One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a Google Ads advertiser is to set up your account and then expect to be able to walk away and forget all about it.
If you're guilty of having done that then I can guarantee that:
- you will be missing out on opportunities to generate more leads and sales
- you will be spending more money on Google Ads than you need to
The best way to improve results and reduce wasted spend is to carry out an audit of your Google Ads account.
There are two ways to audit a Google Ads account:
- Use an automated tool to do the work for you. This is the quickest and simplest solution but it is generally only going to pick up the most obvious problems.
- Carry out a manual audit where you check all the key aspects of the Google Ads account yourself, or get someone else to do it for you.
Google Ads Audit Tools
There are a number of online tools that will audit your Google Ads campaigns for you. However, the majority of them require you to pay something for this service.
A notable exception is Adzooma, which offers a completely free Google Ads audit (or, as they call it, a Google Ads performance report).
You can see how Adzooma works and what you get in your free performance report in this video that I've made:
Even if you are going to carry out a more in-depth manual audit of your Google Ads account, I recommend taking advantage of the free audit from Adzooma. It will do a good job of identifying any low hanging fruit and will highlight the things which are going to be costing you the most in terms of lost sales or wasted spend.
Click here to get your free audit report.
You can read about other automated auditing tools in this article about Google Ads tools.
Manually Auditing a Google Ads Account
For a thorough Google Ads audit, nothing beats rolling up your sleeves and delving into the account yourself.
There are four main areas where you should focus your attention:
Campaign Settings
Here you should be checking the key configuration options for each of your campaigns. Things like:
- Are you using separate campaigns for Search and Display?
- Do you have a campaign for brand name terms?
- Have you got a remarketing campaign?
- Are your location settings correct?
- Are your budgets big enough?
- Is conversion tracking set up properly?
Ad Groups
An ad group is a container for a number of keywords and one or more ads which will be shown if one of those keywords is matched to a user's search query.
You should avoid having too many keywords in each ad group as this can lead to a lack of relevancy between the keywords and the ads. And that can cause your quality scores to drop, which means you'll pay more for each click.
As well as checking you have enough ad groups and that there are not more than a handful of keywords in each one, you should make sure your default bids are high enough to give you top of page rankings.
Keywords
When it comes to keywords, there are quite a few things you should check as part of your Google Ads audit. These include:
- Are you using the correct keyword match types?
- Have you got enough negative keywords?
- Do all your keywords have good quality scores?
- Have poorly performing keywords been paused?
- Have you used the search terms report to find new negative keywords to add to your campaigns?
Ads
Finally, you should audit the actual adverts within your Google Ads account. Some of the things to check are:
- Are you split-testing your ad copy?
- Do all ads contain strong benefits and USPs?
- Do all the ads have good spelling and grammar?
- Have any ads been disapproved?
- Do your ads use Title Casing?
- Are the ads highly relevant to all the keywords in their ad group?
If you are planning to carry out an audit of your Google Ads account you can find a full list of all the points you need to check in my free 30 point Google Ads audit checklist. If you've not already seen it, please do download a copy today.
And if you have got any questions about how to audit a Google Ads account, please get in touch with me direct or leave a comment below.
