10 Most Common Growth Opportunities Uncovered in Blackbird's SEM Audits
As a completely biased party, I think Blackbird’s marketing audits are the industry’s best. The channels and campaign types have changed over the years and our audit has had to commensurately adjust but we always see the same couple of things pop up.
The backbone of the process is an exhaustive checklist. We turn over hundreds of rocks looking for ways to improve Google and Bing accounts. And there are 10 growth opportunities that emerge more commonly than any others.
I’ll outline them here – and explain the issues they create if they go unchecked.
Under-using bid automation. I’m not one to tell you to blindly trust algorithms, but it’s tough to justify manual bidding at this point, no matter the volume of your keywords. Let the algo do its work – but make sure you’re asking it to do the RIGHT work (more on that below). The exception would be brand campaigns where sometimes manual will drop CPCs without loss of impressions and clicks.
Missing impression share from budget. If a campaign is budget-capped, ads stop delivering before all available impressions are served, which means you’re missing potential clicks and conversions. (I see this all the time in accounts of every size.) The two main ways to combat this are: A) Reducing bids so that each click spends a smaller portion of your daily budget; B) Increasing your overall budget so that the campaign has more room to spend on those costly clicks.
Giving Performance Max free rein. Performance Max has one goal: to hit numbers and look effective. If you don’t steer it away from low-hanging fruit, it’ll gobble it up and look more powerful than it is. Campaigns that aren’t excluding brand terms and tilting the algorithm away from retargeting and toward net-new customers are letting Google off the hook and spending money without regard for incrementality.
Over-relying on SKAGs. Match types aren’t what they used to be; since they’re bleeding into each other now and nothing is ever truly “exact,” it’s impossible to achieve perfect query-to-keyword mapping with structural negatives. Don’t spend your time trying to drill down and eliminate a small percentage of stray clicks. I recommend striking a good ad group balance that keeps both query relevance and overall click volume healthy.
Under-relying on exact match. Wait, should you trust exact match or not? Yes, there is still a use case for exact match for high-volume queries, particularly in tandem with tightly themed ad groups (to find ad group outliers, keep an eye out for low ad and keyword quality scores).
Optimizing ads with best practices. Beyond query mapping, there are two variables I see mis-used in ad construction. The first is not using all available fields; the second is using pins, which tend to tank performance even though they afford advertisers more control.
Letting the algorithms find low-value conversions. If you simply ask Google to find you conversions, Google will find the easiest conversions possible. Instead, teach Google more about the audiences you’re really looking for by integrating offline conversion tracking into your campaigns and optimizing toward higher-quality audiences like SQLs and opportunities.
Discrediting YouTube. Even brands running YouTube campaigns are usually under-budgeting (a good halo impact test can show YouTube’s actual performance).
Neglecting YouTube controls. Speaking of brands running YouTube, lots of them are forgetting to exclude retargeting, which artificially inflates numbers because the default conversion metric includes view-through-like actions. And most brands could also benefit from manually controlling targets at the ad group level.
Forgetting LPO and CRO. These have been important components of successful ad campaigns for many years, and nothing has changed. The best-run, most efficient campaigns can only drive traffic to your owned properties. If those properties aren’t optimized to make the most of that traffic, you won’t convert it.
I could write a whole lot more about other discoveries uncovered by our audits, but this should get you started. If you’re interested in learning more about our process and some of the gains a full audit can help drive, we’d love to hear from you.
