@joshuamaraney

Here's an example of a bad Google Ads account that I recently audited. This company is in Australia and they sell products online. When I take a look at this Google Ads account, the first thing that I'm realising is that they don't have any shopping campaigns.

If you're running an e commerce account, you have to have shopping ads. That's the first problem. The second thing is that if I go into account settings over there, I always start with it to see what the automated settings are.

Straight away, I can see that a lot of terrible automated settings are turned on. Sometimes this is bad default. Sometimes the Google reps have told you to do it.

Basically what is happening over here is that Google has control of your campaign and though making changes not for your benefit but for theirs. You can see over here removing keywords and a whole variety of nonsense is turned on. All of these have to be switched off.

If we look under goal settings, remember that on e commerce website, no e commerce values are even being tracked over here. They're tracking page views as a goal. This is just absolutely nonsense.

A lot of the other settings are wrong or they're not recording. So there's almost no chance that this account can be running correctly. If they're using smart bidding, if we look at that bidding, by the way, they're using targeted ROAS, return on advertising spent.

But if The Google Ads account is not imparting a value that it's meant to be tracking against. Obviously, this is bound to fail. The next thing in this campaign, they've got search and display Select, which again we've mentioned so many times is terrible.

Their ads are showing on random websites that have got nothing to do with it and they're wasting a budget which at least should go to search if not for shopping

are showing on random websites that have got nothing to do with it and they're wasting a budget which at least should go to search if not for shopping. If we look over there, they've got one ad group with lots and lots of broad keywords. As we've mentioned, broad keywords give Google licence just to show your ads for anything.

Again, possibly if they were using targeted draw us correctly, the ads would serve well. But over here, you almost guarantee that your keywords are showing for irrelevant stuff. Over here, this Google Ads account is literally one of the worst I've ever seen and it just shows you if you don't know what you're doing in Google Ads, why Google rep has set it up for you or someone that says they know what they're doing, you really are going to get a bad Google Ads account.

If you need an audit on your Google Ads account, drop me a DM or send an email to info at topclick dot c o dot z a.