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How to Perform a Google Ads Audit (Complete Checklist)
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You have your Google Ads prepared, you've done a mix of manual bidding and some smart bidding (because it's a new campaign), and you believe you've prepped enough to get your digital marketing campaign started.
However, your ads seem to have hit a bit of a snag. They're not impacting your audience as much as you intended.
Is the theme of the campaign to blame? Should you already do a post-mortem due to the lack of performance? Not necessarily.
Why You Need a Google Ads Audit
You might instead get a better look at why your ads are not hitting the right notes. Maybe they're a disorganized mess because you're new at making campaigns. Don't worry, we at Marketing Ignite are here to help.
We can specifically tell you how to do a Google Ads audit before you spend one cent on doing smart bidding for them willy-nilly.
The most important part of Google Ad auditing is this: you need to work on your campaign granularity from its delivery to the ad level. It involves taking the measurements of various metrics and adding details to your campaign.
If you want to know how to perform a Google Ads audit, you've come across the right article.
Find the best chances to upgrade your campaign. Or we'll help you do so. We here at Marketing Ignite have witnessed the evolution of Internet marketing firsthand and continue to keep track of the latest developments, particularly in terms of Google Ads.
What Should Come After a Google Ads Audit
Before going back to the drawing board and remaking your campaign from scratch, you should look more into your method of advertisement delivery. In this case, you should audit your Google Ads more before remaking said ads.
You might as well. The campaign has been planned and executed already, The ads are already out there.
In order to maximize your exposure on a "failed" or underperforming campaign, you should see if you've simply not executed the ad delivery or pay-per-click (PPC) campaign properly.
Know what you could've done better. Google Ads are way more complicated than most people think. Many a startup or even a multinational company can attest to how much of a financial and time-consuming headache these Internet ads can be.
In other words, neither God nor the Devil shouldn't be in the details. You should be paying attention to those details yourself!
Setting Goals From The Beginning
Great things start from small beginnings. The foundation of your campaign should root from a single goal or even a single unifying idea you're supposed to build upon rather than a mishmash of ideas with no single foundation.
Clearly Define Your Goal: The clearer your goal is, the clearer your advertising campaign will be because you know how to deliver a solid message that pushes you towards greater brand awareness.
Avoid Jumbled or Nonexistent Goals: It's all fine and dandy to have great Google Ads conversions, ROI, and targets with your smart bidding. However, they matter not or any other tips on this entry if you have nonexistent or chaotic goals. Goals focus all those techniques to a specific end.
Ask Yourself Before Starting the Audit: Ask yourself before doing a Google Ads audit what your goal is. Create brand awareness? Do a better campaign than the one you did before? Incorporate current trends to your marketing? Make your social media more prominent?
Disambiguate Your Goals: Having a blanket goal like saying, "We intend to have a successful company!" is as bad as having no goals at all. Every circumstance and company is different. Concretize your goal by disambiguating the "How" of it all.
Know How to "Get There": Instead of saying you want your company to make more money, think about how to do that, like lowering CPA(cost per acquisition) or entering social media marketing.
Small Goals Build Towards Bigger Goals: A goal could be a method to achieve a bigger goal. Start with something vague, like wanting to increase conversions. From there, you can establish smaller goals to get to that bigger goal, like smart bidding, sales-funnel-based SEO, or adding calls to action on your blog entries.
What Does Success Look Like? Success is meeting goals and maintaining growth for a company. Startups can begin by expansion and multinationals can begin by increasing profits yearly as they expand their own way. Your definition of success helps you define your goals relative to your mission-vision.
Most Importantly: Don't go for goals that have nothing to do in furthering the interests of your business. For example, reducing your (cost per click) won't bring you sales and just save you money, so try targeting your advertisement content instead for more conversions.
You can make more profits, increase your customers, create brand loyalty, and so forth by figuring out how to get there. Avoid white whales and wild goose chases—only focus on goals relevant to your company's bottom line.
Reviewing Changes in Performance
To help establish the technical details of your audit, you need to review your performance trends first by understanding trend lines. This will tell you how much your Google Ad performance has changed over a period of time.
The scheduling should also make you aware of what you were doing or what you've implemented at the time, whether intentionally or unintentionally, that merits investigation and improvements in the future.
Ideal Data Range: Make sure the data range you're examining isn't too soon or too narrow, like reviewing 2-3 days or 2-3 weeks of data. That's too little data to tell you about trends or whether or not your campaign is truly working. You want to get conclusions from complete data that run its course for at least 3 months.
Why 3 Months? You can draw more accurate conclusions when you have at least 3 months' worth of data. The first month is the introductory period, the second month is whether it sinks or swims, and the third month is a confirmation of whether it's trending downward or upwards.
Don't Go for More than 3 Months: Don't review performance trends for more than 3 months. By that time, various changes, variables, and the natural regression of the Law of Diminishing Returns should set in, thus mucking up the data regarding the performance of your campaign alone.
What to Look for: Look for fluctuations when sticking to your 3-month review from 30 days to 60 days or the first and second month of the 3-month data range. Look at where your specific Google Ads goals have taken the campaign during that time period compared to what happened in the third month.
Persistent Dips in Performance: You can do your Google Ads audit of your campaign by paying attention to the persistent dips in performance that happens within 30 days. You can investigate what went wrong during that time frame, what settings you took, and how it affects the nature of your ads.
What about Steady Inclines or Declines? If the peaks and valleys are steadier and subtler, you should be able to identify the point of origin where it started, what happened during that date, what setting you adjusted, and so forth.
The Google Ads Line graph: You can pin down the causes for your incline or decline by reviewing the Google Ads line graph that shows you conversion and click trends every 30 days or so.
Organizing Your Account Properly
Aside from figuring out the data range you're supposed to examine to find clues on what to audit or enhance with your present and future campaigns, you should also pay attention to the technical details.
How organized is your account? Your account should have logical organization in order to streamline your data for the sake of things like budget allocation.
It should reflect that you know what you're doing or your IT manager does. A chaotic account structure should be the first thing you should audit because that chaos might reflect on your account management as well.
Campaign Organization 101: You need granularity and segmentation in order to make the account you're running into a successful one. Auditing isn't just about accurate interpretation of data to make informed decisions when changing your account settings around.
Be More Focused: Focus the majority of your budget on a core service campaign or any tried-and-true campaign that has served as your company's bread-and-butter through the years.
Keyword Placement: You can specifically place well-performing keywords in your arsenal that have worked for previous campaigns into any burgeoning new campaigns you have on hand to indicate you've allocated your budget into them.
Dedicate to Your Core: If you're dealing with an experimental campaign you should keep your budget low since it's a testing ground for advertising and marketing ideas.
Service Allocation: Reorganize your campaign further by dividing the campaigns out in accordance to the service they provide. Budget allocation should be prioritized to the most relevant and important services to your company.
Number of Ads Per Ad Group: Doing a Google Ads audit on your ads per ground is dependent on the goals of your campaign and the nature of the campaign itself. It's truly one of the basics of how to perform a Google Ads audit.
Networks: A campaign should only target one network at a time. Don't target multiple networks at the same time because you'll end up spreading your campaign too thinly.
A granulated Google Ads account or an account that's been crystallized into granules means an account that works on every component part of its biddings. Audit every "granule" such as its goals, services, locations, and every last keyword you're bidding on.
If you were to attempt to put your keywords and ad groups into a campaign or several, you'll have less control over things and success becomes more of a gamble.
Don't forget that at the campaign level, you have full control and management of your budget. When auditing, consider how you wish to keep your budget managed and how the campaigns should be segmented based on your budget management.
The importance of campaign segmentation cannot be underestimated. Your approach to it impacts your campaign in every which way.
Sure, you might wonder what the point is since you compare everything to the nature of your campaign and its goals anyway. However, the number of ads per ad group is an important metric to that end.
To be more specific, you should for the most part leave only one ad per ad group if you're testing out ad viability. It's a huge miss to go for one ad per ad group normally in a campaign if it's not an experimental campaign.
Turn things around with your ad count if you're overly focusing on 1 ad per ad group or you have multiple ads in one ad group mucking up your focus and traffic.
You should limit it to about 2-4 ads. Going over 4 ads in an ad group is too much. It splits the traffic up and defeats whatever purpose your campaign is attempting to achieve. You should audit the ads to the manageable 2-4 ads per ad group.
This allows you to test out ideas while also running a full-on core campaign with proper traffic flow. The best of both worlds of 1 ad per ad group (testing grounds) and more than 4 ads per ad group (splits up the traffic).
Typically, you're recommended to run 3 ads per ad group. Thanks to the advent of RSAs (Responsive Search Ads)—which are dynamic ads that change in accordance to search signals—most people go with 1 RSA and 2 ETAs (Expanded Text Ads).
This ideal configuration allows you to maximize your bids and optimize any target you wish to achieve, from better CTRs to a more robust sales funnel and conversion rate.
ETAs, however, are already on their way out. They might go the way of the "spam links in directories" method of achieving Internet exposure to make way for the likes of RSAs. Just keep an eye on this development for future reference.
Also keep in mind that you can't go beyond 3 RSAs per ad group as per Google Ads policy as of this time.
Allow your Google Ads on search without display added or else they're run amok on the display network. When auditing campaigns for Google Ads, the magnitudes of traffic differ from one network to another.
What works with one network—a more aggressive offer, promo, or advertisement—because it features high-intent terms might not work as well for those who go through the display network, which has low-intent terms instead.
Furthermore, the display network eats up your budget like locusts at the wheat field. Audit your approach when you have a display added to your Google campaign or don't add a display at all. To wit:
Display network campaigns spend more than what's allotted in the budget.
Display network campaigns spend the budget dry by the end of the day or before it.
These campaigns are most likely to spend most of the budget first with little of it spent on the actual search network itself.
You can optimize your budget and advertising spend with the simple audit of taking off the display network from your search campaign.
Select the campaign then go to the "Settings" option in order to finagle with your network settings.
Geography: You can also audit your account by geography. It's important to have geographic campaigns in order to manage things like schedule (as per the time zone) and language (such as the national language, vernacular, dialects, and the lingua franca of the region).
Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAGs): Without SKAGs (Single Keyword Ad Groups), your campaign won't have the foundation to support itself, resulting in it floundering. By implementing SKAGs, you'll see your CPAs (Costs Per Action) and CPCs (Costs Per Click) go down while your CTRs (Clickthrough Rates) go way up.
A campaign should only target one region or country at a time, covering specifics like language, keyword, and ad timing relative to time zones.
Multinational companies or international businesses can have campaigns that target several countries or several localities. However, it's best to have separate campaigns for every country instead of one campaign for several countries.
Your bidding will go out of control with multi-geography targets because you're bidding through multiple time zones for those many nations.
The performance of your Google Ads can change depending on local competition, the keywords being used in what language, and so forth depending on which geography, country, or region you're targeting.
Don't mix all your geographical demographics in a single campaign. Have separate campaigns for separate countries so that your granular campaign is able to specifically target them via your "Locations" tab.
Putting in one keyword per ad group with its own set of ads isn't nutty and you won't be crazy to do so. Or you might be as crazy as a fox.
They assist your campaign as a PPC (Pay Per Click) marketer to gain more control of your campaign (essential when doing Google Ads audits) and get a cleaner overall account structure.
It even increases your CTRs, reduces your ad spend, and improves upon your Quality Score for good measure! It helps more with your attempts to have granular control of your search terms, negative keywords, ads, and bidding.
For instance, we've had a client get 500 percent conversion increases by merely putting up a SKAG-type of structure in their campaign. We even got amazing revenue increases from multiple startups across the board, averaging 200 to 300 percent increases.
Doing an Actual Google Ads Audit
It's even more complex to audit the content of your Google Ads themselves versus auditing their method of delivery, like assigning the number of ads per ad group, paying attention to networks and geography, or making a granular ad campaign overall.
Even the content, creativity, messaging, and presentation of the ads should be audited in light of the metrics you're getting and the results you're seeing. Like in writing, don't be afraid to "kill your babies" and do an ad campaign overhaul.
Granularity Explained: Granularity assigns various metrics with meaning and adds details to your campaign to make it more elaborate and optimized to accomplish your end goals.
Video Ads: Audit your video campaigns such as YouTube ads and partnerships with content creators to feature your ads on their videos, with you serving as their sponsor.
Ad Copy: When auditing your ad copy, check for relevance. Like with SEO (Search Engine Optimization), your ads should be optimized for the keywords, key phrases they're being added to as search ads.
Ad Rotation: When it comes to how to perform a Google Ads audit, one of your top priorities should be managing who sees which one of your ads and when they get to see it.
By making your ad campaign more granular, you can get to funnel money to more efficient areas of your campaign while doing away with inefficient areas. In essence, auditing your ad campaign makes it more granular by default.
It's like taking specific measurements to your ingredients while cooking in order to get a specific dish made in accordance to the portions you wish to serve (how big your customer or consumer base is).
It takes time and effort to work with and/or audit your ads in a more granular fashion.
It will take you quite a while to use trial and error to test out what works and figure out what doesn't work or requires improvement for the best results.
Just don't forget that there's an emphasis on starting with a goal so that you don't get lost in the details and keep looking at the big picture. Don't nitpick or micromanage to death—do tweaks until you get the best outcomes overall.
What can you audit here? Scrutinize the content. Don't drop your guard on auditing video campaigns and essentially Internet commercials because they focus on the "top of funnel" audiences that are unlikely for conversion.
Specifically, pay attention to video quality, the content creators you've decided to sponsor, and whether your "commercial" is on par with best practices.
Experiment on which ads should work in light of the audience you're supposed to be catering to. YouTube is geo-locked and geography specific, so it will show your ads to any specific demo you're targeting for you on relevant videos.
Try out different lengths of ads to see if you get better conversions, traffic, or exposure there. You can also go for different available ad types to see which ones click with your company (like cheaper banner ads versus skippable ads or non-skippable ads).
You can improve your Google Ads quality score by improving on the quality of your ad copy or the very text that brings context to your advertisement.
Your ads might not be reaching the CTRs and conversions you wish to get mainly because your copy doesn't have a clear message or it borders on irrelevancy with what it's aiming for.
Now you can go with single keyword ad groups. In this instance, it's not a big miss to test out relevancy and effectiveness by having 1 keyword per ad group for your campaign. This improves upon your quality score and can in turn assist in better conversion rates when push comes to shove.
Fair warning, though. We at Marketing Ignite recommend you and other clients to not be overly obsessed about getting a better quality score, especially when they don't directly impact your conversions.
Once you find quality keywords to work with, put them in your ad copy and elaborate on their topics. Contextualize your ads on those specific keywords that trended or made a splash on your metrics.
There are also a number of factors that affect ad copy in a constructive or destructive manner. Therefore, when doing a Google Ads audit on them, you can do things like a regular A/B split testing schedule.
A/B testing is when you split your audience to test a number of variations of a campaign. This will then help you determine which variant performs better.
This should also allow you to zero-in on which parts of the ad copy will add to the success of the singular ad it's on or the ad campaign overall the most.
Beyond metrics, the art of the ad copy is also a writing exercise involving creativity with the written word. Improve on your ad copy game to make it readable and functional enough to get you those conversions you're gunning for.
Ad rotation helps with the traffic distribution along with the number of ads per ad group. In this case, you can zero-in on top ad performers by keeping it 1 ad per ad group.
Besides which, if you're doing A/B testing as part of your ads audit, you should ensure that enough traffic and eyes are going through every ad variant to see which ones work the best.
Take a look at your ad rotation settings. Make sure you have the "optimize for the best performing ads" option or "rotate indefinitely" option selected. The former tells you which ads are top performers (with every ad limited to ad group). The latter gives all ads an equal shot until you check out their metrics.
During past Google Ads audits, we defaulted to "rotate indefinitely" for the reason mentioned above. Sometimes, having Google sort out the best performing ads cuts the legs from under other ads that would've performed just as well when given more time.
The rotation of the ads allowed us to fairly rate every ad for a stretch of time, thus allowing the "cream" to "rise to the top" when all is said and done.
We've lately been going with the "best performing ads" rotation because Google algorithm has advanced enough to smartly pick the best ads while the rest of the ads that need work can go back to the drawing board.
Some might argue that going the "best performing ads" route prevents newer ads from competing from the more established ones. The existing ads have the bigger share of the data while newer campaigns lack data.
However, evidence shows that the Google algorithm is smart enough to give newer ads enough rotation time to keep up with the more established ads.
It's also the option that gets you the most immediate results, but you can always default to "equal time" with "rotate indefinitely" if you want a more thorough testing period.
ETAs and RSAs: You also want to audit your RSAs (Responsive Search Ads) and ETAs (Expanded Text Ads) for good measure. They're search ads types you should take a look at along with ad type ratios.
What are Responsive Ads? RSAs are not just text ads. They're "responsive" search ads, which makes them more dynamic in accordance to keywords and metrics. They change with the flow of data and the more data Google Ads get for them, the better their upside.
Pin Down Headlines and Descriptions: In our experience, RSAs work best when you pin their descriptions and headlines in such a way that they show up in specific positions. This gives you more managerial control of RSAs similar to their ETA seniors.
The Pin Icon: The Google pin icon appears when you hover your cursor over descriptions and headlines. Click on that pin to pin them into position.
Tested to Work: We've seen from tests that pinned RSAs reached higher ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) at more than 50 percent while maintaining a CPA that's 30 percent lower.
Prevent Merging: The pinning tactic of auditing your RSAs also prevents descriptions and headlines from merging together that makes them nonsensical. This flaw is part of the reason for RSA underperformance.
RDAs or Uploaded Display Ads: Anyone who knows how to perform a Google Ads audit understands it's best to "granulate" their campaign by focusing on one network per campaign.
We've audited our share of old accounts. In particular, with one client, we needed to deal with STAs (Standard Text Ads) that went the way of the Dodo back in 2017. In 2022, they have become obsolete and require removal or replacement.
ETAs replaced STAs, but even ETAs are on their way out. By the time you're reading this, ETAs should already be retired in June 2022. To replace them, you need to incorporate more RSAs into your campaign.
Let's talk about RSAs. Many of us here at Marketing Ignite are doing our best to optimize RSAs, but up until ETAs departure they had issues in performance—RSAs underperformed against ETAs. This should change over time.
As the Google algorithm gets smarter the longer RSAs are around, these so-called responsive ads should get to the level of ETAs and beyond. They have the potential to instead outperform ETAs by their nature.
If you want your tROAS (Target ROAS) smart bidding to work better, pinning is a must to maximize that targeted improvement. It's a means to an end. To wit:
This also means if you're running display as well, you should pay attention to your display ads instead of overly focusing your ad creation, smart bidding and Google Ads audit on search ads.
If you're using uploaded display ads, audit them by accounting for every potential size that Google will allow you to upload them. Limiting their size limits your audience.
Using more size variations also means you'll get more valuable ad placements when all is said and done. In regards to RDAs (Responsive Display Ads) also partly solves the size issue.
Google makes RDAs for you that can fit through a wider variety of display devices and placements even if you've only used a few sizes for your ad text and sizes. That's the beauty of A.I. and the algorithm for you!
Switch to RDAs in order to not need to manually make a bunch of image sizes yourself, Google will do it for you in a dynamic or responsive way, the same way dynamic websites resize themselves in accordance to the device they're displayed on.
Adding Finishing Touches
You now have a better idea of the primary or priority audits for your Google Ad campaign. Now let's talk about supplementary audits that won't necessarily impact the overall success of your campaign, but can make your campaign more presentable.
In other words, these are the icing of your cake or the cherry on top of the sundae. They're not overly important to the main thing, but something will feel off without them.
Knowing these things will also contribute to campaign success, pushing it towards the right direction as it enhances its solid audit foundation related above.
Change History: The account has a history log you can scope out in order to give you an idea or a feel of how much work you've accomplished and how "audited" your campaign has become.
Display Placements: Take charge of display placement with this feature. It helps you manage where the ads get displayed specifically. When doing a display placements audit, go to the screen for "Where Ads Showed".
Automations: You can automate your Google Ads using custom scripts or through native automated rules included in the account. Dealing with Google Ads at all requires a modicum of automation already.
If you're directly managing the account, this info might not seem important to you. However, when auditing your campaign into granularity, it pays to know where you are on the "map" to your road to campaign success.
Also, it helps companies audit employees or agencies like us in Marketing Ignite. It informs you whether we did what you asked of us or if we've come up with better solutions to your issues so you can make more informed decisions in the future.
It's on this screen that you'll be informed about how many impressions and clicks are generated from a variety of websites and applications. Some of them might not be the places you want your ads shown for a multitude of reasons.
Don't go overboard when auditing placements. It's important to remember your ad might show on a huge amount of apps and sites. There is such a thing as a too-granular campaign.
Avoid becoming like a boss who micromanages too much. Audit moderately for this and do your fundamental overhauls things like account organization and the ads themselves.
Concentrate more on placements with loads of clicks, but zero conversions. Those sites eat up your web traffic bandwidth with no conversion rewards, essentially.
Don't bother with mobile gaming clicks. By our experience, their benefits are so limited they're practically nonexistent.
However, in this context, we're talking about scripts and rules. These will help make your campaign run like a well-oiled machine, with you merely adjusting settings in case of snags or if you wish to scale up or down the campaign.
When automations work, they'll assist you in staying in peak performance without needing manual intervention. They require only little to no interaction, except for maintenance or tiny optimizations.
Reviewing the Basics
You should always cover these basic elements when doing the major audits or finishing touches to your Google Ads audit. It's the fundamentals that help build your skills towards doing more complex adjustments to your campaign.
Learning the ropes will help you figure out how to meet your goals, organize your account properly, audit the actual ads themselves, and do the finishing touches on your audited campaign.
A review of the basics of auditing an Google Ad campaign should also give you step-by-step instructions on how to perform a Google Ads audit properly and correctly.
Spelling and Grammar: What use are all the ad copy variants you've tested using the A/B or split testing method if you can't be bothered or can't keep track of your misspellings and grammar mistakes?
Conversions: At this point, you might be sick and tired of hearing it, but yes—your campaign's success lives or dies by its conversion rate. To audit your campaigns ability to turn a captive audience into paying customers, you need to have conversion tracking.
Proofreading and editors should be a fundamental requirement for your ad copy. We normally wouldn't cover because it's mostly understood by any auditor or editor worth their salt that it should be present.
Proper grammar and spelling should be present on your text and especially your image ads with the text included with the picture, so they're harder to spell-check or proofread after the fact.,
The easier method of scanning for errors is downloading the ads to a spreadsheet (Google Sheets work) and manually scanning them with your eyes.
Make prodigious use of your word processor's native spell checker or make some room in your budget for the Grammarly service. You won't regret it.
Even with Grammarly's assistance, manual scanning will allow you to pick up things the spellchecker might not, like homonym-type typographical errors.
Naturally, when making ads, you can bend the rules a little bit to cater to your audience's speech patterns or the latest slang as well as catchy catchphrases that aren't necessarily grammatically correct.
As a rule of thumb in terms of style, make your text feel conversational and less sales-y up until the Call to Action part. Break up your test to not be whole chunks of paragraphs as well to make them more readable, like this article.
An advert with multiple grammar errors reeks of a hastily made spam ad. It's amateurish, unprofessional, and raises all sorts of red flags on behalf of anyone who sees it.
Getting your hands on this important measuring tool allows you to audit or separate the chaff (inefficient ads with low conversion rates) from the wheat (high-performance ads with high conversion rates).
Your account data is practically useless if during your Google Audit you found out that your conversion tracking wasn't set up properly from the start. What a waste of an advertising budget!
We'd estimate about only a third or less of all Google Ads accounts have accurate conversion tracking. Anecdotal, sure, but likelier than you think!
Here's something that isn't anecdotal. According to a recent study, of the sample of Google Accounts doing conversion tracking, only half of them or about 50.1 percent were tracking meaningful relevant data.
Here are some tips to make your conversion tracking work without you going overboard with your tracking.
GTM: Use GTM (Google Tag Manager) to make your conversion setup as watertight, smooth, and optimized as possible. It's another tool even the inexperienced can use to achieve ideal conversion rates.
Google Tag Assistant: If you're already Team GTM, get an extension for Google Tag Assistant. It will examine after submission of a test conversion on your website if you're firing off conversion events.
Preview and Debug Mode: You can also use the preview and debug mode on your GTM to submit a test conversion to see if the conversion event is firing or not instead of depending on the Tag Assistant extension.
Troubleshooting Tool: You can get help and guidance from Google's troubleshooting tool in case you've missed any steps or neglected to do certain things when setting up your conversion tracking for your campaign
Keywords and Negative Keywords: Don't waste your ad spend trying to rank high on the wrong search terms. You'll need to audit the very foundations of your campaign if you've been coming up with ads for irrelevant keywords!
You should depend on the keywords lists provided by Marketing Ignite because we prioritize contextual relevance as much as the Google algorithm does.
However, keyword lists aren't the end-all, be-all of figuring out which search terms to bid for with Google Ads. Even certain words we're sure are relevant to our brand, company, and product are triggered by unexpected searches.
While auditing keywords, search for the keywords that are getting clicks and eating up your budget but aren't converting the clickers or viewers into paying customers.
The non-performing keywords unable to improve your business in 30 days should be the first ones to go. Unless your business is exposure and getting eyeballs to your site, they're not worth the ad spend for lead-generation businesses.
You should also have a blacklist of negative keywords as well. There are some words you don't want to associate your ads to.You might have some when targeting broad keywords, thus necessitating an audit.
What to Look For in a Google Ads Audit
Whether it's a new account or an account that's progressing fine on its own but could do better, knowing what to look for when it comes to auditing your Google Ads can mean all the difference in the world when it comes to controlling or making the most out of your ad spend.
Other guides tend to get redundant with their auditing, erring on the side of extra work. In contrast, we've presented you with a complete checklist with all the important components included for a more optimum auditing experience.
You want to improve your PPC campaigns by knowing its areas of improvement, of course. It could be something technical, like applying the right smart bidding strategy.
Or creative, like making a unified vision for your marketing campaign ideas. A Google Ads audit is simply the maximization or optimization of your campaign on that avenue.
We hope this cut-and-dry guide will get you fully prepared when it comes to thoroughly examining, evaluating, and fixing your Google Ad campaign from pillar to post.
Let Marketing Ignite Make Your Marketing Blueprint for Success
If you're uncertain about how to perform a Google Ads audit, you can depend on Marketing Ignite when it comes to all things relating to Google Ads in general (setting up and managing campaigns), and doing a Google Ads audit in particular.
We were established specifically to address diverse businesses’ marketing needs in the face of the ever-dynamic evolution of the Internet, Google algorithms, and the possibility of people being fully immersed online, not just in social media but every aspect of life.
We are the architects of the future, and you can build your business's advertisements and promotions through us. Contact us now for more details.