When starting out in Google Ads, ensuring your account is set up with the right foundations is crucial for your future success. Here’s some key things to check before setting live any activity.
Auto-Apply Recommendations (AAR)
To retain as much control of your account as possible, opting out of auto-apply recommendations is an absolute must for advertisers, especially FCA regulated businesses.
By opting out you ensure Google won’t have the ability to make new ads and edit existing ones, remove keywords or expand your audiences without permission. One specific AAR is the ad suggestion opt in, which can also be ticked in the sub-account settings. Ensure this is opted out of, too, to prevent new ads being created without your approval.
Many advertisers need to put their ads through their own compliance checks before go-live, so ensuring you have complete creative control by opting out of this feature is a must. Although AAR is considered by Google as a method of expanding conversions and account success, they can lead to unprofitable changes which hamper campaigns.
Automatic Asset Opt-Outs
Another craftily hidden setting is the automatic assets menu. Without opting out of these, Google will dynamically show different assets across campaigns you’ve created.
When segmenting out campaigns into specific products or themes, running these dynamic assets would run the risk of having ill-suited assets accompanying the ads. Opting out of these prevents this and allows your campaigns’ proposed assets to be served, as intended.
Content Suitability
Safeguarding your brand's image is often regarded as Google’s responsibility. Whilst they aim to do so through their various systems in place, you can ensure a heightened level of suitability under the content suitability tab. Opting into these options prevents your ads from showing on inappropriate placements on the Display Network.
Speaking of Display, meticulous targeting and exclusions are needed as the Display Network is often overrun with wasted clicks with ad bots and ill-suited placements often drive the majority of spend. Negating all apps, kids YouTube channels and adding negative keywords around games and children will massively mitigate this. Partnered with fine-tuned placement and/or topic targets, your Display campaigns will be able to go after the right users with well-targeted placements to maximise efficiency.
Tracking and Measurement
Ensuring sitewide tagging is an absolute must for Google Ads success. Without this, you’ll have no visibility over which campaigns or keywords are driving your success.
Our recommendation is to set up Google Ads conversion tags with Consent Mode and Enhanced Conversions in place. This then allows you to maximise conversion visibility.
Partnered with this, we’d also recommend you opt-in to the ‘Auto-tagging’ option in the account’s settings. This way Google Ads will automatically append necessary parameters to your destination URLs, allowing you track and gain extra, valuable insights inside Google Analytics. In short, setting up for success in Google Ads requires a comprehensive tagging set up, with tightened account controls, leaving you in charge of decisions, not Google.
If you’re interested in setting up a Google Ads account but don’t where to start, or are looking for a free audit of your existing account, please get in touch today!
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| Author | Kieran Hadfield |
| Channel | Analytics |