Free Google Ads Performance Grader

Google Ads is a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platform that enables businesses to run ad campaigns on Google properties.

The most popular Google Ads campaign type is paid search ads, where users pay to have their ad appear at the top of the search engine results page (SERP) for queries relevant to their offer.

• Google Ads works like an auction, where advertisers bid on keywords, the terms their potential customers are typing into Google. However, winners aren’t determined by bid alone, which levels the playing field for businesses big and small.
• This is due to Quality Score, which Google assigns to ads based on their relevance to the targeted keyword, landing page experience, and expected click-through rate.
• Relevance and Quality Score also play a role in Display campaigns, where AdSense technologies are used to figure out what ads to show on what pages throughout the Google Display network.

The Google Ads Performance Grader is a free tool to help Google advertisers better understand how well their campaigns are performing compared to PPC best practices. Using a proprietary grading algorithm, the Google Ads Performance Grader generates a free, easy-to-read report that includes an overall grade as well as individual grades in four key areas of pay-per-click marketing:

• Wasted spend – Are you making proper use of negative keywords? Or are you wasting hundreds, even thousands of dollars per month on irrelevant keywords that never convert?
• Quality Score – Are your campaigns Google-approved? High Quality Scores have a major impact on your ROI, improving your rankings and lowering your costs.
• Impression share – How often do your ads appear for relevant search queries? Increased impression share can improve exposure and multiply your lead generation results.
• Account activity – To maintain performance, you need to spend active time in your account. How often are you checking under the hood?
• You’ll learn how well you’re really doing in each of these important areas, as well as how you can improve your performance, driving more leads and sales at lower costs.

• Performance Tracker: Automatically track and analyze your account every 30 days, so you can see how your overall performance and key metrics are trending over time. For example, advertisers can use Performance Tracker to easily monitor and act on changes in Quality Score, something Google just doesn’t offer.
• Mobile Readiness Score: Assess your mobile PPC preparedness and optimization, including an evaluation of your account’s adherence to mobile best practices.
• New and Improved Benchmarks: We’ve revisited our competitive benchmarks for PPC, so all of the KPIs in your performance report (including Quality Score, click-through rate, account activity, and wasted spend) are more current based on the thousands of accounts we’ve analyzed.

In addition to a full breakdown of your current Google Ads account performance, your report will include actionable tips on how you can improve your score specifically. But here are some overall best practices for Google Ads account management:

• Filter out wasteful, irrelevant clicks and non-converting traffic with negative keywords.
• Maximize relevance across your campaigns for higher Quality Scores.
• Raise click-through rates with strong keyword, text ad, and ad group targeting and organization.
• Practice regular, active account management and optimization.

You can also stay up to date on the latest tips and best practices with The WordStream Blog.

• Do you have a sneaking suspicion that your Google Ads (AdWords) campaigns could be doing better?
• Need to justify greater investment in PPC to your management?
• Just curious if all your hard work in PPC has paid off?
• Want to show off to your coworkers what a PPC rock star you are?

Any and all of these are great reasons to use the Google Ads Performance Grader to get a free, instant report on your account and see how your PPC metrics stack up against best practices.

Need one more great reason to use the Google Ads Performance Grader? It’s an award-winning tool that was recognized in the 2012 Massachusetts Innovation & Technology (MITX) Innovation Awards for Best Customer Engagement Driver.

MITX 2012 Innovation Awards Winner

The Performance Grader is used in different ways:

• New advertisers – Learn where to focus your efforts for a profitable and efficient campaign.
• Experienced advertisers – Get a thorough and comprehensive report on where you can improve results and save money.
• Agencies – Use the reports to explain your work to clients in a format they can easily understand.

Try out our free Google Ads Performance Grader and let us unlock the secrets of Google Ads for you.

Your performance report will give you specific action items to improve your score, but here are some general suggestions to boost your Google Ads performance.

• Prioritize relevance. Make sure that whatever you’re offering in your ad matches the intent of the keyword you’re targeting.
• Test your ad copy. Have 2-4 active ad variants in each ad group so you can test and achieve optimal click-through rates.
• Follow landing page best practices. Have clear copy, make sure it’s an extension of the ad, keep form fields to a minimum, optimize for mobile, and more.
• Keep a clean account structure. No more than 7-10 ad groups per campaign, no more than 2-3 ads per ad group, and no more than 20 keywords per ad group.
• Bid high enough. So you can get on the SERP and gather sufficient data to make optimizations.
• Have a local PPC strategy. Google offers plenty of features in the way of location targeting.
• Proactively manage your account. Check in and make adjustments to keyword lists, bids, campaign settings, ad groups, and more.

You’ll also find tips and strategic advice in WordStream’s PPC University.

Consider the advice of Stefan van Vliet, co-owner of Dutch agency Compass Online Marketing, who completed the second interview in our second series of ongoing interviews with those who received high scores with the Google Ads Performance Grader.

In our full interview with Stefan, he explains some of the mistakes he made early on when first beginning his campaigns:

“I chose to set the budget to virtually limitless and tried to optimize our campaign while running, but just couldn’t keep up (and honestly didn’t know what I was doing). So only 1 week and almost €10k in losses later I pulled the plug. So for an extensive lesson in AdWords management: always test before you allocate serious budgets.”

Stefan explains his company’s successful Google Ads strategy:

• Get sufficient data by bidding high and getting in spot #2-3 (above organic results).
• Keep track of conversionsKeep track of conversions, cost per conversion and value per conversion (using conversion tracking with dynamic value tracking).
• Adjust bidding to meet a cost per conversion which is roughly 50% of the value per conversion.
• Optimize ads and try to improve conversion rates.

When asked for his advice for low-scoring marketers, Stefan suggests to:

• Leverage negative keyword lists
• Split campaigns on a low level
• Leverage advanced CPC bidding in Google Ads Editor
• Use the comments function within Google Ads Editor to make notes of what you do

For more detailed information about Stefan’s winning techniques and suggestions, read the full interview on our blog.