Module 6 - Day to day monitoring

How much day to day work does a YouTube account really need?

Not a lot. Most of the time you are going to want to make a few amends and then wait a good three or four days. There are, though, a few red flags and warning signs to look out for, and I will go through them now.

One of the easiest things to do, especially if you have had a particularly good week, is to look at a comparison. Go to overview at the top left of your account, which is normally where you land when you first log in, and change the date at the top. I have got it on the last 30 days. Just as a quick refresher, you can change these, so if you wanted to track costs against conversions you can.

What does the conversions graph tell you?

It is the easiest place to spot a red flag. On this day, on Monday the 28th, for some reason we had 31 conversions. It might have been some kind of event, or something happened. Then we have had quite a lot of conversions here, and then it went down.

If it were not for that spike, and we had consistently no conversions for three or four days, that would be a warning flag. It can be quite normal to have two or three days where you do not have any conversions. It might be that your keyword just is not working. It could even be down to the weather, meaning your product or your ads just are not showing, or people are not in a buying mood.

But three or four days where you have had no conversions whatsoever is worth investigating.

What if you are getting clicks but nothing else?

Then something is almost certainly wrong with your tracking. Say you were tracking page views as well. In the last 30 days, if I had 150,000 clicks and I went on to page views, and I was tracking time on site of over 60 seconds, I could see there were 60,000 people who were on the site for more than 60 seconds.

Now imagine that instead of the 60 seconds event it was just page views, for remarketing for example, and I had zero of these. I would think there was something wrong with the tracking somewhere, because I have got 150,000 people clicking to view my page but none of them triggering the view page pixel. It might be a wrong URL, or something wrong with the tracking setup.

That is another very obvious warning flag: you are getting clicks, you are getting cost, but no cost per conversion and no time on site.

Why would an ad get approved and then not serve?

Because your targeting is too small or your bid is too low. If you have had an ad live for a while, you will see this. All of these went live last week, but they have had zero spend on them. These went live two or three days ago, sorry, so these have had no money spent on them in the last three or four days, other than this one which is four pound. This is a daily check, because obviously your ads are not serving.

It is probably going to be one of two things. Either you have not got enough people in your actual targeting, so Google has not found enough people to serve your ad to and it physically cannot serve it, or you have put the bid way too low.

For example, for this one we are going for ads specifically on mobile, and we just want people to click to go straight to a phone call. It has got a target cost per acquisition of 30p. That might be very low. For this kind of ad we might need to pay a pound, or two pounds, or maybe even five pounds for someone to actually ring the business. 34p was suggested by Google, so I added it, but it might be way too low.

How should you raise a bid?

Slowly. I would increase it to about 40p, not 40 pound, 40p, then wait another day or two. If it is still not serving, increase it again. Just slowly increase it, rather than going crazy and putting five pounds in just so it serves.

That matters because this campaign has a budget of 10 pound a day. It is a very low budget, and if you set the target cost per acquisition at five pounds you would get a maximum of two calls a day, and that is on a good day. Google will just spend your budget very quickly and serve it to absolutely anyone.

What are the daily checks, in summary?

Serving, conversions, tracking and spend. Go to overview and you will see the grid there. If you are spending money and getting clicks but not getting time on site or conversions, that is a big warning sign. Either your tracking is not set up correctly, or there is an error in the URL you put in your ad.

Another is if your ad is not serving after three or four days when it has been approved. Increase the bid.

Then there is the daily look at conversions, just to make sure the cost per conversion does not completely shoot up one day for whatever reason. Here it is about 20p per conversion. If it shot up to six or seven pounds, that is however many times higher, and something bad would have happened. We would need to make some amends there.

Those are the really daily checks I would do: make sure the ads are serving, make sure the conversions are coming in, make sure everything is being tracked correctly, and make sure you are not overspending on your budget.

To check your budget you can go into the campaign and change the date in the top right, for example to yesterday, so you get a full day's figure, and you will see the cost for the day. This is quite a high spend account, so for yours it might be 300 pounds a day, 500 pounds a day, whatever your budget is. Just make sure it is not doubling your budget, because otherwise you are going to get annoyed very quickly.

But that is everything. I hope that was helpful, and again, if you have any questions let me know.