As mentioned in the introduction of custom attributes, the first section currently contains two parts:
Essential custom attributes. We consider this the bare minimum we need to know about your account and will show a green checkmark in the all accounts overview once you answer these five questions.
Additional custom attributes. Here, you can activate budget monitoring and enter custom naming conventions.
You can click on the question mark❔ tooltip next to each question for more information, which you'll also find below.
Essential custom attribute questions
What is the efficiency target of this account?
Most PPC accounts work with a CPA or ROAS target to make sure their campaigns are profitable.
While we won't go into what makes a good efficiency target (you can read all about that in our goal settings blog post), we encourage you to share your target with us.
You do this by simply clicking on CPA or ROAS and then entering the target value as following:
CPA: the value in the currency of the account, without any symbols, up to 2 decimals, so "75" and not $75.
ROAS: use the same notation as the 'Conv. value/cost' column in Google Ads, so "4.5" and not 450%.
How is it used?
We currently don't use these efficiency targets directly in our checks, but plan to do so in the near future, especially to check if Smart Bidding and Smart Shopping campaigns are meeting your goals.
Enter the brand terms, including common misspellings.
Even if you don't advertise on your own brand name (although you should in most cases), we recommend entering the most common ways of spelling your brand name in this field, comma separated.
There's no need to add all possible combinations with your brand name (like products and categories), just the name(s) itself.
There's also no need to add very rare misspellings of your brand name, as we have threshold of 10 weekly impressions for the branded separation check.
If you'd like to have more background on why we believe you should always separate branded searches from generic searches, we can highly recommend reading Paid Search: The Bright-Line Divide by George Michie.
While you're at it, also be sure to enter your brand terms in Google Analytics to enable branded and generic paid search channels.
How is it used?
Multiple checks will use the terms entered here. Such as making sure branded and generic search terms appear in the right campaign(s), calculating a weighted non-branded quality score and making sure we don't recommend branded terms as shared negative.
Does the website use Google Analytics?
Answer 'yes' if the website uses Google Analytics. And 'no' if it doesn't.
How is it used?
If you answer 'yes', we'll check if site metrics are imported correctly into Google Ads, so you can use Google Analytics data in Ads reports. If you answer 'no', we won't check for this.
Do you want to auto-tag the URLs?
If you answered 'yes' at the previous question, you should usually also answer 'yes' here. Learn more about auto-tagging and how to enable it.
Answer 'no' if the website does not use Google Analytics or if you prefer to manually tag your URLs with UTM parameters (to pass on these parameters to the CRM or another analytics system).
How is it used?
If your answer 'yes', we'll check if auto-tagging is enabled and if you answer 'no', we'll check if auto-tagging is disabled.
Does this business comply with all personalized advertising policies?
Answer 'no' if the business belongs to one of the prohibited categories for personalized advertising. Answer 'yes' if it doesn't.
How is it used?
If you answer 'no', we won't check for the use of all audiences types you aren't allowed to use. If you answer 'yes', we will check for the use of these audiences.
Additional custom attribute questions
What is the monthly target budget of this account?
If this account needs to stay close to a certain monthly budget, please enter that budget over here, without a currency symbol (it has to be in the same currency as the one used in Google Ads).
How is it used?
Once you enter and save a monthly target budget for an account, we'll provide a daily updated estimate of how much this account will deviate (or not) from this target budget for the current month.
If we expect it to deviate at least 10%, this will be shown in the budget monitoring column in the all accounts overview:
Custom naming convention for branded campaigns.
You can leave this field empty if all your branded campaigns contain "brand", "corporate" or "trademark". This includes variations like "branded" or "branding".
However, if you (also) use something else to indicate a campaign contains branded keywords, please enter that word or those words in this field, so we can recognize those campaigns.
If you use a combination of our default list and custom words, please enter all words that apply, as entering anything in this field overrides our default settings.
How is it used?
This works in combination with the "Enter the brand terms" question above, to check whether branded queries only appear in branded campaigns.
Custom naming convention for audience-specific campaigns or ad groups.
You can leave this field empty if all your campaigns that target specific audiences only (so using the targeting setting, not the observation setting) contain any of the following words (case insensitive): "remarketing", "retargeting", "RLSA", "RDSA", "visitor", "customer", "similar", "look-alike", "lookalike", "affinity", "in-market", "inmarket" or "intent".
However, if you (also) use something else to indicate a campaign is targeting audiences only, please enter that word or those words in this field, so we can recognize those campaigns.
If you use a combination of our default list and custom words, please enter all words that apply, as entering anything in this field overrides our default settings.
How is it used?
To check if these campaigns have the audiences set to 'targeting' and to check if campaigns not containing any of these words have audiences set to 'observation'.
Campaigns to ignore from all audit checks.
Currently, we already ignore the following campaign types from our audit checks:
Paused campaigns
Non-serving campaigns (with an end date in the past or a start date in the future)
Draft campaigns
Trial campaigns
Universal App Campaigns
Smart Shopping Campaigns
Smart Display Campaigns
Express Campaigns
If you want us to ignore more campaigns on top of this list, you can enter a word (or a combination of characters) here, so we can recognize those campaigns. A common example is ignoring campaigns targeting competitor brand names, as those will always have a low quality score.
Once you've answered all questions above, it's time to move to the next section: anomaly settings.