Simple Tips For Effective Google Ads Tracking: 3 Timescales
Daily, weekly, and monthly Google Ads tracking provides clarity for strategic decisions!
Google Ads are the best tool for capitalizing on the monumental amount of search traffic on the internet. Google Ads tracking is the process of looking at the different data points in your campaign and adjusting as necessary.
You can’t change what you can’t measure. That’s why Google Ads tracking is a crucial part of being an effective Google Ads manager.
This article will outline the essential factors that you need to keep tabs on every day, every week, and every month. There are many Google Ads strategies out there and corresponding Google Ads tracking requirements, but here we will go over the basics.
A word of caution
Google Ads tracking is about gathering data and using that information to make decisions about your campaign optimization.
But Google Ads aren’t a faucet that you can turn on and off at will, just by changing a few controls. Your tweaks can take days or weeks to show up, depending on the search volume and what your competitors are doing with their campaigns.
In a nutshell, be careful making too many tweaks. Tracking the below data points is useful, but give any changes you make a chance. For example, a tweak on a Monday could work out well on the weekend, but you wouldn’t find out until the following week because of the search volume. If you make another tweak before the changes take effect, you’re altering without enough data.
Google Ads tracking: 3 timescales
There are three timescales for effective Google Ads tracking:
- Daily
- Weekly
- Monthly
The below suggestions are how often you should check these data points, not the range of data you should inspect. A quick example: while you should track your spending every day, you can keep track of it based on daily spend, weekly spend, or month-to-date—whatever you feel most comfortable with inspecting.
Daily Google Ads tracking
Spend was already mentioned as something you should check every day. While it seems obvious, ensuring your campaigns are spending the right amount is the bedrock for all other decisions.
An underspending campaign is a major red flag because it could mean there’s something wrong with your setup. If you inspect your campaign and everything seems all right, then there could be little to no search volume for your targeted keywords. Whatever the reason, consecutive days with an underspending campaign requires a strategy shift.
The second thing that’s worth checking every day is your click-through-rate (CTR). This factor is the primary driver of whether your Google ads show—a good CTR indicates customers find your content a useful answer for their search.
We check both of these using a month-to-date or 30-day range.
Weekly Google Ads Tracking
Every week, take a look at your search impression statistics and your bids.
The search impression share is how often your ad shows on relevant searches. The statistics you should monitor every week are the search impressions share lost due to budget and rank. This information helps determine what happens with the other weekly data point, the bids.
If you’re losing search impression share because of budget, then you can lower your bids and get more clicks for your current daily spend.
When you’re losing search impression share because of rank, you can raise the bids and get more of the search impression share.
We check these using a 7-day range, looking for trends in the data. If search impressions share is trending up, little action is needed. But when it’s trending down, we look for steps to minimize the search impression share loss due to budget or rank.
Monthly Google Ads tracking
Data about your ad copy and specific keyword data are what you should track every month. You could follow it more frequently—as often as every week—but there’s a large amount of data and potential work involved with frequent checks.
To get through this task, check a new ad group each week at a rate that lets you check all of them once a month.
During this monthly Google Ads tracking, look at the CTR of your ads. The ads with the lowest are underperforming—rewrite the ad copy and test a new version.
Similarly, comb through the data of your keywords. If any of them have a low CTR, pause them. You can come up with a comparable variation, change them to phrase or exact match, or drop them out of the rotation altogether, depending on your strategy.
We inspect our ads and keyword data using a 30-day time range. This range could go as high as 90 days, depending on how long your campaign has been running and click volume.
Google Ads with Algorithmic Global
Knowing what to check and how often is the key to effective Google Ads tracking. The suggested timescales create a situation where your Google Ads are given enough time for the changes to take effect.
Make careful changes and measure your results while keeping in mind that Google Ads don’t change course on a dime. Think of your campaign like a cruise ship, not a jetski.
Are you interested in promoting your business, service, or product with expert Google ads management? The team at Algorithmic Global can help! Give us a call or reach out to us via our contact page, and our experienced team will follow up with you and find out how we can work together on your digital marketing!
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