How to Tidy Up Your Google Ads Account The Marie Kondo Way

Ahhh, spring is here. The sun is shining, birds are chirping, and kids are running to the park to play. You can also tell it’s spring by seeing many families start their spring cleaning routine. Whether it’s a vacuum running, garages getting organized, or windows getting cleaned, everyone has to help out to get more organized for spring. And one woman has taken her joy of organizing and transformed it into a worldwide phenomenon.

Enter Marie Kondo

Marie Kondo, aka Konmari, is one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. She has written 4 books, made several television appearances, and recently launched a Netflix series called Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. In her Netflix series, she visits families with cluttered homes and helps them learn how to organize through her KonMari method. The KonMari method focuses on gathering up all of your belongings, one category at a time, and only keeping the items that continue to spark joy in your life. This method of decluttering may seem odd at first and you might risk ridicule from friends and family by asking the items if they bring joy. But with a little bit of time and effort, you’ll feel a sense of accomplishment that you have never felt before when it comes to organization. After hours, or what seemed like days, of decluttering my home, I looked around with a sense of pride thinking to myself “What if you could use the KonMari method to organize more than just your home?” As a small business owner, there are many areas that you could clean up and declutter. Whether it is cleaning up your WordPress website, organizing tags in Google Tag Manager, or even updating your blogs/pages with new content, there are many things you can organize to improve your digital marketing strategy. Today, we’re going to discuss how you can apply the Konmari method to spark joy into your pay-per-click advertising account.

How to Use the KonMari Method to Clean Up Your Google Ads

Ideally, you should be performing a deep audit of your Google Ads advertising account every year. We also recommend that you analyze your campaigns every month, or at least before and after a major promotional sales event. Here’s how you can use the KonMari method to tidy up your Google Ads account:

1. Commit Yourself to Tidying Up

This step is rather straightforward. If you would like to see your Google Ads account succeed you must put in the time and effort to maintain it.

2. Imagine Your Ideal Lifestyle

To simply translate this into Google Ads speak, what are your goals and expectations? Are you looking to increase form submissions, calls, or walk-in traffic? Outlining your goals will help you layout the path towards a more organized Google Ads account.

3. Finish Discarding

Out with the old and in the new. As you’re going through your Google Ads account with a fine tooth comb, look for underperforming items. Ask yourself if you really need that keyword, ad group, or ad. If it won’t help you achieve your goals, discard them. If you are on the fence about removing something, we recommend pausing it.

4. Tidy Up By Category

After you have established your goals, you can attack the various categories. You should analyze and clean up each category, one at time. Doing so will improve your attention to detail and ensure that no unnecessary items remain. Keep reading, we’ll go into more detail about what to look for in each category.

5. Follow the Right Order

Whether you’re baking a cake or assembling a bike, all projects big and small include instructions to ensure you set up / create things in the right order. Google Ads is no different. Begin with analyzing your campaign. Continue to tidy by looking into the campaign settings, ad groups, keywords, ads, and ad extensions. This is a basic list but an excellent start to cleaning up and organizing your Google Ads account.

6. Ask Yourself If It Sparks Joy

Part of the KonMari method is to seek treasures that spark joy in your life, rather than just blindly throwing things out. As you manage your Google Ads account, look for the keywords, ads, images, and other items that are performing well and contributing to your overall goals and expectations. For example: If there is a keyword that has little to no impressions simply thank it for its service, remove it, and move on to the next.

How to Tidy Up Google Ads by Categories

Campaigns

• The first thing you should look at within the campaign is the settings. Is the budget set at the right amount? Is the right bidding strategy used? Are you targeting the right locations?
• Each campaign should begin with a main theme. Within that theme, should be a subset of relevant elements, also known as ad groups. For example if you are in the automotive industry, your campaign could be the vehicle’s make and the ad group would be the vehicle’s individual model.

Ad groups

• Did you know that a campaign in Google Ads can hold up to 20,000 ad groups? So don’t worry about having too many ad groups or even worry about not having enough.
• The main takeaway here is to organize your ad groups so they’re relevant to the campaign.

Keywords

When analyzing your list of keywords, you should look at the following:

• Quality Score
• Click Through Rate (CTR)
• Clicks
• Impressions

If the keywords are underperforming or not performing at all, you should consider removing them.

Ads

Analyze the performance of your ads with these key metrics in mind:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• Conversions
• Cost per Click (CPC)
• Click Through Rate (CTR)

Ad Style

Google Ads offers different ways to present your ads. It’s recommended that you use a mixture of all ad styles and test out different ad copy to see which performs better.

Text Ad

Google Ads suggests that at least 3 text ads are utilized in each ad group. A text ad consists of: url, display url, 3 headlines, and 2 descriptions.

Responsive Search Ad (RSA)

This type of ad automatically adapts to show relevant messages to the searcher. An RSA ad consist of: url, display url, 3-15 headlines, and 2-4 descriptions.

Responsive Display Ad (RDA)

This type of ad combines and tests your assets to display relevant ads. The RDA ad consist of a series of images (1 landscape, 1 square or 1 logo), up to 5 optional videos, 5 headlines (30 characters), long headline (90 characters), 5 descriptions (90 characters), business name, and a custom call to action (CTA).

Call-Only Ad

This ad is designed only to have one action: click to call. The call only ad consist of: phone number, 2 headlines (30 characters), 2 descriptions (90 characters), and a display url.

Spark Joy Into Your Google Ads Campaigns

Performing a massive pay-per-click (PPC) audit requires effort, dedicated time, and most importantly, motivation. After spring cleaning your Google Ads account, you’ll be able to see a noticeable increase in ad performance and ROI.

Tags: Paid Search Marketing