Today we will discuss how to audit your Google Ads campaign as efficiently as it could be? Unless you’ve audited it, you can’t be sure. While there are many tools and services that provide algorithm-based results, they often don’t take into account your marketing goals, target audience, and the desired results of your efforts.
Whether you’re taking over a client’s account, or as part of a new role within your business, it’s essential to know where things stand before moving on.
It is also useful to carry out a periodic audit of your campaigns, in order to allow you to take a step back and examine the elements which could escape you in your daily management.
The benefits of a Google Ads audit
- Find areas of wasted spending.
- Identify new opportunities for expansion.
- Improve ongoing management processes.
- Obtain audience information that can be applied to the account as well as other marketing channels.
- Validate hypotheses.
So here’s how to audit your Google Ads account .
Step 1: Review the goals
The first step in the audit is to look at the business (and account) goals to make sure you have a clear understanding of where you need to go.
To understand well
Understanding what those goals are and what results you are looking to achieve will set the tone for your audit, throughout the process. This will facilitate the audit of the account, and bring objectivity to the latter.
Some questions to ask regarding the objectives:
- What are your conversion goals for the business?
- What are the conversion goals in Google Ads ?
- Have your goals changed?
- Can you track performance beyond ads (for leads, sales, or traffic)?
- Has your target audience (or personas ) changed?
Step 2: Account and Campaign Settings
- Is geographic targeting appropriate and precise?
- Do you see in the “places” tab any countries or regions that you do not want to target? or on the contrary, places that are missing?
- Are you sure the demographics match your audience?
- The bidding strategy, is the budget and advertising distribution methods meet your wishes?
Step 3: Review the account structure
There are many ways to structure the use of campaigns and ad groups, organizing around:
- Logical business goals.
- Target audience.
- Product lines.
- Service lines.
- Subject was given.
The aspects of the account structure to be assessed are as follows:
- Do the campaigns represent different segments of the campaign setting level (geo-targeting, offers, campaign-level budgets)?
- Do campaigns provide summary reports for the ad groups that are part of them?
- Are the campaigns easy to compare against each other?
Step 4: Analyze ad groups and keywords
Aspects of ad groups to consider in the audit are:
- Do they contain homogeneous keywords (dealing with the same subject)?
- Is the maximum CPC set in line with what I’m willing to pay?
- Are my ad groups competing with each other?
- Are my top-performing ad groups getting enough budget?
Regarding keywords, ask yourself if:
- Are negative keywords used?
- Does the research report show off-topic keywords for the topic and conversion goals?
- Are there any terms that have a high impression, click-through, and / or spend rate, but don’t convert?
- Are there any keywords that have poor quality scores?
- Are there any terms that don’t match your intended or desired CPC, CTR, conversion, or conversion rate goals?
Step 5: Ads and landing pages
Your ads now also need to be scrutinized. You can verify :
- Are there at least two ad variations in each ad group?
- Are the keywords present in the ads?
- Do ad headlines contain effective calls to action?
- Are there medium or low-quality ads?
Landing pages are external to Google Ads, but have a direct impact on the performance of your campaigns and influence the metrics you measure in Google Ads.
Your landing pages must therefore also be part of your audit. Consider the following:
- Does the page have a good title and a clear call to action?
- Are the forms working?
- Is the conversion tracking code in place?
- The quality ratings of the ads referring to a particular landing page
Read: how to create converting landing page
Conclusion
Your audit is finished: you have gathered the information necessary to know the status of your account, its strengths, its weaknesses… And above all, you have identified avenues for optimizing your account and its performance and that is how to audit your google ads campaign
Read: How to sell your products on Google shopping