Google Ads Audit: The Ultimate 10-Point Guide For Success

We all know that Google ads management is not as easy as many people think. Besides, a Google ads audit is an absolute must when you intend to take over a new account from a client or stepping into a new role within your job environment.

It is always essential to understand where things are standing before you begin making any positive changes going forward.

A Google ads audit checklist is compared to a doctor’s checklist to evaluate the performance of marketing campaigns.

It is an excellent practice to keep checking the performance of your ads from time to time to ensure that you are getting the best out of your campaigns.

Let’s look at the Google ads audit checklist in ten easy steps.

1. Keywords

Every marketing campaign targets a specific group within the market audience. In order to target a specific audience, you need to understand the best practices of using Keywords with a clear picture in mind about what you want in business.

Focus on the user’s intent and face the roles of the customer. Do not focus on what your business wants but consider what pains your customers.

Even though you might have proper keywords, ensure that they are relevant to your audience. Carry out proper research to uncover healthy information about some of the best keywords within your industry.

Keywords are the backbone of Google Ads campaigns, so it’s essential to ensure you’re targeting the right ones. A keyword audit helps uncover opportunities for optimization:  

• Search Query Report: Analyze the search terms report to know which queries trigger your ads. Identify irrelevant or low-performing keywords and add them to your negative keyword list to avoid wasteful spending. 
• Match types: You can check the match types you are using for your keywords. This includes broad, phrase, and exact match. Using a broad match keyword will also mean you send irrelevant clicks. Also, in the case of an exact match keyword, it limits your keyword reach. Find a middle balance depending on performance. 
• Keyword Relevance: Your keywords should reflect the ad copy and corresponding landing pages. Relevant keywords pay off in Google with higher Quality Scores and, consequently better ad placements. 

2. Be Crystal Clear

What does your ad mean when it lacks a call to action? This is an essential element that you should not miss out on in your campaigns. You need to think about a proper way that you can use to engage users and encourage them to convert at the end.

Always remember that the ad is likely to lead to some sort of a landing page. The page should have a clear call to action. Always remember that the ad targets the most appropriate person to click it and explore further.

3. Review Your Goals

Before getting your hands into your Google ads account, you need to begin by reviewing your goals in business. Get a clear understanding of your goals and the business in general. Note that there are different conversion goals that you need to understand and the performance outcomes that you are looking for.

Define your business goals clearly and make them simple to attain. Ensure that you are working towards attaining specific goals and channel all your concerns in the same direction.

4. Evaluate Your Account Structure

You might have a good account with everything needed and still fail to attain your goals in business. It ensures that you have a perfect hierarchy since it also impacts the amount of time it takes to manage the Google ads account. You can check out different ways of structuring your Google ads account to enhance its effectiveness.

You can structure your account using your logical business objectives, service line, subject matter, persona targets, and many more others. Note that there is no right way you can structure your account; you only need to plan it in a manner that gives you more control over it.

With an efficient structure, the targeting improves, and so does performance tracking, while making optimizations becomes easier.

Here is what you must evaluate in your account structure review: 

• Campaign Organization: Campaigns should be organized in a logical sequence, either based on business objectives, geotargeting, or product-based groups. 
• Setting up Ad Groups: Thematic ad groups are more related to specific keywords, products, or services. This keeps the relevance and thereby increases the Quality Score. 
• Keyword Grouping: Relevant keywords are grouped in an ad group. Broad keywords cannot be placed within the same ad group with specific keywords. 

5. Ad Groups

This is one of the areas where many people tend to get confused when doing the Google AdWords checklist. When you hear of ad words, always remember that it refers to a group of ads and not keywords. Once you confuse the two concepts above, you have missed out on a major point that will likely impact the final results.

When doing a Google ads audit, do not overthink about keywords since there are also other essential elements that you need to consider and evaluate keenly to be on the safe side. Concentrate on your landing pages, quality scores, and the ability for your customers to convert.

6. Ads

In most Google ads accounts, ads are left to run independently without being checked. The most important thing you can do at this point is to set ads rotation and ensure that every ad group has a couple of ad versions.

Ensure that you test all the versions of the ads to identify which one performs better than the other.  Despite the fact that the Google algorithm monitors ads operations, it is dangerous to leave things on autopilot.

You can utilize different variations in every ad group depending on the number of ads that you have. Also, in the ad headline, incorporate a call to action to propel the effectiveness of the ads.

7. Campaign Settings

Yes, it is pretty easy to review your campaign’s settings quickly and move on to the next thing. People forget that they need to get back to the settings and make a few adjustments to get the best out of their efforts. However, before making any possible changes, you need to review a series of things before you conclude.

Check on the geographic targeting of the ads and their accuracy. Ensure that you have advanced location targeting features to cover all your target localities fully. Check whether you have the most appropriate dayparting in place to get the best out of your ad campaigns.

Google Ads offers many settings that directly affect how people perceive your ads. Look at all the settings below for each campaign: 

• Location Targeting: The campaigns may not be targeting the geographic areas they intend to, or locations may be targeted too broad or narrow or in disalignment with target market. 
• Device Targeting: Analyze the performance across different devices like desktop, mobile, and tablet. In this case, you will need to make some bid adjustments if some devices perform better or worse. 
• Ad Scheduling: If your business is time-sensitive, you want to make sure your ads are running at hours when your target audience will be most likely to convert. Look at historical data to optimize ad timing. 
• Budget Allocation: Evaluate if your budget is aligned with your campaign goals. If certain campaigns are underperforming, consider redistributing the budget to those with higher potential. 

8. Landing Pages

A landing page is considered an external part of Google ads. However, it has a significant impact on your ad campaigns’ success and affects all other metrics within your campaigns. There are many landing page builders available online that can help you craft the perfect landing page for your campaigns in no time.

You need always to remember to analyze the performance of this crucial element even if it does not show up on your radar. When evaluating the quality score of your performance, the landing page impacts the final figure you get.

The landing page should have consistent wording with a clear call to action to enable customers to navigate easily. Create a positive user experience to enhance the conversion rate.

The landing page is an important ingredient in turning clicks into customers. The best of ads can all go wrong if the landing pages are not up to par and, thus, be detrimental to campaign performance. 

• Relevance: Ensure that the landing page closely resonates with the intent of the ad and keyword. Lack of relevance causes a disconnect in intent; it also leads to greater bounce rates and lower Quality Scores. 
• Speed: Page load speed is important for user experience. Slow landing pages result in high bounce rates and adversely affect Quality Score. 
• Conversion Optimization: Ensure that the landing page is optimized for conversion. This includes clear CTAs, a simple and user-friendly design, fast load times, and mobile optimization. 
• Monitoring: Your conversion tracking should be set up properly. You should be able to measure your ROI with the primary actions being purchases, sign-ups, or lead submissions. 

9. Conversion Tracking

Check if your conversion tracking has been set up correctly. Ensure that you have connected your account to Google analytics to get out every aspect outlined clearly. Evaluate if there is any type of leakage within your conversion funnel. Note that this needs to be checked from different points of view, such as the landing and conversion pages.

10. Creating a Report and the Action Plan

As you continue analyzing your Google ads account, you need to have a proper way of documenting all the key elements to highlight areas affecting your general performance.

Also, it is evident that your findings are likely to be shared by other people, either internally or externally. This means that you need to get a proper way of formatting your report to help you create a proper action that will help you solve the problem at hand.

In Conclusion

Once you are done doing a Google AdWords audit, you stand a better chance to identify possible errors within your campaigns and get the way out. The above discussed are some of the significant elements that you can consider while doing your audit.

Read Also…

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• How can Google Ads Help You Advance Your Business Goals?
• Google Ads: Successful Strategies For Marketing Your Business