Whether you’re a Google Ads veteran or just getting started, it’s always good to periodically go through your accounts and double check your setup. This will help you error check your settings, look for optimisations and see where new features should be tested. 

Setting up a ppc campaign can be relatively simple, but adopting more of the advanced features and achieving successful results in an account can be challenging. Validating what really works takes lots of experimentation depending on the size and spend of the account. Running effective A/B tests takes large amounts of data (and therefore spend), so this can be a particular challenge for smaller accounts where accumulating data may take many months. 

With Google also regularly releasing new features, and “best practices”, you need to know what works. 

That’s why it’s important to have some basic “best practices” in place that you can adopt into your account to improve the performance of your account. 

Here’s the complete ppc audit checklist template for 2024

Tracking

Google Analytics Linking

Link Google Analytics to Google Ads. This will mean you can see the Google Analytics tracked data for your campaign performance and allow you to create bid strategies optimised towards these conversions. You will also be able to see Google Analytics engagement metrics (insert search engine journal why not the best approach)

Conversions will only be imported into Google Ads if they were the last click in the conversion path, so it isn’t advisable to use the Google Analytics tag for bidding on ad types other than Search, as the available data for an automated bid strategy to learn from would be quite limited. 

Where to go:

Conversions > Linked Accounts

Google Merchant Center Linking

It’s essential to link the Merchant Center to Google Ads if you’re running Google Shopping. This will allow you to see your product information, performance data and approval statuses of your Shopping campaigns within Google Ads.

Where to go:

Conversions > Linked Accounts

Tagging

• Which tracking tags are being used for bidding?

• Is the Google Ads tag being used for non-last click typical ad types?

• What attribution models are these tags using? (link default attribution models)

Settings

This is a simple one, but can easily trip up even experienced ppc professionals. With campaigns being built over many years, small settings can easily get missed. Here are some common ones to check

• Location - Are you targeting in, or regularly in, your targeted locations?

  • Are the desired target locations in use on each campaign across the account?

  • Target options: Presence or Interest, Presence, Search Interest - Stick to using Presence only, unless you want your campaign to show for users who are just showing interest in your target location and may be located outside of it. 

• Language - Are you running all languages, or English only? Running all languages is an easy way to tap into more inventory. Think about the number of bi-lingual households where users of the same device may be searching in multiple languages (reference) 

• Search partners - Are you running Search partner activity? If so, have you measured how well these partners perform? Segment your campaigns/ad groups by search partner to understand any differences in performance 

• Conversion Goals - Is each campaign using the appropriate conversion action for that specific campaign?

• Day parting - Once a necessary requirement with manual bidding, it’s now no longer necessary with automated bidding, as the bid strategy can make these changes for you (and likely be better at doing so). If you’re running automated bidding, test turning this off 

• Ad rotation - ensure this is set to optimise so that Google Ads can push more impressions to the best performing ads

Ad Types

The types of ads you’re using in your account will largely depend on the type of business you’re running

Search

Dynamic Search Ads

Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs), are a great way to access more search inventory, identify new keywords, and help a campaign to reach its goal target ROAS/CPA

There are many ways you can structure your DSA setup, and you can flex your account structure depending on how much you want to leave to Google’s automation, versus maintaining control yourself.

Here are some popular ways of integrating DSAs into your account:

All webpages:  Create a single DSA campaign targeting all pages on your website. This could be used as a “catch-all” campaign, to find new keywords not currently targeted, and customised by excluding areas of your site you don’t want to advertise on. 

Pros: 

• Incredibly quick and simple to set up

• Offers a “catch all” for new keywords and any new pages that are added to your website 

Cons: 

• You would be using the same description 1 and description 2 for all ads, meaning potentially lower CTR’s, as you couldn’t customise these depending on the website URL

Url level:  A popular approach is to create a DSA ad group for each url, and then include each as an ad group, so you effectively have url level ad groups

Pros: 

• The option to write specific ad copy for each url, potentially improving performance through higher CTR’s

• Search terms will be clearly broken out by the url that triggered them. If your website has specific categories and campaigns broken out by category, this could offer a simpler campaign structure than having DSA specific campaigns, and help you see performance at the campaign level for both DSA and non-DSA search 

Cons:

• Could be time consuming to set up for a large site

• If new urls are added to the site, these would need to be added (however a “catch-all” campaign could still target these). 

DSA specific campaigns:  Another approach could be to create specific DSA campaigns. 

Pros:

• Keeping your DSA campaigns specific would mean you can amend budgets between your generic and DSA search. Whilst this might be appropriate for your website, it can come with some downsides, especially when using Smart Bidding. 

Cons:

• By breaking out your campaigns, you lose the benefits of combining your generic and DSA ad groups - for which there are many. 

• If you’re using Smart Bidding, then the bid strategy can amend bids to aim to hit the overall target. By segmenting your campaigns you’re effectively limiting the amount of data that you’re feeding the bid strategy, and therefore potentially limiting your performance. 

• There should be no need to limit budgets towards DSA campaigns, as they can now offer (*In my experience) at least as good enough at hitting performance targets as standard search campaigns 

• This isn’t recommended as it makes comparing performance of like categories more challenging. It also means your search terms between like categories would be segmented across two (or more) campaigns, if you were to have a DSA and a generic campaign

Other:

Shopping

Keywords

Match Types

Is the account making full use of all match types? Have broad match versions of keywords been tested? If not, they could potentially provide additional volume

Relevance

Quality Scores

An account should have strong quality scores across the board in order to ensure that Average CPC’s are as cheap as they can be. For every point above 6, there is an x% increase in Average CPC. 

• It’s therefore really important to keep a close eye on your quality scores as high quality scores can be really damaging to your overall efficiency 

• (insert graphic on quality score vs. CPC)

• Aside from analysing the keywords in the account for their quality score, it may also be useful to set up a script to track your quality score over time. Link to script for tracking quality score  

• How to optimise your Quality Score and ensure low CPCs - Wordstream qs (link)

• Check out our article on how to optimise your quality score

Negative Keywords

Is there a clear split between brand and generic traffic, enforced by negative keywords? Is this enforced across Search and Shopping campaigns?

Negative Keyword Lists 

• Are negative keyword lists being used for common terms across the account? This is a much more efficient way of adding negatives, especially when creating new campaigns.

Ads

Responsive Search Ads

You need to equip your account with the best possible creative assets for Google’s automation to work best. So that means combining your best product features and benefits, call to actions, and reasons to buy from your brand vs. a competitor. 

With Expanded Text Ads now retired

• Are all Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) rated “Excellent”? RSA’s rated below Excellent show 

  • Optymzer study on RSAs (link)

  • Do RSA’s make full use of the 15 headlines and 4 descriptions 

  • How has pinning been used? 

• Is Dynamic Keyword Insertion being used? (link) This won’t be appropriate in all cases, but it’s a really simple way to help boost the CTR of your ads. It works by inserting the search term that a user has searched into one of the ad headlines, thereby potentially increasing the relevance of your ad and CTR

Ad performance

Cleaning up the account from poor performing ads will ensure that your ad spend is kept efficient, that quality scores can be high (through high CTR’s), and that the ad copy you’re showing prospective customers is relevant, engaging, and drives users to convert 

Here are some of the questions you should be asking:

• How are the current ads running in the account performing? Poor performing ads should be identified and paused (but only once you have statistically significant data)

• Are the ads optimised towards the key KPI for the account?

• Is the ad copy properly aligned to the brand/s in question?

• A simple way to identify poor performing ads is to use a script which can look over all of your ads and show you where there is significant data to pause an ad

Extensions

Ad extensions are an important feature to implement as they can help to improve the CTR of your ads. They work to increase CTR by increasing the clickable real estate of your ad

Applied at either the account or campaign level, they offer you the ability to increase the range of messages, and direct prospective customers to different areas of your site. 

Sitelinks

• Are sitelinks in use? Google states that sitelinks can increase the CTR of your ads by 9%. (ref) Sitelinks allow you to direct users to different areas of your site. If you’re in retail, this could be towards sale price items, or for lead gen, this could be to additional pages overcoming barriers to purchase.

Example

Callout Extensions

• Are Callout Extensions in use? Callout extensions should be used to state reasons to buy from your business and can help to overcome barriers to purchase before a prospective customer has clicked through

• Examples include:

  • Free delivery

  • Next Day Shipping

  • 24/7 Customer Support

Example

Structured Snippets

• Are Structured Snippets in use? These are very similar to Callout Extensions, though slightly different. They should be used to 

Example

Audience Lists 

• Audience lists are a great way in Google Ads to separate your targeting between users who have previously engaged with your website in some way, and those who haven’t.

• These can then be used to separate campaigns into “new” and “existing” - either website visitors who have visited certain pages on your site (cookie based, using a tracking tag), or via an offline upload via Customer Match 

• Each option has its positives and negatives, so it’s best to combine both if possible

  • With a tracking tag, your audience pool will likely be larger, and you can easily customise your audience based upon pages visited. However as it’s cookie based, if a cookie is no longer present, then a device will be re-classified as “new”

  • With an email address uploaded via Customer Match, you can guarantee that the email address is associated with a customer. However, this will only match users logged in via the Google platform, e.g. Gmail. This match rate is reported to be around 15%, so don’t expect all of your customers to be targeted/ excluded via this method

  • You’ll also need to regularly refresh the list to ensure it’s up to date, which can be done manually, or via the Google Ads API

Broad Match / Modern Search

Google are now pushing towards what they call “Modern Search”, which is an account structure that better takes advantage of broad match and the advantages that machine learning can confer. 

Now that Google is better able to understand the meaning and intent behind a term, so the argument goes, you no longer need to segment campaigns and ad groups so strictly. 

Google states that Smart Bidding optimises bids at the query level (irrespective of match type) to reach the ad group target. Therefore account structure can be consolidated into fewer ad groups, with more clicks going through each group. 

However, the bid strategy can only learn insofar as there is good data feeding into it. 

Account structure by AOV / Conversion Rate 

So for accounts with naturally high AOVs/low conversion rates, it may be wise to run ‘Primary’ conversions of Add to Cart and Proceed to Checkout. This will feed more data into the bid strategy especialy when conversion windows might be <7 days (an issue post iOs 14.5). Increasing the number of conversions at the ad group level will help the automated bidding to work

Which account structure is best for you?

As always, the important thing is to test varying account structures and see what works for your business. Even in 2023, the case for broad match isn’t clear cut and some accounts will benefit more than others. Depending on the industry, sufficiently broad terms may be being picked up already through phrase and exact match and close variants. 

If an account has a high volume of conversions at the ad group level (e.g. 50+ per month), then it may benefit less from consolidating ad groups as there’s less to be gained. Smart Bidding tends to work best with more data so consolidation may be more impactful for smaller accounts.

If a broader ad group structure is being used and if impressions are being maximised at the ad group level through looser groups of keywords, then you’ll need you’ll need a way of ensuring that ad copy is relevant to the users search term

Here’s how to implement it:

Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI)

• Dynamic keyword insertion enables you to dynamically insert the users search term in place of ad copy within an RSA. As in the below example, replacing “KeyWord” with the searched term and defaulting to “Orange Juice”

“Buy {KeyWord:Orange Juice}”

• Place URls at the keyword level

This is an often forgotten trick in that keyword level URLs override ad level URLs. This means you can have a single RSA that serves a broad ad set in terms of the keywords within it, but maintain landing page relevance (also important for quality scores)

For example you could have a broad ad set targeting filming equipment with keywords such as “camera matte plates” and “camera hand grips”. You could then have URLs at the keyword level for these individual keywords so maintain separate landing pages. Differences in copy would be attained through DKI 

• IF functions

 IF functions will also ensure that ad copy being served is relevant to the search term even if you’re using a large number of keywords in an ad group

By using DKI and IF functions you can be both broad in your structure and specific in your ad copy ← a killer combination for efficiency of building an account and having relevant, specific and punchy ad copy

Adopt these four tactics and you’ll have relevant ad copy and landing pages with a broad structure. The trade off here is in maintaining highly relevant ad copy in that if you go very broad in your ad group consolidation, that the only difference in ad copy with be the dynamic keyword insertion. 

This might be a good trade for ecommerce where you may have broad ranges of similar products that can get away with ad copy that isn’t so specific. Though it may not be appropriate for lead generation or where your product range is diverse and unique. 

Wrap Up

And there you have it, the ultimate ppc audit checklist for 2024. We hope you have found this useful and have taken away some tips to improve your account performance that you can implement today