Unlocking ROI: increasing transparency and eliminating Wasted in an Insurance Client’s Google Ads Campaign

Summary

Audited a large-scale B2B insurance client’s Google Ads campaign and created new metrics and reports to expose wasted spend and highlight executor impact.

Background

The client reached out for a professional audit of their paid search account, which is managed by an external agency. More specifically, they are concerned that there is wasted spend in their ads account and that the agency’s team was not performing as many optimizations as they implied.

Project and Outcome

In order to answer the questions the client had, I needed to take a critical look at what they were and weren’t getting from the execution team. This meant reviewing several things:

1. KPIs and Metrics
2. In-Platform Account Performance
3. Call Recordings and Call Notes

All of the metrics that were provided by their agency were basic aggregated KPIs that tied to business objectives, such as CPA/CAC, ROAS/ROI, etc. This is great for understanding the impact of a given campaign, but it’s not great for understanding opportunity. They didn’t have the metrics that would show them which campaigns have additional scaling potential, nor did they have metrics that would show which campaigns had wasted spend.

To dive deep into campaign performance, I constructed new metrics and data visualizations that showed over 80% of their keywords had no spend at all, 15% of their keywords had a ROAS less than 1 and all of their positive performance came from 5% of their keywords – all branded – with extremely high ROAS bringing the rest of the account up. This finding called the value of the agency into question, as the branded keywords that were profitable are not complicated to run and all of the keywords that were not branded were financially unsustainable.

On top of not having access to the metrics that would show areas for improvement, reviewing the call showed that their account executive was overly vague, reactionary, and without explanatory power. Improvements in ROAS were attributed to “optimizations”, but “optimization” is a meaningless term. The account team was using “optimizations” to give the appearance of working towards the future and explain fluctuations in performance after the fact.

Going Forward

To prevent this issue going forward, I had several recommendations for the client and managing future relationships with freelancers, agencies, or internal campaign managers:

1. Don’t Be Satisfied with “Optimizations”. There is no need to micromanage your campaign managers, but asking for some insights into the specifics of their efforts can help you stay informed and understand what to ask for in the future.
2. Ask for Predictions. On top of knowing what optimizations they’ll put into place, a good PPC manager should have an idea of what impact their optimizations should have on performance and why. Asking for predictions makes them commit to their plans and holds them accountable.

None of this means you should micromanage your agency or execution team, but asking these questions means you are better equipped to determine whether your team is actually working for you or trying to pacify you with vague platitudes.