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Squared.io schedule

Make the most out of your time on Squared.io

Initial set-up checklist

Once you've connected your accounts and given everyone access who needs it (see How to Add Users or How to Connect Accounts), the first step is to ensure your account is configured for success before establishing your regular optimisation routine. 

  • Setting up penalty alerts - This will ensure you are notified whenever a penalty exceeds the threshold you set, notifying you by email or Slack
  • Automation activation - These automations ensure that the accounts have the correct settings, that keywords are routed properly and that they are being continuously cleaned
  • Setting up brand safety automation - These automations ensure best practice brand safety is in place, preventing ads from appearing in low quality, irrelevant (such as kids or incorrect language placements) or brand unsafe placements around the web.
  • URL Scanner - Checks all landing page URL's and reports back on any errors. Critical errors are sent as a Slack message or email to relevant users.
  • Negative Ads and Keywords

Once these are set up, Squared.io can take on the heavy lifting here from a day to day perspective, freeing you up to focus on unique, strategic workflows.

Your Regular Optimisation Routine

The following schedule is based on how the most successful teams use Squared.io.

3x a week

Query analysis

There are two ways to do this, Add Queries and N-Grams. Spend around 20 minutes, three times a week, reviewing these. This replaces hours of manual SQR work and automatically handles cross-match negatives when used alongside Routing Negatives.

Add Queries: A traditional SQR where all the anaylsis and set up has been done for you. By using the Add Queries tool coupled with the routing negatives automation there is no need to manage cross match negatives.

Find out more about reviewing queries.

Not only will regularly doing this improve the control you have over the search terms you’re triggering, but it will also help with other areas of Squared.io: absolute top, budget hit, missing queries, engagement score, and reach score.

N-grams: N-Grams highlights missing queries and aggregates performance for every n-gram (a phrase made up of n words). This allows you to quickly identify:

  • New phrases worth adding to ad groups

  • Poor-performing phrases that should investigated and potentially blocked.

Use the filters to surface n-grams driving a negative ROAS or not converting to start reducing your unseen wasted spend. 

ngram sliders

By splitting out traditional Search, AI Max and PMax, you can identify if there are certain campaign and match types performing poorly and add targeted negatives to you campaigns to ensure best performance routing. If it is a poor performing N-gram across all three, you can add an account wide negative or investigate the customer journey if it is usually an important set of search terms. 

n-grams

Find out more about n-Grams.

Check insights for quick wins and fixes

There are many penalties which are easy to fix and improve performance. Find out more about actioning Squared.io insights. By fixing on average 2 a week (dependent on size of the penalty!), in a relatively short space of time, there will be tangible improvements to the hygiene of the account and still leave you time in the rest of the week to focus on more strategic work.

Optimization score

  • Negative conflicts: Remove the negatives blocking your live exact match keywords. If the keywords are being blocked intentionally, just pause or remove the keyword
  • No audiences: Apply the relevant audiences and set them to "targeting" on RLSA campaigns missing targeting. More information on targeting settings here
  • Missing brand safety: Check if key brand safety exclusions are missing on your activity (e.g. tragedy content, unrated videos, live streaming videos). More information on brand safety settings here
  • Missing content theme exclusions: Check if key content theme exclusions are missing on your activity (e.g. family content, politics etc.). More information on brand safety settings here
  • No shared libraries: Shows you campaigns with no negative keyword shared library lists applied. Most accounts will have a set of terms they should never appear for. Check your Squared.io negatives have been applied to resolve this and prevent future issues
  • URL expansion on: Using this setting could result in sending visitors to pages you don't intend to advertise so adding URL exclusions is advised.

Audience score

  • Targeting the world: This is usually done in error
  • Language mismatch: Campaigns with identical geo-targeting, but differing language targeting is usually done in error. Having consistent language targeting will ensure you are targeting the correct audience
  • High Risk Score placements: Shows placements that Squared.io has identified as being poor quality or unsafe for brands. Switch on Exclude high Risk Score placements automation in Brand Safety & Fraud and set the slider to a maximum of 75 to auto-exclude these
  • Kids placements: Shows you ad placements being advertised on that are aimed at children based on Squared.io analysis. Switch on Exclude kids content automation in Brand Safety & Fraud to exclude these

Engagement score

  • Too many ads: If you have more live ads than expected, there could be old ads live which need removal. Setting up ad negatives can help prevent this from happening
  • Low sitelink and callout count: Check ad groups missing the recommended number of extensions and apply them to help boost CTR / ad rank
  • No RSAs: See which ad groups are missing RSAs and implement them
  • Disapproved ads and sitelinks: Fix ads and sitelinks currently disapproved
  • Auto-created video assets: Google auto-created video assets may not follow your brand guidelines and these should be reviewed and removed if necessary

Reach score

  • Product disapprovals: Fix disapprovals on products in GMC
  • Product demotions & errors: Resolve products missing out on impressions due to missing or incorrect columns in GMC
  • Disapproved keywords: Fix keywords currently disapproved

Conversion Score

  • Maximize bidding strategy without a target: Using a maximize conversions or maximize conversion value bidding strategy without a CPA or ROAS target set could lead to negative performance due to unnecessarily high bids being used for limited additional conversions
  • Not using smart bidding: Campaigns not using smart bidding can have a negative effect on campaign performance.

These are also all good candidates to set up as penalty alerts, as mentioned in the set up section above. 

Weekly: Ensuring good health on your accounts

These will help ensure good performance

Budget hit (Reach Score): Identifying campaigns currently hitting budget is an excellent way to identify opportunity. If a campaign is currently limited by budget and it is:

  • performing better than expected efficiency (i.e. has a ROAS of 5 and the target is 3) then there is an opportunity to request more budget. If not possible, consider free up budget by either pausing poor performing activity such as zero converting keywords or ad groups, or route spend from another poorer performing campaign.
  • performing worse than expected efficiency (i.e. has a ROAS of 1 and the target is 3) then consider increasing the aggression of your bidding targets. This should help lower CPC's and allow you to buy more traffic for the same budget.

Zero conversion (Conversion score): Use this report to help prevent wastage on your account. It shows you the keywords or shopping product groups spending the most money without delivering conversions over the last 30 days (you can change the date range in the top right).


You can download this report to see the highest spenders which have not recently converted and decide which action to take - whether that's pausing keywords, excluding products or tweaks to landing pages, bids or copy.

Placements (Protect): You should have set up your brand safety features and so the worst placements will be removed automatically. However, it is always important to review where your top placements are in case they are not relevant or more specific reason why the client may not wish to appear there. This quick review ensures that your ad placements that appear at scale are appropriate.

placements email pic

Find out more about Placements.

Monthly / quarterly: work on a larger project

These are items that can be discussed and planned using insights from Squared.io, which can highlight continuous growth of the account(s). These can take a little longer and require more data to review but are valuable in improving the performance of an account.

Missing product categories (Audience score): The product category column is one of the key values used by Google to determine which queries to show your products for – so this should be as granular as possible to match to the most relevant queries and expand reach. You can find the available product categories and IDs here.

RSA improvement (Engagement score): Having a 'good' or 'excellent' RSA ad strength can help your ads deliver more impressions. Use the "RSA low ad strength" report to see which RSAs have poor or average ad strength. Find out more about ad strength here.

We show you Google's recommendations for improving your ads, with a headline and description breakdown on the download - helping you decide which to keep and which to test. You can also improve you ad copy using our ChatGPT integration, which you can see here.

Quality Score improvement (Engagement score): The most conclusive way to save money in Google Ads is by improving quality score. Value score highlights how quality score is trending across the account, and has reports for decreasing, increasing, low and very low score keywords. These reports show you each area of quality score and their historic level to help pinpoint potential improvements and monitor the impact of any copy or landing page changes made.

 

Competitor queries (Add queries and Competitors under Optimize): Get actionable keyword research by using the competitor feature to find new queries that are currently being missed in your paid search activity (and organic rankings if you've linked Search Console). 

Find out how to use the competitor feature here.

Organic queries (Add queries under Optimize): If you're looking to maximise your search coverage, perform a gap analysis between SEO and PPC by surfacing the queries you’re ranking for organically but missing out on in paid search. This view includes the organic delivery for impressions and clicks as well as the average monthly search volume according to Google.

Find out more about organic queries here.

Monitoring organic overlap (Organic Overlap under Optimize): You can use this report to see if there are potential cost savings to be delivered on the keywords you're buying when they are also ranking organically and have low paid search competition. 

Find out more about organic overlap here.

Monitoring internal overlap (Group level): If you're running accounts with overlap in the target market and audience, you can use the keyword overlap report find duplicate keywords and queries across your Google Ads portfolio – helping reduce internal competition.

You can also use the report for single brands running in multiple markets to find common queries and keywords which underperform in all markets and should be negated.

Or to find queries and keywords performing well in some markets that would benefit from expansion into other market accounts.

Get more information on group keyword overlap.

Low reach keywords and ad groups (Reach score): The low reach table shows the exact match keywords with the highest potential to increase impressions. This can help with budget planning and forecasting as well as shifting non-exact match spend to stronger performing exact match keywords.