Before jumping into an Google Ads campaign, you should layout a Google Ads schedule to keep yourself organized.

Start with a specific schedule of items that you need to perform on a daily, weekly, monthly, and bi-monthly basis.

This schedule should be managed at a variety of levels, including the:

  • Account
  • Campaign
  • Ad Group
  • Keywords
  • and Ad Levels.

Google Ads Schedule

Daily:

Key Outliers

Look for numbers that seem out of place and make changes if needed.

KPI’s

Look at important PPC metrics and make adjustments as needed.

  • Average Position
  • CTR
  • Clicks
  • Quality Score
  • CPC
  • Conversions

 

Weekly:

Pause Underperforming Keywords

Pause keywords that have spent without converting or have a low CTR and could harm account performance.

Check Your Search Terms

Check the Search Terms report each week to make sure your ads are showing up for keyphrases you want to be ranking for. If you are showing up for keywords that you don’t want to be ranking for, add those keywords to your Negative Keywords list.

Check Budgets

View your budgets for both search campaigns and display campaigns. If you’re running through your budget early in the day, consider raising it or making adjustments where it’s needed.

Display Network Review

Exclude placements that have spent a lot of money without converting.

Check Your Keywords’ Quality Score

Make sure your keywords have a quality score of at least a 7. Having a low quality score can affect your campaigns significantly in terms of how it outperforms its competitors. a combination of factors, including expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience, will determine your quality score. If you notice some of your keywords have a low quality score, consider pausing those keywords, updating your landing page copy to include more keywords like those or updating your ads to include keywords such as those. Remember, Google wants to make sure your ads are relevant to a user’s search, giving them the best user experience possible. However, aim for a quality score of 3+ on competitor keywords and branded keywords (keywords that include your brand name) should have a quality score of 8-10.

 

Bi-Weekly:

Pause & Change Ads

Pause underperforming ads and write new ads. You should be testing at least two ads per ad group at all times, and you should have enough impressions to accurately evaluate if the ad is working or not.

Create Responsive Search Ads

Responsive Search Ads allow you to create more headlines and descriptions that Google will play around with to show more relevant ads to your customers. With Responsive Search Ads, you can enter multiple headlines and descriptions, and over time, Google Ads will automatically test different combinations and learn which combinations perform best.

Run an Auction Insights Report

Auction Insights Report is a tool that allows you to see how your campaign or ad groups are performing against other advertisers in the same auction. It allows you to see your impression share versus your competitors’ impression share, the overlap rate (how often another advertiser’s ad received an impression in the same auction that your ad also received an impression), your position above rate (how often another advertiser’s ad in the same auction shows in a higher position than your own, when both of your ads were shown at the same time), and more insight into your campaign against your competition.

 

Monthly:

Double Check Settings

Often times, something within settings is missed or isn’t set up properly. Do a quick check after every month, to ensure your settings are okay.

Check On Your Extensions

If you haven’t already setup extensions on your ads, you should do so. Check on them on a monthly basis to see how they are performing and if there are any other extensions you could be adding to improve performance.

Set & Update Goals

In order to improve your performance, you should set monthly goals for a campaign. This will provide much needed benchmarks that you can reflect back on at the end of every month. Do you want to see 50 conversions per month? Do you want a CTR of at least 10% per month? What are your KPIs?

Landing Page Review

Run a Destination URL report to gauge which landing pages are performing well and which aren’t. You should create variations of your landing page through a/b and multivariate testing to see improve poor performing landing pages.

If the landing pages still aren’t performing well, then it’s time to reconsider your design, ad copy, and the keywords you’re targeting.

Monthly Keyword Report

Run a monthly keyword report to see which keywords are performing the best and to see any major changes.

This is also the only way to have a record of a keyword’s quality score because Google Ads doesn’t allow you to view past quality score.

 

Bi-Monthly:

Geographic LocationsGeotargeting

By running a Geographic report, you can view locations, whether it’s region, metro area, or most specific location in order to see if performance is below or above average in individual locations.

Ad Scheduling – Hours of Day and Days of Week

Look at performance by day of week and hour of day, then consider using ad scheduling to optimize your campaign for the best times.

Historical Performance Review

Analyze historical data to evaluate seasonal and long term data trends.

Now that you have a starting point, you can create your Google Ads Schedule! Or if you’d rather leave it to the experts, get in touch with us about our Pay-Per-Click and Digital Advertising Solutions.

Topics: PPC