7 Essential Tips for Conducting Google Ads Audits
Ensure peak performance of your Google Ads account with audits focusing on critical areas such as conversion tracking, impression share, match type performance, and more.
PPC accounts are always evolving. With frequent adjustments like short-term promotions, testing new features, removing low-performing items, and continuous management, it’s essential to periodically step back and assess the account from a broader perspective.
Regularly auditing your account ensures its functionality and provides clear insights into where to concentrate your efforts effectively.
Accounts are typically audited for one of three primary reasons:
- Account performance has declined
- You want to optimize your account to achieve “more” — whether it’s increasing conversions, lowering CPA, or boosting ROAS.
- You do a regular audit as a check-in.
When conducting an account evaluation, it’s crucial to cover seven essential components that are integral to any comprehensive audit.
1. Proper conversion tracking
When I start an audit with a client, the first question I ask is simple yet crucial: “Do you have confidence in your conversion data?”
If you lack confidence in your conversion data, it can cast doubt on the accuracy of all other account metrics.
Next, it’s important to identify any untracked conversions on your website. For example, phone calls and chats are often overlooked and not properly tracked. This reveals where there are data gaps and suggests that your performance metrics might be better than they appear.
Lastly, review the settings. While every setting is crucial, there are a few essential ones that require thorough examination.
The first is Count. When someone converts multiple times, should you count each conversion separately or treat them as a single conversion?
In lead generation, it’s typically unnecessary to count someone more than once because multiple contacts from the same person don’t add additional value. When the count setting is set to “every,” it often inflates our lead generation conversions.
Conversely, in e-commerce, it’s usually beneficial to count every instance when someone checks out at your store. Therefore, “every” should be used as the count setting in this case.
Next, we need to examine the “Included in account-level goals” column. Goals marked “yes” are utilized for automated bidding. You might have goals that you want to assess within the account but prefer not to use for bidding purposes.
Lastly, it’s important to review how values are being tracked and ensure they align sensibly with the chosen bid method.
For example, if your account shows strong store visits, assigning a higher value to these visits allows you to use ROAS bidding effectively, taking into account in-store purchases.
If store visit values are set to the default of one, automated bidding would largely disregard this goal because the assigned value is too low to significantly influence bidding strategies.
Conversion goals can be overridden at the campaign level, so it’s important to check if any campaigns are using a goal setup different from the account defaults.
Once you’re satisfied with the conversion tracking, it’s time to explore opportunities to maximize your account’s performance.
2. Impression share evaluation
Impression share represents the percentage of times your ad was displayed out of the total opportunities it could have been shown.
You lose impressions for one of two reasons:
Ad Rank: Your ad did not rank high enough to be shown in the auction.
Budget: Your campaign’s daily budget has been exhausted for the day.
- Your bid.
- Your Quality Score.
- Your ad assets (extensions) impact on the auction.
Ensuring you have high-quality ad assets is straightforward. The next step is to evaluate your Quality Scores to determine if they are generally high or low. An effective way to do this is by using pivot tables for Quality Score analysis. If your Quality Scores are low, and you’re not focused on pre-qualifying traffic as in B2B scenarios, improving your Quality Scores can significantly boost your overall conversions. If your Quality Scores and assets are in good shape, the only way to get more from your current keywords is to raise your bids or conduct ad and landing page testing to increase conversion rates. If raising your bids isn’t an option, you’ll need to add more targeting methods to achieve additional conversions.
A window will open, allowing you to import conversions directly from your Google Analytics, Salesforce, and third-party apps. But for this understanding, I’ll click the GA4 properties option. Then click Track conversions from web. Press Continue once you’re done.
3. Campaign settings consistency
If you have many campaigns, it’s not uncommon to find a few with incorrect settings or those that need a closer examination.
You should pay attention to any campaign that differs from the others in any of these settings:
- Language
- Location
- Networks
- Time of day
- Bid strategy type
Different campaigns typically have diverse settings. However, if you identify a campaign targeting all countries and territories, unlike the others, it merits a closer review.
If only one campaign has a device bid adjustment, which could mean it’s not targeting a specific device type, it’s useful to check for any keyword coverage gaps on that device.
The possibilities are numerous, and you will encounter false positives. However, advertisers often overlook this screen when checking for inconsistencies, such as one campaign running from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. while the others operate from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.
There may be a valid reason for the variation, but it’s crucial to identify and investigate any settings that appear unusual.
4. Match type usage
Your bidding methods can significantly impact the effectiveness of each match type. It’s often observed that broad match performs well in a Target CPA campaign but poorly in a max conversion campaign.
Analyzing the performance of each match type can reveal whether any match types should be removed or if a bid strategy adjustment is necessary to optimize the performance of all match types.
5. Ad group organization
Segmenting ad groups strictly by match types or creating single keyword ad groups (SKAGs) is considered outdated. However, maintaining strong ad-to-keyword relevance within ad groups remains crucial.
Every ad combination within an ad group should effectively describe every keyword it targets. Remember, an ad group is fundamentally about the ad itself.
The role of keywords is to determine ad visibility, while ads serve as your opportunity to demonstrate understanding of user intent, pre-qualify the user, and compel them to visit your site.
When there’s a disconnect between keywords and ad assets, overall click-through rates (CTRs), Quality Scores, and conversion rates can suffer.
Reviewing ad groups with below-average performance, a high volume of keywords, or scrutinizing the organization of key ad groups can provide insights into the need for improved account structure.
Google recently introduced a set of columns that display the number of active keywords and ads within each ad group, which proves useful for evaluating account organization.
It’s also important to verify whether any ad groups lack active keywords or ads. This situation often indicates that the last ad was inadvertently paused or all keywords or ads were disapproved, necessitating adjustments to the ad group.
6. RSA pinning
- Control: You want to know what is working or set a specific message.
- Math: You have too few impressions for Google to determine the best responsive search ad (RSA) to show.
- Testing: You’re testing pinning lines to understand which one converts best for you.
Using pinning effectively means pairing it with machine learning, especially when multiple variations are attached to each headline. The main problem with not using pinning is the math. If you have 15 headlines, 4 descriptions, and 10,000 impressions a month, each ad combination might only appear once every five months. This low data density can cause Google to prioritize ads that match keywords, potentially overlooking important elements like calls to action and what makes you different from competitors. Testing ads and using pinning strategically can really help improve your metrics. As an auditor, it’s important to point out where more testing is needed to make things work better.
7. Change history
Google recently introduced the ability for advertisers to access their Performance Max search terms.
For larger accounts, retrieving this data can be particularly challenging and time-consuming. Google appears to be offering more transparency, yet the process of working with this data remains cumbersome.
If you manage to successfully download the data (which can take over 24 hours for extensive accounts), it’s essential to compare the search terms from Performance Max campaigns with those from your regular search campaigns.
You’ll often discover overlap between the search terms of both types of campaigns. Additionally, you may identify Performance Max search terms that you’d prefer to allocate to your regular search campaigns, especially if you’ve structured specific ad groups for those terms.
Reviewing the Performance Max search terms enables you to identify opportunities to add new keywords to your search campaigns, incorporate new negative keywords into your account, or enhance the relevance of Performance Max campaigns to match search terms more effectively.
Bonus: Performance Max Search terms overlap
Is the account being actively managed? I typically filter out scripts and automated changes to see how frequently manual adjustments are made to the account.
Are branded keywords being manually bid on? If yes, when was the last bid adjustment made?
Is broad match being utilized? If so, when were negative keywords or search terms last added to the account?
Analyzing the frequency and nature of these changes can shed light on the manager’s priorities and the overall management of the account.
Discover opportunities to optimize your Google Ads accounts
Audits play a crucial role in PPC management. No account is perfect; they evolve and errors can persist if left unchecked over time.
The key is to conduct audits to identify and rectify these issues. It’s not just about fixing problems; it’s also about gaining a holistic view to enhance overall account performance and determine actionable improvements.
While there are many aspects to consider in an audit, these seven steps provide a solid foundation to ensure the reliability of your data and optimize your PPC account effectively.
