The Definitive AdWords Audit Guide [with Interactive Checklist]

Ever get the feeling that your AdWords account should be performing better, but you don’t know how? You’re not alone: a lot of advertisers spend so much time tweaking the knobs and dials that they neglect to step back and look at the account as a whole. Their tunnel-vision prevents them from seeing mistakes as well as money-making opportunities.

I’m here to make sure that doesn’t happen to you. So pull up your calendar right now and schedule time every few months to do a PPC audit on your account. Make it easy: schedule it for when you get your car’s oil changed or when you change the air filters in your vents. Just like those are preventative measures to ensure better performance of your car or heating/cooling system, regular AdWords audits will ensure better account performance before it gets into trouble.

There are six basic components to an AdWords audit; and instead of listing them, we’ve decided to make you a handy checklist to make you think big picture PPC.

Note 1: If the checklist item doesn’t apply to you, check the box anyway.

Note 2: If the counter isn’t going up when you check all those boxes, give the page a refresh. It’s finicky.

1. Do You Audit Your Campaign Settings?

1. Do your campaigns have a logical, descriptive naming convention based on common themes?
2. Do you have a campaign dedicated to branded terms?
3. Do you have a campaign dedicated to remarketing?
4. Did you make sure all lists are collecting visitors?
5. Did you make sure you have a unique list dedicated to each major abandonment activity?

**Make sure you don’t have campaigns set to both search and display because the two networks require different bid prices and the user intent is different: visitors coming from the search network are actively looking for what you offer, whereas visitors in the display network are doing something else when they see your ad. Within the display network, check on the following:

6. Do you have any automatic placements that need to be changed to managed?
7. Do you see any poorly-performing placements that should be excluded?
8. Have you included various banner sizes and are you using both image as well as text ads?
9. Are your location targets correct, with no strange or contradictory overlaps?
10. Did you double check that your daily budget is appropriate given your CPA?
11. Have you set up ad extensions?
12. Did you set your ad rotation to rotate indefinitely? If you set it to optimize, Google automatically shows the ad that gets more clicks–although that might not be the ad that gets the most conversions or revenue. More clicks gets Google more revenue so naturally that’s what they want to optimize for. But you want to test to see which ad makes YOU more money, not which one makes Google more money.

2. Do You Audit Your Ad Groups?

1. If your campaigns are named appropriately based on common themes, are your ad groups named to reflect more targeted themes or subcategories?
2. Do you limit the keywords in each ad group to no more than 20 so you can keep them targeted to tightly-knit themes with matching ad copy?
3. Do you use negative keywords at the ad group level to avoid overlap and maintain consistency from keyword to ad to landing page? For example, if you have one ad group about gloves and another about scarves, make “gloves” a negative in the scarves ad group and vice versa

3. Do You Audit Your Ads?

1. You should always be running two different ads in each ad group and doing A/B testing to see which one performs better
2. Make sure your ads follow all of the advertising guidelines
3. Check for correct spelling and grammar
4. Look for any ads that have been disapproved and get them approved
5. Make sure your ads have a compelling message and a strong call to action
6. Check that ads are going to the best landing page and that the destination url is correct

4. Do You Audit Your Keywords?

1. Do you have the appropriate match types configured? If you have too many broad-match keywords, you can save money and get more targeted traffic by including more modified broad, phrase, and exact match keywords
2. Sort by impressions and sort by spend to see if you have any keywords that are costing you more money than they’re making
3. Do you see any keywords that need to be paused or bid down?
4. Do you look at the search terms report for any keywords that should be added as positives or negatives?
5. Has the quality score dropped on any keywords?

5. Do You Audit Your Landing Pages?

1. Make sure your landing pages match the keyword and ad
2. Do your landing pages look professional and follow best practices?
3. Do you have a systematic process for identifying and prioritizing conversion obstacles, then running A/B tests to fix them?
4. Have you created unique landing pages for different devices?

6. Do You Analyze Your Metrics?

The five steps above are all to prepare you for the final and most important step: analyzing the metrics so you can make data-driven decisions. Here are a few things to look for:

1. First and foremost, is your AdWords account is linked with Analytics, and do you have goals configured?
2. Look for trends. It’s a red flag to see the CPA creeping up or quality scores sliding down over time
3. Do you set your date range to compare apples to apples? Do this, especially if seasonality affects your business. For example, if Christmas is your big selling season, compare the data from the previous year’s Christmas season. Don’t compare Christmas to summer.
4. Do you look for gems and lemons?
5. Do you adjust your budget accordingly based on under-performing and highly-performing segments of geography, time of day, day of week, and device?

Make the time to check these six areas of your account a few times a year, and keep it running like a well-oiled machine. After all, you do that for your car, and it doesn’t have the revenue-generating potential that your AdWords account does.

— Theresa Baiocco