Chapter 4: The Red Zone

Red

Your account is spending too quickly and performance is poor – these accounts are often the ones you need to spend time on most urgently, as this is where most clients churn.

Step 1: Check the vitals

This step is about issue identification only – you are not trying to fix anything yet as you need to understand the major issues before you prioritize actions.

Step 2: Treat the life-threatening issue first

The fastest way to stabilize the account is to slow down the spending and make sure that your daily budget is being prioritized towards performing campaigns, giving you time to identify and treat the cause of the performance problems.

Recommended Steps:

• Calculate the ideal daily spend between now and the end of the month to understand your ideal daily spend level (Adpulse does this for you automatically)
  
• We would usually recommend reducing the formula result by some reasonable percentage (say 10-20%) until performance picks up.
• Sort campaigns by performance, best to worst.  Choose a time period that works best with your client’s account history, then:
  • Check the recent spend vs. impression share (where available) for your best campaigns, and look for opportunities to increase budget on those campaigns and reduce budget on your worst ones.  When increasing budget, if impression share is not available (eg PMax or Discovery campaigns) you can use a simple ‘high water mark’ strategy to work out a logical maximum for your budget on that campaign – simply look at the daily spend history over the last 28 days, and increase your daily budget anywhere up to that highest daily spend figure.  Warning: If you are using Max Clicks (with no upper bid limit), Max Conversions or Max ROAS bid strategies, limit the size of the increase to 15% above the current budget, and limit these larger changes to every other day to avoid spikes in CPC (which will dramatically decrease your performance!)
  • If you’re going to increase budgets on those better performing campaigns, don’t forget to reduce budget on (or pause) your worst performing campaigns to compensate, and to stay within your adjusted ideal daily spend target.

Often this daily budget reduction combined with the budget reallocation will fix both problems (pacing + performance) meaning you can increase your daily budget back to the ideal daily spend calculated value.  It’s easy, fast and effective, which is why it’s generally the go-to optimization for us.  You should run through this optimization a couple of times a week initially, then if the account is moving in the right direction and settling down, you can relax the schedule to weekly until it’s back to where it should be.

Step 3: Stabilization

If you have the time or the account needs deeper optimizations in order to pull performance back into line:

Check all campaign spend patterns

This is to see if they are running out of budget before the end of the day or if those campaigns spend regularly reaches their daily budget, and reduce bids for any campaigns that are.  This should reduce CPC’s and improve CPA/ROAS for those campaigns without spending any more money.

• Go to Reports > Predefined Reports (Dimensions) > Time > Hour Of Day
• In “Level Of Detail” select “Campaign”, then within that tile select Filter and choose your first campaign.
• Ensure your table is sorted by Hour Of Day, then scan down the impressions column to see if your impressions drop to zero (or are very low) unexpectedly later in the day.  
• To reduce bids we generally recommend a 10-20% change at any one time:

Troubleshooter Actions

If you used the ROAS/CPA Troubleshooter in Step 1 and you found foundation metrics that were significant contributors to the decline in performance, here is how you check/action those.  In Google Ads or Analytics, go to the page that displays that data layer and set your time period to be the same as you set in the ROAS/CPA Troubleshooter (for example, “last 14 days vs. previous period”).  Next, check for changes in these foundation metrics within each data layer listed in the next major bullet point (starting with Campaigns) by sorting the “Change” column:

In the example below, we were looking at Campaign level data to find campaigns that have had a large increase in CPC.  We selected the last X days as the time period and then turned on the compare dates function to “previous period”.  Expanding the CPC column and then sorting by “Change” quickly shows us any campaigns that have seen a large CPC increase.  It turns out that this campaign was one that had a sharp increase in CPA, and the CPC was the major driver.  Someone had changed the bid strategy from target CPA $10 to target CPA $18 which resulted in the CPC’s exploding!  It’s not unusual for Google to call your clients directly and ask them to opt into the auto recommendations… often the client doesn’t even have access to the account.  Google gets the verbal OK from the client and turns everything on, and everything tanks.  It can be a real performance killer!

If poor performance is a longer-standing issue

The ROAS/CPA Troubleshooters won’t help because they are designed to compare a good period to a bad period and highlight the contributing negative metrics.  Instead, it’s time for a good old-fashioned health check on your poor-performing campaigns.

• Look for high CPCs, low CTRs, low conversion rates, and wasted spend (spending a lot with few or no conversions) across the following data layers, looking for areas where you can either apply a negative bid modifier (depending on bid strategy) or exclude altogether.  

• Check the bid strategy – time for an experiment or to update the existing bid strategy settings?
• Check landing pages for relevance and page speed (https://pagespeed.web.dev/ or https://gtmetrix.com/) to improve quality score and relevance
• Blocked search term check.  Look for search terms that have a history of generating conversions but are no longer getting any impressions.  Working out the reason for the blockage (and fixing it) can reignite some high-quality traffic.  Common causes are negative keywords or keywords/adgroups being paused.
• Check your GA4 page metrics between campaigns, ideally looking for any that are significantly worse than others. This will tell you if you have keywords/targeting that is too broad or irrelevant. 
• Should some budget be diverted to different platforms?  An example might be to take an underperforming budget from one platform and send it to another platform but target campaigns or strategies (like Brand or Remarketing) that have a high chance of a better ROI.

Step 4: Monitoring

Now that you have taken urgent corrective action, you need to make sure that performance and budget pacing don’t overreact.  Keep a very regular eye on these accounts to make sure they start to come back into line, and if they don’t, go back through Step 2 above on a regular basis.  

If you’ve done everything in Step 3 once in a month, it’s unlikely that more regular checks and tweaks in these areas will offer a significant benefit to the campaigns.  In fact it’s possible to over-optimize and choke potential performance.  Stick to doing this list monthly or more often for very large accounts.