6 Step Guide to a Google Ads Audit

Many businesses are running Google Ad campaigns, as Google is currently the world’s biggest search platform. Although running an ad campaign on Google ads doesn’t mean it will be successful and bring in great profits for the business.

That is why you need to evaluate the effectiveness of your Google Ads account regularly. And a Google Ads audit that can be done with tools like Clever Ads can help you access the information about the current effectiveness of your ad campaigns. 

If you have been running a few ad campaigns on Google for quite a while now, it may be the perfect time to evaluate them. And to help you better understand what a Google Ads audit is and how it is done, we’ll share the 6 step guide for performing it.

Step #1: Understand Your Goals

The first step of an audit is to review the current situation of your Google Ads account and your goals. This will help specify what the main focus of your ad campaigns is.

The goal for each business is individual. First of all, to clarify what is yours, think about the conversion goals you and your business are striving for? Then, identify what are the conversion goals for the Google Ads platform; what is it that you want to achieve with this platform? And lastly, evaluate if your goals and target audience haven’t changed over time.

Step #2: Build a Structure for Google Ads Account

Having a structure for your Google Ads account will help manage the advertising campaigns you already have running by accessing needed data more easily.

To start building a structure on this platform, you should organize product lines, logical business objectives, service lines, and subject matter. Finding the best way for business to structure their Google Ads account is difficult and takes time, but the mentioned factors are worth considering to find the most optimal structure for you.

Step #3: Review Account Settings

Account and campaign settings are pretty easy to view. Editing is important for a successful ad campaign because your goals, target audience, or the situation in the market might change over time.

When you do review and edit your account settings, there are a few things to pay attention to. First, check your geographical targeting. Is it accurate, or maybe it needs to be edited? Maybe you have scaled your business during the years? And are the advanced location settings activated? Then, also see if device targeting is on and if you are taking advantage of including dynamic search ads into your ad campaigns?

Step #4: Review Your Ad Groups

By reviewing your ad groups, remember that ad groups are not the same thing as keyword groups. And to check them, take a look if all of your ad groups have ten keywords or fewer. It’s important because the more precise your ad groups are, the more likely they are to convert.

Also, confirm that your ad groups do not compete against each other because if they do, you are just dividing the clicks of your target audience into two or more ads. To get the most advantage of ad groups, make sure they complement one another.

Step #5: Look at Your Keywords

Auditing the keywords in your ad campaigns will help you identify trends, but it’s very important that you stop yourself from making improvements on your keywords before the entire audit of your Google Ads is over. If you start editing now, you may do more harm to ad groups and ads than improvement.

When looking into your keywords, do it campaign after campaign so that you stay focused on different goals that these campaigns have. Notice if negative keywords are used. If they aren’t, you’ll be wasting clicks and money on generic keywords. 

Then, check if you have included keywords that have low quality-score and if so, you should consider removing them at the end of the audit. Also, see if all the keywords that have a high cost-per-click are set to the optimal level.

Step #6: Review Ads

To review and test your ads efficiently, perform rotation, and make sure that each ad has two versions of it so you can start A/B testing and pick the better performing version for your advertising campaign.

When you review or create ads for A/B testing, focus on creating two versions of an ad, ensure that you use dynamic keywords, call to action phrases, and remove the ads that have low-quality scores.