A PPC audit (also known as an SEM audit or Google Ads audit) is a thorough review of your PPC account. It highlights areas negatively affecting your PPC performance, including account structure and performance insights. Your audit should result in a clear action plan, prioritizing the most impactful changes for your account.
A PPC audit is the first step a PPC manager should take when working on a new Google Ads account. Audits lead to optimized campaigns that align with business goals. They also identify opportunities to boost results, including ROI.
PPC accounts should be audited at least once every 3-6 months, depending on their size. Regular audits are crucial to ensure nothing has slipped the manager’s attention.
This guide provides a comprehensive PPC audit template for analyzing your Google Ads account.
Manual audits can be time-consuming, but we’ve automated this PPC checklist. Try it here and get your free Google Ads audit report in minutes.
Want to learn how to run a step-by-step PPC audit? Let’s get started. A thorough audit should focus on two key areas: account structure and performance.
This step makes sure your account is set up correctly based on PPC best practices. It’s crucial for new and existing campaigns, as the PPC landscape changes quickly. Account structure checks include campaign organization and conversion tracking.
In this step, we’ll look for areas of wasted spend and opportunities to increase conversions or lower acquisition costs. This analysis should translate your findings into financial impact. For example, analyzing search terms reports to identify irrelevant keywords reduces budget leaks.
This checklist outlines the most important issues that can impact the health of your PPC account. Work through it now to ensure your account is set up well.
Conversion tracking is enabled. First things first: check that conversion tracking is enabled in your PPC account and that conversions are being counted correctly. Want to know more? Check out this article on the most frequent Google Ads conversion tracking mistakes.
Campaigns don’t run on Display and Search at the same time. The Search network consists of users searching for goods, services, and information. The Display network is made up of publisher sites that show ads. On these sites, users watch videos or read articles. As the user intent and the networks are so different from each other, it’s best not to combine the two in one campaign.
Display campaigns exclude sensitive content. This step is all about protecting your brand. Adjust your settings to make sure your ads aren’t displayed next to sensitive content.
Display campaigns exclude mobile app traffic. Mobile app traffic can be of very low quality, which wastes valuable budget. Review your display campaign settings and exclude traffic, as relevant.
Auto-apply settings are deactivated. Auto-apply lets Google to make changes to your account without your input. We would always recommend turning these settings off.
Automatic asset creation is deactivated. Google can automatically generate AI text assets for campaigns with this setting. As the performance of these assets varies widely, you may want to opt out once you have your own assets in place.
Google’s recommendations. While it’s best not to enable auto-apply, some Google recommendations may be useful. Check the Recommendations tab in Google Ads regularly and accept relevant changes.
No enabled broad match keyword settings. Broad match settings prevent the use of other match types in your campaigns. As using a range of match types gives you more control over your keyword targeting, you may want to turn this setting off.
Campaigns use at least three types of asset (formerly known as ad extensions). Assets have a positive impact on your ad rank. They’re also a great opportunity to tell potential customers more about your brand. Include sitelinks, callouts, and structured snippets in your campaigns to build interest.
Want to know more? Read this article about how to understand and analyze ad assets.
Campaigns use the minimum number for each type of asset. This is usually at least four callouts, four sitelinks, and two structured snippets. This setup allows you to run reliable A/B testing and collect data about your best-performing assets over time.
All assets are fully approved. Disapproved assets can’t run, while partially approved assets can run with restrictions.
Keywords in conflict with a negative keyword. If negative keywords and keywords overlap, your ad may not show, costing you valuable impressions.
Keyword match types are properly formatted. Incorrect match type symbols (e.g. no closing “ or ] symbol) mean incoming traffic won’t be filtered as you expect.
Duplicate keywords within a campaign. With duplicate keywords, you don’t have control over which keywords the clicks go to. This means your optimization efforts won’t be as efficient. (This also applies to similar broad-match keywords in the same ad group.)
Disapproved keywords. Check if all keywords are eligible to run.
Duplicate search terms. If a search term triggers keywords from different ad groups, this is an opportunity to improve your targeting.
Add high-conversion search terms as keywords. By allocating high-performing search terms to your ad groups as keywords, you’ll get better control over your traffic. This is because you can create more relevant ad copy and landing pages.
Keywords have good ad relevance. Google’s quality score rates the relevance of your ad copy to your keywords (as well as expected CTR and landing page experience). You can control ad relevance by updating your account structure and ad copy. As quality scores can change over time, it’s also a good idea to check high-volume keywords regularly to spot unexpected drops.
Ad groups with too many keywords. Too many keywords per ad group (e.g. above 50) make it harder to create relevant ads. We also offer a free Keyword Grouper tool to automatically create ad groups based on your chosen settings.
All ad groups have active keywords. When you’re constantly pausing, adding, and moving keywords around, mistakes can happen. No active keywords mean you can’t participate in the auction.
Negative keywords are correctly formatted. Mistakes in negative keyword match types mean you may not block unwanted search traffic.
Negative keywords are effectively organized. Shared negative lists help to avoid conflicts — they’re also easier to manage. This is why it’s always worth checking how many negatives are repeated at the ad group or campaign level.
Search campaigns use negative keywords. Negative keywords are one of the most effective ways to minimize irrelevant traffic to your website. This is why it’s always important to check negative keywords are in use.
Broken URLs. All landing pages are accessible, including keyword-level Final URL, Sitelinks, and DSA landing pages. Can you imagine a more frustrating way to waste PPC budget than for a customer to arrive at your 404 page?
Keywords using unsecure URLs. Not using https is a signal to many visitors that you don’t protect your customer data. In fact, some browsers and antivirus software may even block the page from opening.
Landing pages offer a good experience. Google’s quality score rates your landing page experience (as well as expected CTR and ad relevance). A better user experience can lead to higher conversions and lower CPCs, so it’s worth reviewing content relevance and technical factors like page speed and mobile-friendly design.
Ad groups with duplicate ads. All ads within each ad group should be unique. Duplicate ads mean fewer opportunities to test new copy and find what resonates most with your customers.
All ad groups have active ads. Ensure that you have active ads for every ad group to bring in traffic for your keywords. Adalysis also offers tools to create new ads in bulk.
Ad groups have two or three active ads. If you only have one ad, that means you can’t test ads against each other. However, too many ads mean it takes too long to reach statistical significance. Two to three ads creates a better balance.
Outdated ad formats. You’d be surprised how many accounts are still using Expanded Text Ads, even though this ad format can no longer be edited. It would be better to convert them to Responsive Search Ads and use the higher number of ad assets.
Responsive Search Ad assets with poor performance ratings. Google states it prioritizes ad variations with better performing assets, which can significantly impact your campaign by potentially leading to lower click-through rates (CTR), fewer conversions, and overall reduced ad effectiveness.
Disapproved ads. Make sure all active ads are eligible to run and fix any issues flagged by Google.
With a healthy account structure, we can now assess how many more conversions and revenue we can bring in. This Google Ads audit section is all about the money.
Time will tell if your PPC strategy is successful. No one can say for sure if it’s working after a few clicks or impressions. This is why it’s important to identify a threshold at which to make that call.
This threshold will vary from advertiser to advertiser. As an example, you may want to pause a keyword if it’s produced 100 clicks and zero conversions in the last 30 days — or not. Want to know more about statistical significance in PPC? We’ve got you covered.
Once you’ve defined your thresholds, go to the Google Ads interface. Drill into keywords, search terms, landing pages, and placement reports. This will help you find where you are potentially wasting your budget.
Once you have enough data to make a decision, you can clearly see the worst-performing segments. It may be tablet or mobile traffic, network settings, audiences, or others. Quick wins include reducing your bids to make sure the losing segment has less (or no) exposure. Disabling relevant traffic settings in Google Ads can also reduce your CPA.
When you’ve fixed the issues losing you money, you’re ready to scale. Before increasing your budget, you should work out how many more conversions you can expect. (If the search volume is limited, the budget may not be the issue.)
Look at the metric ‘Search lost impression share (budget)’. It tells you how many impressions you didn’t receive due to budget restrictions.
Now it’s math time. To translate the lost impression share to impressions, you’ll need to find the total available impressions volume. Divide your impressions by the total impressions, then calculate lost impressions due to budget. Look up your CTR and conversion rate in Google Ads. Now you can work out how many clicks and conversions you can expect if you increase your impression share.
Useful tip: follow the same logic for each campaign with limited budgets. You can then prioritize the campaigns that will yield the best results with more extra investments.
Put simply, ad rank is a set of values Google uses to determine if your ads are eligible to show. If eligible, it also determines where on the page your ads are shown. Your bids and quality score are part of ad rank, as well as structure elements like assets. In this section, we’re going to focus on bids.
You only want to increase bids if there’s a high chance of better results, right? Start by filtering for well-performing keywords with conversions and an acceptable CPA. Consider whether to increase impression share for these keywords by raising bids. (When your keywords are in the top position all of the time, you may end up raising your CPA without much to show for it. It doesn’t always make sense.) The metrics to look at are search impression share, search top impression share, and search absolute top impression share.
The next step is to define how much you should increase the bids by. Take into account metrics such as Google estimates for the first page and top page bids, and search lost impression share (rank).
Useful tip: you can follow a similar logic to reduce bids for your worst-performing keywords.
Remember, though, that your quality score also heavily affects ad rank. Raising bids can give you a quick win. In the long term, you should look for more cost-efficient ways of achieving the same results, and that’s where quality score analysis comes in.
Quality scores directly correlate with cost per click (CPC). Typically, the lower your quality score, the higher the price you will pay for a click.
Aim for a quality score of seven or above for your highest-spending keywords. This will ensure you avoid paying inflated CPCs due to low relevance.
There are three quality score subfactors: landing page experience, expected CTR, and ad relevance. To boost your scores, you’ll need to identify which factor is weakest and solve the issue. For example, if your biggest problem is ad relevance, you may want to reorganize your campaigns into more focused ad groups. If your expected CTR is low, you could run A/B tests for your ad copy. Want to learn more about managing your wuality scores? Download our free guide.
To complete your analysis manually, export your keyword data and the quality score components in an Excel file. This will help you to pinpoint the most problematic ad groups to focus your efforts on.
Once you’ve completed the PPC audit checklist, it’s just a question of compiling your findings to present to your client or management.
If you are looking for a template, have a look at our automated PPC audit report to inspire you. Link your Google Ads account and get a full report in minutes. You can then export it into PDF or share the link with your team members, managers, or clients.
By the way, you may also find our free Google Looker Studio templates useful. These free PPC reports are designed to save you time and make your life as a PPC manager easier. Grab your reports here.
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