To truly unlock the potential of your Google Ads campaigns, regular audits are essential. Without them, inefficiencies can slip through, leading to wasted ad spend and missed opportunities. Whether you’re managing your ads manually or using automated tools like Lebesgue, an audit is key. It helps optimize performance and maximize ROI. In this blog, we’ll dive into how to conduct a comprehensive Google Ads audit, uncover hidden opportunities, and fine-tune your campaigns for better results!
What is Google Ads Audit and how to do it?
A Google Ads audit is an essential process that helps you unlock the full potential of your ad campaigns. It’s more than just reviewing basic metrics—it’s about diving deep into your account to uncover inefficiencies, optimize your strategy, and ultimately drive better results.
By evaluating everything from ad copy to targeting and budget allocation, you can identify what’s working, what’s not, and where there are hidden opportunities to boost performance.
Automating your Google Ads audit brings significant advantages. Tools like Lebesgue’s automatic audits analyze multiple aspects of your campaigns at once, quickly identifying areas for improvement without missing critical details.
This saves time and allows for faster adjustments, while relying on data-driven insights to minimize human error. Automated audits ensure your campaigns are consistently optimized, making the most out of your ad spend.
However, if you prefer a more hands-on approach, don’t worry—we’ll walk you through the key elements you should check during a Google Ads audit.
Biding strategy
Your bidding strategy is the engine that drives your Google Ads campaigns, determining how much you’re willing to pay for clicks, conversions, or impressions. If not optimized, you risk overspending or underperforming.
A well-adjusted bidding strategy helps maximize your ad spend, ensuring you’re targeting the right audience while controlling costs. Fixing it is crucial for improving campaign performance, driving better results, and maximizing your return on investment (ROI). By fine-tuning your approach, you make every dollar work smarter, not harder!
Multiple events track conversions
When multiple conversion events are tracked in Google Ads, it can lead to overreporting, where one action, such as a purchase, is counted multiple times. This distorts the performance data, causing the algorithm to believe that your campaign is more successful than it really is, which can lead to overbidding.
Focus on tracking the most important conversion actions to eliminate redundancy and ensure accurate reporting. By setting up proper conversion value tracking, you’ll get clear and reliable insights, allowing for better optimization of your campaigns and more effective bidding strategies.
Shopping or Performance Max Campaign
Shopping and Performance Max campaigns offer high efficiency and simplicity, making them game-changers for e-commerce businesses.
Shopping campaigns reach customers directly with product ads across Google, driving an average of 30% higher conversion rates. Performance Max campaigns take it a step further by leveraging machine learning to optimize ads across various Google channels, including YouTube and Display.
With Performance Max, businesses have seen up to 20% more conversions at a similar cost per conversion.
To get the best results from Shopping and Performance Max campaigns, make sure your product feeds are up to date and accurate. Set up proper audience signals to help guide the campaign’s targeting, and ensure you’re tracking conversions correctly.
Using market intelligence tools allows you to stay informed about industry trends and compare your campaign’s performance to benchmarks. This way, you can continuously adjust your strategy to ensure you’re maximizing your ROI.
Keyword efficiency
Keyword efficiency is crucial for ensuring your Google Ads campaigns deliver the best return on your investment. If certain keywords are causing a customer acquisition cost (CAC) that is significantly higher than your average order value (AOV)—for example, four times higher—this is a sign that those keywords are inefficient and draining your budget.
Consider pausing underperforming keywords or adding them as negative keywords to prevent them from triggering your ads. This allows you to focus your budget on more profitable, high-converting keywords. By doing this, you can improve your overall Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).
It’s also important to regularly review your keyword performance and adjust your strategy. This ongoing optimization helps ensure you’re investing in keywords that deliver value and contribute to the growth of your business.
Using negative keywords
As we mentioned above, negative keywords help refine your Google Ads targeting by preventing irrelevant searches from triggering your ads. This is especially important because irrelevant clicks waste your ad budget and reduce the effectiveness of your campaigns. For example, if someone searches for “cheap furniture” but you’re selling high-end, luxury pieces, your ads shouldn’t appear.
By adding specific negative keywords, you ensure your ads show only to people with genuine intent, improving the relevance of your traffic and increasing your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). Regularly updating your negative keyword list helps maintain this focus.
Retargeting audience list
Retargeting audience lists help show ads to people who have previously interacted with your brand. However, if you don’t update these lists, you could end up spending your budget on customers who have already purchased.
Research shows that 30-50% of sales come from retargeting, but this effectiveness drops when the list isn’t refreshed.
By regularly updating your retargeting lists to target new potential customers, you can avoid overspending and improve your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), ensuring your campaigns remain cost-effective.
Display campaigns efficiency
Display campaigns are visual ads that appear across the Google Display Network, usually in the form of banners, images, or videos. While they are effective for brand awareness, they typically have a lower conversion rate for e-commerce businesses.
Studies show that Display campaigns can have conversion rates as low as 0.5-1%, compared to higher-performing campaign types like search ads, which can have conversion rates of up to 3-5%.
To improve your Display campaign results, use market intelligence tools to analyze industry benchmarks and identify the most effective campaign types for your business.
This allows you to make informed decisions and allocate your budget towards the campaigns that drive better results, improving your overall Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and campaign efficiency.
Number of ad accounts
Having multiple active ad accounts can lead to bidding against your own ads, which results in inefficiencies.
This competition can drive up your Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM) by as much as 12%.
To resolve the issue of multiple active ad accounts bidding against each other, the first step is to consolidate your accounts. Ensure you have one primary account for each business or campaign to avoid internal competition.
Review all active accounts, and merge or deactivate any that aren’t necessary. This way, you can focus your budget and bids on a single account, preventing inflated CPM. Regularly audit your accounts to keep track of ad performance and ensure you’re not spreading your budget too thin across multiple accounts.
Conversion value tracking
Conversion value tracking is crucial for accurately measuring the impact of your advertising efforts. Without proper tracking, you risk spending money on campaigns without understanding their true value. For example, one campaign could be generating 5x more revenue than another, and without proper tracking, you wouldn’t realize it.
By setting up conversion tracking, you gain valuable insights into which campaigns deliver the best results.
This enables you to make data-driven decisions and focus your budget on the highest-performing campaigns, ultimately boosting your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and overall profitability.
Summing up
Regular Google Ads audits are essential for maximizing the potential of your campaigns and improving ROI. By analyzing key elements such as bidding strategy, conversion tracking, and campaign performance, you can uncover inefficiencies and make informed adjustments.
From fine-tuning keywords to optimizing retargeting and display campaigns, regular audits help you optimize your ad spend. Whether done manually or with automated tools like Lebesgue, audits ensure your campaigns are always performing at their best, helping you reach your business goals more efficiently.
