or freelancer sends you doesn't actually match with what's happening in the real life. Right? This would be the first that I would be looking at. Okay. Then The second thing that I would be looking at is going into the conversions column which is on the left hand side on the goals column. Sorry. You go there and then you actually have a look at all of your conversions there. Some of them will be on secondary, some of them will be on primary, which may explain or not explain if you've seen any duplicate conversions. And I'd like you to have a look at whether you're actually tracking the right thing. properly. Okay. Let's say for instance you're tracking purchases. Okay. Um very often what we see is that there are multiple conversion actions. For instance, one with a website conversion source or one with Google Analytics 4 conversion source set to primary and then suddenly you actually track purchases double. So that means you're shooting double the number of sales through your uh through the algorithm and you actually only have half of those, right? So, Google's totally completely wrongly optimizing for stuff, right? So, this is something that happens very often that too many conversion actions are set to primary and it's leading the um algorithm astray. You've also uh got this issue when you actually seen like in the first thing that you have some sort of conversion duplication on. Sometimes you may only have um be optimizing let's say towards one purchase and you um that's great and then use go onto the gold section and see, oh, only one conversion action is set to uh primary. That's great. But somehow the numbers still don't add up. What I would do then is I would head to the section where it actually says um view all conversion actions, which is what you see in the top right, and look at a column that is called repeat rate. The repeat rate basically tells you if a purchase convert is fired, how often is it seen in that session? So for instance, if a tag has been put twice into the checkout when someone actually makes a purchase and it fires twice for per person, the repeat rate would be really high. Okay, so that can be an indicator that something's wrong and that it's overattributing. Okay, so this is something that I would absolutely check for as well and see if everything is working the way it should. I would also uh hover over the column tracking status. I make sure that both consent mode and enhanced conversion data works perfectly fine. Sometimes in all defense, like I'm looking at an account right now of ours that's open, we actually see that there is some problem um which is usually not a problem. Um like for instance, there's one here at the moment with enhanced conversions needs attention supposedly, but we know for a fact that it's actually working. that we've got the server side set up here perfectly working. Um, sometimes it simply um just doesn't work the way it's intended uh to and it makes um some odd um uh stuff there. But it is worth checking in and making sure that everything is fine there. So, this is the first of the four big columns of Google Ads. I call them conversion tracking. You got to make sure that you're not tracking duplicate conversions either by too many conversion actions which the campaigns are optimizing towards. Um, you got to make sure that not too many are set uh to a primary action optimization that uh your Google Ads account is doing weird stuff. You got to make sure that there's no repeat rate that it's usually around oneish that you're not sort of uh tracking duplicate conversions. Um, and you got to make sure that constant mode and enhance conversions works perfectly fine. This is the first If you're already seeing problems here, that is a sign that there's something wrong. And this is something which I would check instantly. Okay. The second thing that I would then check is head to tools and head to shared library and audience manager. Just do command F or control F, whatever it is on on um on Windows computers and have a look if you actually have um customer list. in there. Okay. Do you actually have um customer lists uploaded into your Google Ads account? Sometimes if you've got quite a small business and don't really have a lot of existing customers or you have a brand new account, this is a feature that is not yet necessary. Okay. But if you are mature business and have been running ads for a while and your Google Ads expert hasn't uploaded firstparty data, then why? If you don't see a single segment type on there that is labeled as customer lists, you are already in trouble and I would question why that is. Okay, the third thing that I would double check is um so and and basically why that is just to explain what what it does. First party data sorry before I get to the next point is there to uh tell your Google Ads account who your ideal customers are right If you upload a customer match list, Google looks at this data and uses it for bidding um to understand that it should show more ads to people who look like the people who are existing customers. If you don't have that, then that's usually a bad thing. So, um or a missed opportunity. So, this is something I would always highly recommend. Okay, let's go back to products. If you head into your merchant center, um I would um first of all head into the data sources section which you'll find at the bottom left and then you will also see if your feeds are set up here and if you have really let's say you only sell in the UK and suddenly there's really wild feeds or found by Google is for instance left on as a feed source. This is usually a sign that your feed is chaotic and that um the it hasn't really been optimized. And the best way to really double check this is a sixpoint checklist for which I've actually got a separate podcast as well. And that is um to try and uh go onto um Google and try and just generate a preview. Um one second. I'm just going to try and find a good ad here as an example. Uh and try and generate a preview. of your ad, of your shopping ad. And I would absolutely urge you to go through the sixpoint checklist first. Are the product images any good? If they look weird, if they look distorted, if it doesn't look right, already a red flag. There's something wrong. You need to double and triple check that. Then your product titles, they should be descriptive. They should be long. They should describe what the product is, what it does, what it's used for, what size it comes in everything that fits within under 50 characters. If your ads on the search engine ranking page, just take the product title from Shopify, that is usually already pretty pretty bad unless your uh title on Shopify is actually very good. All right, so this is something that I would urge you to ask what is going on. Then um are your prices showing correctly? This is just a very quick check. sometimes uh if with wrong feeds or old feeds. Sometimes I've I've done um I've done audits where uh with there were still manual feeds used, right? Where then the wrong prices were shown. That can be a bad thing. Then I would uh ask if reviews are showing. If you have reviews on the site and they are not used um in the shopping ads, I would request why especially if you use judge me or if you use um uh looks for instance. Uh Um and I would then also hover over the um over the search result and then double and triple check what kind of structured data is in there. For instance, are we submitting any other things which are relevant? For instance, just now I am on the shopping tab and I'm clicking on a search result and I can see that um it has actually been submitted um that you know this watch that I'm looking at has this color has the pros and cons is um uh is for men etc etc it has all that structured data that's great and lastly if you uh are advertising in Europe and don't use the CSS um that means at the bottom of the shopping ad it says by Google and not by product cast or by uh red brain or whatever then you're leaving 20% on on click costs on the table I would just suggest to go back to any episode where talk about CSS's for instance the one about product hero to learn more about that but basically when it says buy Google down there you are losing money all right so to sum it up check the merchant center is there mess with your feeds and then check the six signs of a healthy feed um that is good product image title price product uh data uh reviews and CSS if there is work being done or or has been done on those. If not, then your um Google Ads guide needs to do more work. Okay. And now lastly, the last thing that I would double check is um what we are doing with our current um uh campaign setup. So for instance, I would check is brand non-brand split correctly. All right. So this is something where lots of ad accounts actually are already failing. they usually have for instance uh one uh Pmax and uh maybe one search campaign or something like that and in both search campaign and the Pmax the uh brand isn't actually obviously excluded. Okay, so this is something that anyone can check pretty easily by clicking on one of the campaigns heading to the search terms and having a look if some of the top impressional conversion generating search terms are actually your branded keywords. If that's the case, I would highly recommend this is a red flag because um basically this these kinds of uh search term types should always be um split into their own campaigns. And I've also um made plenty of episodes about how to do brand and non-brand uh splits properly, but this is one of the biggest things that um uh you you should look at. Then for Instance another thing um uh which is usually a red flag is like very few campaigns I'm not saying that consolidation is bad consolidation is actually the way forward but most accounts which run successfully usually have a brand search campaign maybe a DSA campaign right maybe a uh non-brand search campaign or multiple at least one or two maybe pmaxes and maybe one or two shopping campaigns brand and non-brand, right? That is typically what I see in most ad accounts that are running successfully for ecom or for instance, if you have a a lead generation business and have three to five or 10 different services and there's just one campaign in there. I would wonder why that is. Okay, so that usually is not good. Campaigns should be segmented by their purpose. Um they should be segmented by their goals. Um and if that is not going on then and one campaign is basically doing all of the lifting. That is usually a very very bad thing. Talking about brand and non-brand, something that I also quickly check is the search terms. Um sort of just go to the search term report again and just have a look if there's any sort of queries that may be irrelevant. All of this can be caused by poor conversion tracking, wrong or no customer data, and uh wrong uh shopping ads. Um by the way, so this is something that I would check. Okay. And uh lastly, I would then check if some of the campaign settings pick for instance the highest spending campaign. Click onto the settings and then make sure that it all makes sense. That if for instance optimizes only one goal, that the bid strategy makes sense. Sometimes there's really random bid strategies in there like target rorowass for 171% or something like that which is always always always an indicator that someone has just chosen a random thing and not really thought about it or accepted a Google suggestion and that is not great. I would um always question that. I would also question any kind of automated settings recommended by Google left on such as AI max or broad match keywords. I would um question why for instance location target is to um not set to location only, all that sort of stuff. I would also then have a look if there's a negative keyword list applied because if there's no negative keywords or no negative keyword list, it just shows that there's usually very little done or has little been done in the past. And again, this list was for someone who is more or less a beginner, right? Or u maybe not as advanced. Um it g you a quick overview of what's important in a Google Ads account. account those things which I've mentioned are also indicative uh indicative indicative is that a word it is uh of um whether some work is being done in the ad account and um it also is indicative of um whether certain of basics have been just ignored or not really done enough um etc etc. Of course there's lots of other stuff that one could criticize but the This is just a really small thing of really high quick and dirty five in 5 minutes top level things you can look at which should raise enough doubts or affirm that your media buyer is doing a good job or is um basically pulling the wool over your eyes. And with that um I would come to the end of the episode. If you have seen anything that um is raising eyebrows here just text me Jeremy atyou youngigital.marketing is the email address. You can also go to the website young andandigital.marketing in order to book a call with me. Um you can also uh just head on to LinkedIn Jeremy and Google Ads and send me a message there. I would love to have a chat with you. You could also just mail in any question that you may have and I'm happy to answer that as well. This has been Jeremy Young, your personal Google Ads expert and I wish you a happy and productive week ahead.