Assets, previously called ad extensions, are crucial for improving your PPC accounts. Google uses them to decide ad rank and offer users more ways to interact with your ads, like calling directly or visiting specific pages. While assets add clear value, using them effectively across campaigns can be tricky.
Let’s say you’re managing dozens or even hundreds of campaigns in Google Ads. How can you quickly identify campaigns with missing callouts?
You’ll need the same data for every asset type. Every campaign should be using structured snippets, sitelinks, callouts, and potentially more (here are some suggested minimums). This means auditing your asset usage is vital.
Fortunately, there are three straightforward ways to audit assets across your campaigns.
In Google Ads, under Assets, you can see your assets by type, level, and allocated campaign/ad group. The filters can help you to identify gaps and underperforming assets. However, this can be time-consuming when you have a lot of campaigns to audit.
You can do a lot with Excel and pivot tables when auditing Google Ads accounts. This includes your asset usage.
The easiest way to get started is to:
This is useful if you have at least one extension in every campaign. The downside to this simple method is that pivot tables rely on a ‘key’ such as the campaign in this case. If there’s no value for that key, then nothing is displayed.
For instance, this account is missing structured snippets in one of the campaigns. Since that campaign doesn’t have a row in the pivot table source data, nothing can be displayed.
Solving this issue is very simple. Download a list of your active campaigns that should contain extensions. Copy the campaign list and paste it into your campaign column in the pivot table source data. You don’t need any other stats, just one row per campaign name:
Now when you create a pivot table, there will be a key for every campaign. As the attribute values are 0, they won’t affect your asset counts. When you create this pivot table, you can just filter, sort, or look for rows with no data. Here we can see that campaign 5 is blank, which means it doesn’t have structured snippets.
The above methods both take some work, and you have to remember to run the reports and pivot tables on a regular basis.
Automated scans review your asset usage, so you can find missing assets at a glance. This screenshot is part of the Adalysis dashboard. We can easily see that all the campaigns have multiple assets, but account doesn’t have structured snippets, location, or app extensions. (For a free Adalysis audit report, click here.)
Ad assets aren’t new. But when campaigns get added, removed, and changed all the time, mistakes happen. These small misses can add up to a lot of missed opportunities.
Choose your method for auditing your account, and make sure to check-in regularly, especially after large changes. This will help you to ensure you’re getting the most out of your ad assets.