How to conduct a professional Google Ads account audit

 Use this detailed study as a guide to assess your own Google Ads account and assist in increasing its profitability.

The purpose of an audit

Here are some justifications for conducting a Google Ads audit:

• Someone doesn't like how they performed. Their spending has increased while their conversions have fallen. Something is not right.
• The account owner wants to confirm that everything is in order and that they are adhering to best practices.
• Despite wanting more, the account owner is content with the services they are receiving.
• The agency is doing an audit as part of a proposal, therefore they need to know what the items are, how they sell them, what their sales funnel looks like, and whether any of it is being disregarded.

Make the proper inquiries

There are a few things you need to be aware of when doing an account audit. Some of the questions you should pose to the customer or yourself are addressed by Geddes.

• What are your Google Ads account's objectives?
• What do you want to gain from it?
• What sort of account would you consider successful?

Beginning the audit of your Google Ads account Overview of your accounts.

Account summary

Scope

• What is the account's size? Is it two or thirty campaigns?
• What does advertising cost?
• Are there only search campaigns or also display campaigns?

level of sophistication

The account manager is new, right? Will you have to instruct that individual?

If they are a professional, you can speak to them differently than if they are just starting out in Google Ads.

What are you omitting to see?

What is not being recorded or is being utilized exclusively in some campaigns? The following conversions are frequently missed by tracking:

• telephone calls
• Downloads.
• email addresses

Use Google's conversion action sets, combining various conversions, and applying various actions to various campaigns, advised Geddes. This allows you to utilize interaction goals at the top of the funnel and CPA goals at the bottom.

Account preferences

Look at the campaign settings after you're satisfied with the conversions or know what needs to be corrected. The setup procedure needs to be consistent, and that's what you want.

Several items to consider are:

• Are the same areas being targeted by each campaign?
• Do they make advertising according to the device?
• Are bid modifications being used?
• How do they make their bids?

Who oversees the account?

Is the account being actively managed by someone? If an account has had five modifications in the past 30 days and is sometimes spending millions of dollars per month, it is probably not being managed.

Other times, it might undergo a great deal of modifications, but since everything is handled through APIs, no one is omitting any data. And other times, you'll see a lot of changes and what is being worked on since someone is truly into the account and actively maintaining it.

You should be able to see from this how involved the management is and what tools are being used to effect change. Is it a human, an API, external scripts, or anything else?.

Trends 

Examine trends once you've finished the fundamental audit. Instead of focusing on month-to-month developments, consider the past year's data. Instead of comparing February to March, think at how March performed last year compared to this year.

As a reference, ask the client to name a few instances when they were pleased with the account. This allows you to compare the visual data between date ranges and determine whether the search traffic has considerably decreased.

Did anyone remove keywords when the volume of searches decreased? Does the impression share increase?

Problems with extensions and quality scores could both be present. A new landing page was introduced?

Knowing these elements will enable you to investigate what took place and identify any changes.

Taking a broad perspective

You don't have time to look at every little thing in a standard audit. Geddes advised looking into the areas that are problematic instead.

Image sharing

• How frequently do the advertisements appear or not?
• Do you have a budgetary loss in impression share?
• Consider ad ranks.
• If the client is still not satisfied despite a high impression share, is it possible to add fresh targeting using a different presentation or set of keywords?

If money is an issue:

• Can you get extra money by manipulating the budget?
• Would you gain more if you used the budget from another campaign?

Geddes noted that manipulating the budget is probably the simplest approach to obtain more conversions.

Examine the patterns and eras during which things changed:

• A problem with the ad rank? If so, you should investigate Quality Score.
• Are the ads relevant? Is the landing page the problem?
• Does the landing page correspond to the account's keywords?
• Did they introduce a new website or page that had an impact on the user experience?

Ask the customer what happened throughout the conversation.

Keywords

What search terms does the client use? What kind of targeting do they use?

Analyze their tendencies and match type usage.

• What is the conversion rate for each kind of match?
• If there is no exact match, do they have a lot of broad match keywords with conversions?
• Does somebody check the query report and update the account with such keywords?

Also common are duplicate search words. In order to enhance conversions, Geddes advises adding a negative term to the ad group that is performing poorly. Additional conversions can frequently be obtained from controlled duplicates.

In the event that you are banning your own keywords, keyword conflicts may also arise. You can be banning terms that don't even appear in Google because Google doesn't look at match types, campaign negative lists, or MCC negative lists. Geddes suggested using Microsoft's to identify Google conflicts.

Ad size groups

Geddes examines ad group sizes using a straightforward pivot table.

• How many search terms are there per ad group and how many keywords are there per ad group?
• How are the advertising groups managed?
• Does the size of the ad groups need to be reduced?

Prioritize the ad groups with the highest budgets. Do they come in big numbers? Geddes advises continuing to use granular ad group structure even with the new ad formats because RSAs do not cover everything.

Performance of RSA and pinning

You want to know the breakdown of the client's total assets after you have an understanding of how they are handling RSAs.

• How often do you use pinning overall?
• Are they a little bit pinning everything?
• No pins at all?
• What are your advertising strengths?
• Which asset performance breakdown is that?
• Are these RSAs distinctive, and how are they performing?
• What is the client's current state of mind?

You can discover how many different adverts an asset appears in by looking at the overall asset report:

• Is it deliberate?
• Did several people work on the pins' design?
• Are they reliable?
• Geddes informs us that pinning has little impact on CTR or conversion rate. Due to your ability to control the message, you'll probably notice a lesser ad strength.

However, you also need to know who you should be paying attention to after you have a general understanding of how ad groups are divided and how they are doing.

You can see who you're up against using the competition analysis feature of Auction insight.

• What is the overlap percentage?
• How are these search phrases being used by various people?
• Are we compatible?
• Do all the advertisements have the same design?
• What makes us distinctive in this crowd?
• Who are your main rivals?

You can then create your own sell-against strategy by seeing how their advertisements are selling against you.

Once you've done that, you can continue to test ads in the same manner as before. You might have some ad groups that contain a variety of ad kinds and other ad groups that only contain RSAs. As a result, you might test RSA ads according to themes, such as "RSA one is about discounts," "RSA two is about prices," etc.

Geddes points out that customers adore insights. Informing clients that they can improve clicks, conversions, or other metrics by performing X is an excellent approach to use multi-ad group testing.

Bid procedures

There are many more things that can be done besides what Geddes mentioned, but you only have so much time to finish the audit. The main techniques to consider are:

• how they are placing their bids.
• How are bid modifiers being used?
• Though common, target CPA does not use device modifiers to adjust bid, so it might not be the best choice.

Audiences

What strategies is the account using to use audiences? According to Geddes, audiences can be employed with a variety of automated bidding techniques and provide a wealth of information and audience bid modifications.

Google does not modify the bidding based on the audience. They explain, "You want to show your advertising more to this audience group, or less to this audience group," using the audience modifiers. Use your bid modifier accordingly to serve ads.

What happens if someone has no audiences, no search audiences, or perhaps some display audiences for remarketing? In accounts, that is frequently a spot for improvement. Learn more about audiences and how to create bespoke audiences.

making the audit available to the clients

The length of some audits might range from 10 to 100 pages.

But it's crucial to keep in mind that not every client that reads the audit will be familiar with PPC on the same level. They merely want guidance on what to do. So, pay attention to the key points and suggestions.