What To Expect From Your Google Ads Agency

Every month, thousands of businesses pay their Google Ads Agency to manage their search campaigns, and while some agencies produce stellar results, others fail miserably. What differentiates the winners from the losers? Are you getting the most value out of your agency? Below are some guidelines on what to expect from your Google Ads Agency and what questions you should be asking them every month so that you can get the most out of your advertising spend and achieve your business goals. By the way, some might be look for a Google adwords agency when the name was changed in 2018 to Google ads. 

When you first decide to run ads with Google ads, it’s easy to get excited about the possibilities it brings to your business. The following will help describe some of what to expect from your Google Ads agency over time as you continue to use the platform together.

Before we talk about what Google Ads agencies should be doing to manage your google ads, let’s talk about all the names and ways that marketers call Google Ads. There are a lot of terms that all mean the same thing, PPC ad management, SEM (search engine marketing), paid search ads, and pay per click. I think I got them all. Some are also still using Google Adwords Management even though Google changed the name back in 20018 to Google Ads.

It makes even more sense in today’s world as keywords have become more relaxed. You should also know that Google Ads is not the only game in town though, there are also Bing and Microsoft ads. Now that we are clear on what we are talking about, let’s talk about if your Google Ads agency is managing a successful Google Ads program.

Google Ads Set-Up and Planning

Every successful Google Ads campaign starts with planning. Your Google Ads agency should help you decide on all of your settings based on budget, goals, quality score, and more. Your Google Ads agency will then put your ad campaign into a healthy state that will enable them to serve relevant ads over time that are clicked on by users looking for what you have to offer.

There are many ways they can do this including managing bids, negative keywords, and more. Your agency should start with an audit of your existing account before making any of these recommendations. If you have already been given a strategy without looking at your existing account, then run!!

Let’s start with the campaign settings: 

• Goals

  • What has been chosen as the goal of the campaign? Each different type of goal unlocks different types of setups that you can do.
    • Sales
    • Leads
    • Website Traffic
    • Product Brand and Consideration
    • Brand Awareness and Reach
    • App Promotion
    • Local Store Visits

• Keyword Research

  • We analyze our client’s websites and create keyword lists utilizing the keyword planner in Google Ads for each service. Often pairing a keyword with just one extra word can make all the difference in the world.
    • This allows us to add to existing keywords that are being used
    • Also allows us to see which keywords we should replace

• Campaign Types

  • Where are the places that your ads are showing? There are many different types of ad campaigns within Google Ads. We are mainly talking about Google search ads in this article, but did you also know there are a lot of other ways to advertise with the platform? Check out this article to see the Google Ads suite of products.

• Budgets

  • What are the budgets of each campaign and the total campaign? It’s important to see how money is being allocated on a monthly basis.

• Bid Strategy Types

  • This is a tricky one with lots of options. Choosing the wrong strategy could mean disaster with your Google Ads.

• Languages

  • Typically we are suggesting English, but you could have someone who is targeting another country.

• Locations

  • Where are your ads trying to target? Are we targeting too much or too little?

• Devices

  • Where are your ads showing, mobile, desktop, or both? Did you know you can increase bids based on the device?

• Rules

  • This often gets overlooked, but is your Google Ads agency using rules to ensure your campaign is running smoothly?

Alright, let’s move out of the settings and look at the actual campaigns.

• Account Structure

  •  This is one of the most important items to look at, without a good Google Ads campaign structure you are set up to fail. Too often we see Google Ads management companies do not take the time to set up several different campaigns. We often just see one campaign and that means the budget is split between multiple or maybe just one ad group. Any keywords that have a large search volume will pull the entire budget, leaving some keywords without the proper allocation of budget. You also need to consider writing different ads for different ad campaigns and ad groups. Ad groups should be bunched together by similarity so you can write ads that are similar to the keywords selected. So campaign structure is very important.

• Well, we couldn’t talk about auditing an account without talking about keyword selection. Proper keyword research is often not done and left in the keyword planner tool as it should be.  Sure keywords are coming less and less important but they are still important.  Often the way you think is different than how others think.  In fact, 15% of searches done on any given day are brand new and have never been searched before.  You still need to do though.  The most important thing to think about today is the keyword intention of the keywords you are selected.  Often pairing a keyword with just one extra word can make all the difference in the world.  Audit your existing keywords and yah no matter what do a fresh set of keyword research.

• Ads

  • Next, go take a look at those ads, are we writing unique ads as we mentioned above that match the keywords we are targeting? Hopefully, by now you are using responsive ads and have all the spaces filled out.

• Ad Extensions

  • Sitelinks

    • This is where you can highlight links to important information on your website that is relevant to the keywords of that ad group. you might also have ones that you just use across the account.

  • Callouts

    • These are the highlights that talk about why you are better.

  • Location

    • If you are a location-based business you can’t forget this one that connects you to your Google My Business.

  • Call Extensions

    • Did you know you can lead them straight to a phone number? This can be good for service-based businesses and mobile campaigns.

  • Price Extensions

    • Have competitive pricing? Showcase it right in the search results!

  • Image Extensions

    • This is newer, but you can images now in search results! Think about that impact.

  • Lead Forms

    • Lead right to a form on the search results page!

  • Promotions

    • Do you have a special going on? Add it in to highlight it.

  • App extensions

    • You can ask a user to download your app

  • Structured Snippets

    • This often gets overlooked but it’s just another way to highlight brands, courses, and more that you offer.

• Audiences

  • We really wish this didn’t get overlooked because this area of Google Ads is just growing. It’s no longer just about the keyword but also the audience that you are targeting. Layering keywords with audiences could be a huge difference-maker in understanding the intention of a keyword. You can select both observation and actual targeting when setting this up. Your Google Ad agency should have a bunch selected in at least observation mode. There are all these types of audiences to choose from below, but we also wrote an article on how to target audiences on Google Ads:
    • Demographics
      • Age
      • Gender
      • Household Income
      • Custom Affinity
      • In-Market
      • Customer match audiences
      • Similar Audiences

• Landing Pages

  • We should be looking at where your ads are landing? Does the page match the keywords we are selecting? If it doesn’t it is going to affect our quality score and essentially our cost per click.  What is the bounce rate or how often someone comes into the landing page and doesn’t click on anything or leave that page?

Now that we are through the main settings in the account, campaigns, ad groups, ads, and landing pages let’s review how your Google Ads agency should at minimum be looking at and talking about with your metrics.

Google Ads Metrics Your Agency Should Be Talking About at Minimum

• Ad Spend 

• • How much are you spending in relation to the budget that you set? 
  • How much as your sending per campaign which should be a service line?
  • How much are they spending in relation to results?

• Impression share 

• • What it is:
    • Impression share (IS) is the percentage of impressions that your ads receive compared to the total number of impressions that your ads could get.
  • Why it’s important:
    • If your impression share is low you are showing for less than what is available in the market share for the keywords we are going after and the areas we are covering.  If we have several campaigns for several areas and/or services we could be spreading your budget too thin to compete. We like to stay around 80% impression share if we really want to dominate an area or service line.  Sometimes “business needs,” tell us to spread out budget across geographical areas and services, and therefore our impression share might be lower.

• Absolute Top Impression Share 

• • What it is:
    • Absolute top impression share (ATIS) is the percentage of your Google Ads impressions are showing in the most prominent position of #1. There’s only one “absolute top impression” per auction so your absolute top impression share is an important indicator of your overall prominence.
  • Why it’s important:
    • We like to ensure that we are showing at the top some of the time but not all of the time. We could be overpaying by showing in the top spot if it’s not garnering us more conversions. We watch this closely to see if we need to spend more per click in order to show higher in the search results.  

• Clicks 

• • What it is:
    • How often your ad is clicked on when shown in the search result
  • Why it’s important:
    • We have to have enough traffic to your website for us to be able to get conversions (or desired actions to the website, see below). The typical number we are looking for is at least 30 clicks to get to a 5% conversion rate which is the national average. We are looking to see that we are getting enough daily to get the conversion. 

• CTR 

• • What it is:
    • How often your ads are being clicked on in comparison to your ads showing.
  • Why it’s important:
    • If we are not getting our ads clicked on enough, then we need to work on more compelling ad copy, site link extensions, callouts, and more. 

• Cost Per Click

• • What it is:
    • How much you are paying every time someone clicks on your ads.
  • Why it’s important:
    • How much you pay per click is dependent on what your ad rank is.  Ad rank is determined by a number of factors but essentially the better your campaign is set up to the way that Google wants you to set it up the better cost per click you will have.  

• Conversions
  • What it is:
    • A conversion is defined as the desired action of the website, whether that be a phone call, form fill, purchase, or sometimes either.
  • Why it’s important:
    • If you are just getting clicks then you could be paying for traffic that is irrelevant and not driving home the desired action of the website. These need to be clearly defined and agreed upon as success metrics of the website. 

As you can tell there is a lot to talk about and look at in the Google Ads account. Google Ads has become the most powerful advertising platform in the world over the last decade or so, allowing companies to reach out to potential customers no matter where they are or what they’re doing. This shift has put an incredible amount of power into the hands of digital marketing agencies, which now have the ability to drive enormous amounts of business.

We have really only talked about search campaigns here and haven’t divulged into the many other types of campaigns you can use inside of Google Ads. If you are Google Ads agency isn’t at least talking about what was reviewed here perhaps it’s time to see if another PPC ad agency can mix it up a little for better results.

Choosing the right Google Ads agency can be like trying to choose which ice cream flavor you like best; all of them seem to be pretty good, and it’s hard to say why you like one more than another. You can’t really go wrong with any of them, and there’s no such thing as the perfect agency (however, we like to think we’re pretty close).

Want to listen instead?

Listen to “Ep #21 – What to Expect from Your Google Ads Agency” on Spreaker.

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