Thinking Of Pausing Your Ecommerce Google Ads Campaigns? Read This First

With so many changes in the world right now, you might be wondering, should I pause my Google Ads campaigns? As a Google Ads pro with 5 years of experience with top brands and agencies, I’m here to tell you DON’T PANIC.

 I get it, this is a scary time for business, but if you hastily pull the plug on paid search advertising, you may be missing out on an opportunity. Here’s why…

Google Ads runs based on an auction. What drives up costs in an auction? COMPETITION. If your competitors pause their ad campaigns, that leaves the auction wide open for you to keep your bids low and dominate the search engine results page (SERP). This means more traffic and potentially more orders on your website.

How do you know if your competition has backed out? There’s a report for that!

Below I’ve included step by step instructions to help you get a peek into what’s happening with your competitors. This exercise will help you determine if your competitors are still advertising on a keyword, plus it can give you an idea of how aggressively they are bidding. I’m using a pretend beauty website as an example, BaumerBeauty.com.

How To See Competition Over Time For a Google Ads Keyword

1. Login to Google Ads. Find that password, I’ll wait. Ok, ready? Lez go.

2. Set the date range you want to look at. In this case, I chose February 28th through March 12th. This will be our pre-COVID 2-week period. The pre/post analysis is not only helpful for pandemics, but it can also work for analyzing sale periods, seasonal periods, etc.

3. Navigate to your exact match core brand keyword

4. Check the box next to the keyword

5. Click on “Auction Insights” – this will take you to the Auction Insights Report

Why the exact match core brand keyword?

• Your core brand keyword is usually your top keyword, so small fluctuations in competition here can add up to big performance changes

• Your core brand keyword is your canary in the coal mine for your Google Ads account. If this keyword is down in traffic or conversions, that’s a good measure of the status of your brand’s popularity online overall.

• By using the exact match type, you are limiting your scope to only that keyword – broad and phrase would be a less precise measurement

• The same process works for any keyword or group of keywords, but the exact match core brand term will usually give you the most helpful information.

6. The functionality of the auction insights report is limited compared to other parts of the Google Ads UI. You can’t compare period over period in the UI. To work around this, I download each time period separately.  Download the report for the first time period (February 28 – March 12), then save it with a new name.

7.Now change the time period to the “post” time period (in this case, March 13-26) and download that report too

8.Next, I organize the reports in a table in Excel to make the information user friendly

Keyword: [baumer beauty]

What can we learn from this report?

Walmart.com and Amazon.com both dropped out of the space. They only had ~10% (each) of the available impressions during the ‘pre’ period, while we had 83%. Digging deeper, we can see that BaumerBeauty.com’s top of page rate went from 91% to 97% while Amazon and Walmart top of page rate went down to zero.

 This sounds like small potatoes, but this change can make a big impact. If Walmart and Amazon ads are showing up alongside your ads, it’s the equivalent of having someone yelling “HEY DON’T BUY THAT AT BAUMERBEAUTY.COM! YOU CAN GET IT ON AMAZON!”. Without that message, shoppers are MUCH more likely to purchase from BaumerBeauty.com.

• Look at that improvement in CTR! 21.5% to 36.6% - that would make sense with our theory (which we have strong evidence for, thanks auction insights!) that competitors dropping out are making our ad more desirable.

• I am surprised that the CPC increased a bit (less competition usually means lower CPC), but this account is on a smart bidding strategy so likely what happened is Google automatically boosted the bid to take advantage of improved CTR. 

• I know this is a very small data set (ideally, I would have 20+ conversions for a fair comparison) but small biz needs love too, and sometimes you must work with what you have!

Cool, I learned a thing. Now how do I take advantage of it to improve Google Ads performance?

If you find out your competition has left the space and you are happy with a keyword’s performance during the post time frame, check the keyword’s impression share in the keyword tab of the Google UI. You may have to add in this column. If impression share is less than 90%, give that keyword a bid boost baby! This will allow your keyword to show as often as possible to capture as many conversions as possible.

That’s great, but what if I’m not happy with account performance?  

I encourage you not to pause your ads completely, especially keywords with your brand name. Keeping brand ads is a defensive move. Protect your position at the top of the search results page so competitors can’t move in on your traffic. If you’re already struggling, losing out on your brand keyword traffic will only make your performance worse, plus you risk losing valuable customers to the competition. Luckily, brand keywords generally have a low CPC and a high return, so keeping your brand terms active shouldn’t be too expensive.

This is a plethora of information to take in, but I hope you walk away with a few key takeaways.

• Don’t panic. Ecommerce is still thriving for certain businesses, so don’t pause campaigns until you’ve analyzed the data

• Use Auction Insights reports and a pre/post analysis to check in on what competitors are up to

• Boost keyword bids on any keywords that have good performance and less than 90% impression share

• Keep brand keywords running to defend the top spot on the search results

Need help performing this analysis for your business? Reach out to me at amanda@baumermarketing.com