There are several ways to check your Google Ads account’s health—either manually or automated. You can, for instance, perform a “view-level check” to spot quick issues that are hindering your Ads’ performance. Second option, you can hire a Google Ads expert. Or, if you prefer, you can use one of those easy-to-get checklists available on Google.
On the surface, there is a good reason you can believe that those three ways can be effective. They are easy to perform and appear to be reliable. But too soon, you’ll realize that they all fail to bring you the insights you genuinely need to get a complete diagnosis of your Google Ads account and sketch improvement techniques.
More so, they come with several downsides:
- Costly: Most Google Ads experts will charge you a huge amount of money only to perform a surface-level audit.
- Time-consuming: You’ll spend a lot of time filling in the checklists only to find out that they don’t cover all the health issues of your ads account.
- Scalability issues: You spend a lot on your ads, but you struggle to scale because your audit failed to reveal all the weak sides of your ad account.
This is why you should ditch these outdated methods and instead use a free PPC audit tool or use a workflow (one that is used and trusted by thousands of happy PPC marketers) that lets you have a clear view of your ads account’s health.
This article will focus on the latter and will provide you with the six elements you need to check to get a comprehensive overview of your Google ads account’s health.
Account and campaign settings
As you begin, it’s all about making sure that your campaign(s) are off to a good start and that they are set up properly.
You need to check if your conversion tracking is enabled. And if it is, are your display and search campaigns separated?
Another important element to check is whether sensitive content is excluded in display campaigns as this helps you protect your brand’s reputation.
Ad extensions
Extensions significantly impact your Ad Rank, so it is important to double-check them to ensure your ads are performing well. As such, you should ensure that at least 3 types of ad extensions are used in each campaign.
The three most important extensions are: Sitelinks, Callouts and Structured Snippets.
Keywords
Keywords are one of the factors that guarantee the success of your paid campaigns. So, to make the most of your keyword settings, you need to make sure that there are no conflicting negative keywords and that keyword match types are properly formatted. Another important consideration is to check that all keywords are eligible to run and that duplicate keywords in different ad groups are not competing against each other.
Landing pages
Have you ever clicked on a link—supposed to lead to a relatively insightful page—only to find out that it leads to a 404 page or a page that is inaccessible for security reasons?
Technical errors happen all the time, so make sure that all your landing pages are accessible (including keyword-level Final URL and Sitelinks). Moreover, keep every URL secure by using HTTPS as it gives your brand more credibility.
Ads
At this stage, your settings are OK, but you need to make sure that an incorrect ad group organization is not affecting your campaign performance.
The first step is to ensure that all ad groups have active ads and that the ads within each ad group are unique. This will allow you to AB test multiple messages at a time and find out what works best with your audience.
For accurate AB testing, each group should have at least 2 ads.
Ad performance and insights
Your audit needs to go beyond just checking the structure of your ad accounts. Experts recommend inspecting your ad performance to see if it is worthwhile from a scalability and budget standpoint.
Here you should seek answers to the following questions:
- How much money could have been saved?
- What’s the best way to reduce the CPA?
- How much traffic is lost due to budget constraints?
- Are your bids impeding conversions?
- How can you improve your Quality Score?
Bravo, you just made it to the end of this article. What is the next step?
- Combine all the items discussed above to create a thorough checklist that will help you assess the health of your Google ads accounts.
- And if this seems too complicated, use the free PPC audit tool to save time, energy, and money.
