Google 101: What is Google Ads Audit?

Hey, guys. So in today’s video, I want to be talking to you about what is a Google Ads audit.

To find out more, check out my video below or keep reading for the full blog.

So a Google Ads audit is basically the process that you go through to determine the effectiveness of your Google Ads campaign.

Conducting an audit can highlight where you might be burning your budget. But it could also highlight strengths within your campaign with your Google Ads campaign. So that you can then capitalize on those trends and invest more into them.

It can also highlight various other things such as weaknesses, which parts of your Google Ads account. You can sort of fine-tuning it in order to help it work that much better. Every part of your Google Ads campaign that you optimize, whether it’s a settings level, or keywords or campaigns.

You’re getting a micro gain, and those gains all add up towards a much bigger, healthier percentage of Google Ads account performance. What I’m going to be talking you through is 10 steps of how to conduct a very simple Google Ads audit,

I’m not going to be going into great detail. The other question is that, how often should you really conduct a Google Ads audit. Then it really depends on the size of the account. There is no fixed sum to say, you must conduct every day, every week, every month or so on.

It really depends on how many changes you make and how. But generally, what I say is that at least conduct an audit at least once a month. Because we get caught up in our day to day optimizations, adding campaigns, looking at negative keywords. But we don’t often step back.

Now, let me do an audit, just to see how the account is performing.

The first thing I would recommend is looking at your goals. Look at your goals and your tracking to make sure this is set up properly. Because there’s no point implementing a Google Ads campaign or trying to optimize your Google Ads campaign.

If your tracking isn’t working if your goals are not set up properly. You can really easily do this here. Let’s just jump in here.

If you are within your account, you can click on tools over here, and you can click on conversions. Here you will see what goals you’ve got configured. They will list on the left-hand side. And then towards the right-hand side. You’ll see how many conversions you’re getting for each goal. So it’s really important that your tracking and your goals are set up properly.

Then you can accurately measure the performance of your account, your campaigns, your keywords.

My second point is the dos and don’ts.

Don’t conduct a Google Ads campaign. If you didn’t load and loads of changes. Allow the account to stabilize before you start implementing your Google Ads campaign.

Now, in Google ads, once you do a campaign, they generally take about seven to 14 days for some real data to start accumulating. If we can make an accurate assessment as to whether the changes that you’ve done. Because you also take seasonality into account you could be implementing a campaign. Simply due to external factors, the account may not be performing very well.

So give it enough of a date range. In order to evaluate a reasonable amount of data, it’s hard to define what a reasonable amount is. But I’d say a month is quite reasonable as a starting point. Also, when conducting a Google Ads audit, don’t use terms for a granular date range.

Don’t just only look at you know, the last seven days or the last 10 days or whatever. And if you do look at a short window, then compare it to the previous period. What I’d say is that you set a reasonable date range, so you’ve got quite a bit, a nice flow of data. That really does take seasonality into account as well and external factors.

Number three, your account structure.

Take a look to make sure your account is logically structured. Whether you got the right campaign set up. When we write campaigns, you’ve got your ad groups are themed accordingly. The sorts of things that you want to take into account are some products or services. Whereby you might want to allocate a lot of budget to some of them because they’re your prime products or service.

Budget towards other products or services, which were whereby you’re not so much bothered about pushing them forward. It may warrant those products services to be put inside a campaign of its own. Likewise, if you’ve got campaigns whereby you’re using geography.

Using locations, that’s another sensible move to say. These products or services need to be in campaigns of its own, so then I can really control what location these products or services are marketed towards. Within going to campaign structure. To get into a campaign structure here, I’ve got a campaign loaded in front of me. What you really do is go into one of your campaigns, click on campaign, and again then click on settings here.

And the types of things that you want to look for is. Firstly, the locations here, are you targeting the right locations. These are locations that we’re targeting. But equally, you can have camp locations where you really want to exclude them.

Just one thing to look out for. Look at your location options. Yeah. Whether you want to target the recommended setting, which is present or interests, people in regularly in, or who shows an interest in your targeted locations.

I normally go for this option here, which is people in or regularly in your target location. So it’s give me a bit more granular control in terms of where. Where I’m looking for where, where people can actually find my ads, at your budget.

Make sure that your budget is as it should be, then you can go inside your advanced settings. Look at your language, setting your budget, what your budget is, and also, more importantly, your bidding. What our bidding strategy are using. In this case, we’re using a target CPA bidding strategy. Now, as long as you’ve got enough data, you want to check whether you know, is that really the right bidding strategy that you should use? Or should you be using a different type of bidding strategy.

And then you know, your ad rotation settings. We’ve got to optimize, prefer best ad performing ads. But you might even decide thatdepending on the bid strategy that you use. You might even decide that you’re going to choose the option of not to optimize or rotate indefinitely.

These are the sort of main types of things that you want to check at a sort of campaign level. But the other thing that you really want to check for is your network settings. Here to make sure that you find Google Search partners. You display network are enabled by default. Now, I normally leave the search partners ticked.

But I think it’s absolutely imperative that the include Google Display Network is turned off. You know that you really don’t want to be mixing your search data with your display data, because with Google Display. Find that you’re getting a lot of clicks, and very few conversions. And implement a Google Display campaign, which do work. But what I’d suggest is have it as a separate campaign.

So you’ve got full control over its settings at bids and how much you’re spending and so on. The next thing you want to check for are your ad groups. Make sure your ad groups are logically grouped up. You’ve got your campaigns and only campaigns, you’ve got several ad groups. Make sure your ad groups are logically so that they are tightly themed as much as possible. And where I recommend per ad group having the region of 10-20 keywords. All the keywords should be highly relevant to that ad group only.

Because if you do that, you can then make sure that your ad is highly relevant to the ad group, which is highly relevant to the campaign. So you’re carrying that theme across really. At the same time, it’s worthwhile checking any keywords within the ad group that are skewing the data. You could have one really good performing keyword which could make the whole ad group look good. Or you could have like several keywords which are really poorly performing. It is it best to keep them in that ad group or take other action.

So let’s go on to take a look at one of our campaigns or take a look at the keywords so that it can search keywords here. You’ll see all the keywords that are listed. And you’ll be able to see various metrics. Like how many conversions that they’ve delivered, what the cost per conversion is, how many phone calls you’ve had, and the overall cost, the impressions.

So what you want to see here is that what keywords are performing and which ones are not performing. If you get if you get keywords here, which are not performing, In this case, you’ve got great some great keywords here. This one’s for 88 conversions. It’s a great keyword.

But if you find that there are keywords within the ad group that are not performing, then it’s best to probably either take appropriate action. Like pause those keywords, or see why they’re not converting. Or even put them into separate ad groups. If ou want to keep your keywords, your ad, which is tightly themed with a high converting keywords. Try to get rid of keywords which are totally not converting.

At the same time when looking at keywords, you’re not you don’t want to forget the keywords. But look at your search terms as well, to see what sort of search terms these keywords are driving you. Then you can use those search terms to put within your negative keywords. So you can have keywords, if you find that your search terms are triggering.

If your keywords are trading the search terms, which are not performing or are not relevant to your business. Then you can add them in as a negative keyword. You also want to take a look at your quality score of keywords as well. You can have a column here called quality score. A quality score will give you a quality score per keyword. Those keywords that are lower into the quality score, you might like to take a look to see why they are low into the quality score. If you really want to keep them because obviously the lower your quality score, the more you pay per click for those for those particular keywords.

Take a look at your ads. It’s really important because your ads are the first thing that your potential customers are going to take a look at. In order to make their decision as to whether they want to click on your ad to visit your website or whether they want to click on one of your competitors ads.

So looking at, take a look at what ads you have, I always recommend have one responsive ad and to expand the text ads. Have a maximum of three ads per ad group. Then the types of things that you want to look at, obviously, you want to get your copy to make sure that all the fields from your headline to descriptions.

But you also want to look more importantly, which ads are converting which ads are not converting. Over here, you can see that this particular ad over here has delivered 43 conversions. Whereas this ad over here is driving no conversions at all. Even though it’s cost 38 pounds. One move that you could take is to pause this ad, which gives the performing ads more of a job or more of an opportunity to serve.

Therefore you’re likely to get better conversions. And remember, the better your ad copy, the better the click through rate you’re going to get. The click through rate is one of the core metrics that Google will use in order to determine your quality score. It is really important you have write really good ad copy.

You’ve got various extensions, such as you’ve got your site links, call extensions, location extensions. If you take a look at your site links, take a look at which of your site links are converting and which ones are not converting. Those that are converting, invest more into them and capitalize on them. And there are those that are not converting places such as switching them around. Put different site links in them to see if you can get other signings that are going to work better. Improve the ad copy that users see with the SEO site links.

Look at your device performance. It is really important that you take a look at your device performance at a campaign level, or even an ad group level to see how they’re performing. Then you can use bid adjustment in order to give more weight to the device that are performing and less weight to the ones that are not performing.

Finally, look at your landing pages. So it’s absolutely imperative that people look to a landing page, which is tightly themed with what they typed into the into the search engine in the first place. What you don’t want people to do is go onto your website, and they haven’t defined what product or service that they’re looking for because chances are they’ll just move away.

If they can’t find that information quickly. They will move away and you will lose the business. So whatever your keywords are, make keywords are tightly themed as your ad groups with the ads and the landing pages.

When you come on to your landing pages, make sure you’ve got a good clear, concise information clearly displayed. As well as really good call to action points so that the users know exactly what they can do if they’re interested in your products or services. If you got any comments about how you conduct your Google Ads audit, put your comments below, I’d love to hear from you.