Google Ads specialists are extremely time poor. The typical day requires juggling time between clients, a multitude of tasks and delivering high quality work. You can be pulled in many directions from setting up new accounts, investigating problems, running analysis and creating reports. Avoid the trap of thinking you need to develop your own solutions to existing problems. Solutions already exist and can help you optimize your time and even improve your work output.
The truth is that in many cases, others in the community of marketers have encountered similar issues before. I’ve found that fellow marketers are eager to collaborate and trade resources. Leveraging the skills and expertise of other practitioners can turn out to be a huge competitive advantage and help you solve day to day problems at a fraction of the time and cost.
In this article we present common issues and popular community based solutions. Whether you are a SEM freelancer, Google Ads consultant or marketing agency these templates are purpose built to solve common recurring issues. We’ve divided these into 4 key categories for Google Ads practitioners:
- Onboarding & Account Setup
- Audit & Analysis
- Budgeting & Monitoring
- Scheduled Reporting
Client Onboarding & Account Setup
Congratulations, you have just landed a new client. Now it’s time to get started. There are 3 key areas where templates can help speed up processes and also provide a conceptual framework for this crucial planning stage.
Information Gathering / Client Interview:
These resources ensure you are asking the right questions, keeping your records organized and looking professional:
- SEM Campaign Setup Form: This form is prebuilt to ask the key questions to a new client. It’s usually filled out together with the client in a meeting
- SEM Campaign Setup Form – Self filled: Similar to the above, yet this one is designed to be self filled by the client, it is recommended for smaller businesses.
Campaign Build and Structuring:
The following templates help you organize new campaign builds and ad writing and provide a process for feedback with clients:
- Google Ads Campaign Structure: This Google Sheet helps you plan out your campaign, write ads and connect them to your keywords. It’s a great way to present this to your client as well for approval before launching a new campaign. This is designed for 1 or 2 campaigns.
- Google Ads Structure (large campaigns): Similar to the above but designed for larger accounts with multiple campaigns.
- RSA Template: A simple Google Sheet designed to help you plan out your RSA’s and present for approval
Planning & Forecasting:
Failing to plan is planning to fail, these templates help you set goals and project future outcomes for your accounts:
Audit & Analysis
Encountering 0 problems with a Google Ads account is as likely as seeing a pickle turn back into a cucumber. It’s fairly often that some part of an account needs to be audited or analyzed to find problems or improve performance.
Resources for Auditing your Account:
From most to least automated, these resources help you keep your account in tip top condition:
- Google Ads Account Audit Script: This is as automated as it comes. This script runs in the backend of your Google Ads account and is designed to discover any anomalies. It can be set to run on a scheduled basis.
- Google Ads audit outline: This is a prebuilt Audit template that you can use as a guide to reviewing an account in depth.
- Google Ads Audit Service: A fresh set of eyes is always a good idea. Pay a fixed fee for a 4 hour audit by a veteran Google Ads professional.
User Experience Analysis:
A good Ad Campaign is only as strong as its weakest link. Google Ads professionals should be reviewing UX on landing pages and recommending solutions, otherwise the entire campaign can suffer, these templates make this process easier:
- User Journey Template: The user journey template allows you to diagnose how users are moving through your website and discover blockages. The visuals on this report are sure to impress.
- Funnel Analysis: Designed to provide insight on your marketing funnel.
- Report funnel: Another take on the funnel, designed with a mobile version
Competitor Analysis & Monitoring:
Common issues can come down to the way competitors are behaving. There are a number of solutions for monitoring and analyzing the changing market conditions
- Auction insights Template: Built to visualize Google’s Auction insight report, this template helps you understand how competitors are bidding and appearing on your keyword set.
- Competitors Monitoring: Another Auction Insights Analysis report with a more thought out design to the above option
- PPC competitor analysis – SEMrush & Auction Insights: This dashboard combines SEMrush data with Auction insights.
Comparing Google Ads with Other Traffic Sources:
This is an important factor in evaluating Google Ads traffic performance & benchmarking performance. When performance inevitably drops this technique can isolate if this is a Google Ads problem or systemic across the whole website, such as a branding issue or technical site issue.
Deeper Internal Google Ads Analysis:
The following templates are designed to help you analyze campaigns inside your Google Ads account.
- Campaign Comparison: Compare 2 campaigns side by side, this template makes it visually easier to work out the differences in performance between 2 campaigns
- Historical Quality Score Analysis: Improving QS is a critical component to running a great Google Ads campaign. This template helps you understand QS changes over time
- Multi Experiment Report Script. This script is useful If you run lot’s of experiments and want to review them in bulk. It runs in your Ad account and exports your experiment results to Google Sheets.
- Bulk Ad Performance Checker: Check Ad Performance in bulk for all your ads. Make decisions at scale
Budgeting & Monitoring
Whether you run a single Google Ads account or you manage 50 Google Ads accounts, a key area you can generate efficiencies is with campaign monitoring. Dashboards can set you free from logging into accounts and running repetitive calculations.
Monitoring your Account:
Keeping an eye on your account is critical, here are some ways to keep across your accounts with low effort:
- Google Ads Weekly Newsletter: Great for managers and clients, this template provides a round up of performance on a weekly basis. This is also a fresh alternative to regular reporting
- Internal Reporting Sheet: This sheet is designed to automatically fill and be used internally to keep track of key metrics
- Weekly Performance Matrix: Also designed for internal reporting, this matrix tracks performance on a weekly basis and also includes forecasting.
- Anomaly detector: This script runs on a scheduled basis inside Google Ads. When it picks up an anomaly such as an unusual jump in spend, it will alert you.
- Full screen dashboard: This is a great dashboard to put up in the office on a big TV screen and have your whole team across KPI’s in real time.
Budget Pacing Templates:
Unchain yourself from constantly logging into accounts and running manual calculations to ensure your budgets are on track
Reporting & Dashboarding
Monthly reporting is an industry standard when it comes to Google Ads. But creating a report that is both useful and beautiful can be a challenge. Prebuilt templates are great options and why reinvent the wheel when there are so many great ones to choose from already
- Agency Reporting Template: Ideal for agencies. This report is custom designed as a monthly report. It includes sections for commentary as well as branding.
- Agency Complete Digital Marketing Template: 8 pages of detailed website performance reporting. This covers far more than just Google Ads so is ideal for a more comprehensive website report.
- SEM Report in Excel: For those of us that need their data in excel with all the familiar tables and advanced table splicing.
- SEM Results Report: A straight forward Looker Studio Report that includes pages for Bing, Google Ads and Linkedin
- Google Ads Report – 1 Pager : Want to keep it to just 1 page of Google Ads? Try this professional dark blue themed Looker Studio report
- Google Ads Report – Question Based: For those that prefer their questions written out and answered. This dashboard makes it as easy as possible to glean insights.
We are confident that we haven’t been able to solve all your problems but we hope that the above resources can at least help you solve some of them. Hopefully we can assist in making your day as a Google Ads specialist slightly more efficient. If that is the case, we are happy. If you have other resources you believe could be added to this list, please get in touch with us on the contact form.
By
Mark Meyerson
