The Most Comprehensive Paid Search Audit Checklist You'll Ever Need

Inspired by the Checklist Manifesto

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Paid search audits are essential to the digital marketing process. The world of digital marketing is constantly in flux, so it's crucial to conduct an audit regularly to ensure the best optimization strategies and the best possible return on investment are in place.

Paid search advertising is more complex than many marketers would like to admit. Google Ads constantly posts new features, releases, policies, interface updates, discontinued features, and announcements. On top of that, many small changes don't warrant a separate announcement, and that’s much change. This is why keeping up with Google Ads, Bing Ads, and other online ad networks is a full-time job.

An audit provides you with a 100-foot view of what you're doing in your account. I like to think about it like Atul Gawande addresses checklists in his book The Checklist Manifesto. Millions rush to airports worldwide every day to entrust their lives to the hands of competent airlines. Surgeons prepare for surgeries every day. Both professions depend on checklists no matter how experienced, skilled, or talented they are in their areas of expertise.

Paid search is not a life-or-death matter. However, unquestionable professionalism should be the standard for any profession.

Paid Search audits are essential because they help advertisers uncover inefficiencies with their paid search or PPC programs. This includes problems they may be unaware of, such as wasting ad spend and lowering their ROI.

Here are a few scenarios where a paid search audit can close gaps.

• Your ads are doing great, but now you're not getting the same results as you once did a week, month, or year ago. What changed? What do you need to do differently?
• Your ads deliver excellent results, but you wonder if you could do even better. What opportunities are you missing?
• You’re just starting with PPC and struggling to get good results. What are you doing wrong?
• Your ads are driving traffic, but your costs spiral out of control.

Below are key components of the downloadable Excel file, a paid search audit checklist we have developed based on over a decade of managing PPC accounts. You can use this as a paid search audit template for all future account audits.

Conversion Tracking

Conversion Tracking is an essential component of ALL digital marketing campaigns. Without it, you have no way to measure progress towards your goals and objectives and analyze the performance effectiveness, efficiencies, and value of referring websites, channels, campaigns, ads, keywords, audiences, and other components of your digital marketing efforts that directly impact your business's success.

Conversions should align with the digital property’s goals and overall business KPIs. Most websites and apps fall into four categories: lead generation, eCommerce, brand awareness, and SaaS websites. Google Ads aligns with these categories and broadly breaks down its conversions into leads and sales since paid search leans heavily toward direct response initiatives.

Account Performance

Overall account performance is based on how effective your account is at meeting your goals and how efficiently it is at meeting those goals. Without goals and objectives, performance is based on generic industry performance. Within the audit, we look at high-level performance indicators such as conversions, cost per conversion, return on ad spend, click-through rates, cost per click, highest converting campaigns, ads, keywords, and other components.

Account Structure

Google Ads is organized into a hierarchy of accounts, campaigns, and ad groups.

• Your unique email address, password, and billing information lie at the account level.
• The campaign level includes your budget, targeting, and other critical settings.
• Ads and keywords are housed within your ad groups.

Campaigns
Each campaign should be based on a broad theme.

Ad Groups
More granular themes should categorize your ad groups. Each ad group should contain a keyword set that is as relevant as possible to that group. Organizing your keywords this way will also help improve their Quality Score.

You’ll want your ad copy to be as closely related to your keywords as possible to generate high click-through rates and improve the ad relevance of your creative. When keywords are in tight clusters, your ad copy will reflect a highly relevant message to your audience and enhance the performance of your campaigns.

Ads
At the ad level, it’s best practice to have at least 3–5 ads per ad group. You want to have enough ads to test different variations of your copy to see what resonates best with your target audience. Every ad consists of several components. The best components of ads to test are either the Headline or the Description.

Every ad component should be the same when running a test except the one you are testing. This ensures that when generating test results, you’ll know exactly which component of your ad is responsible for a winning ad. A new variation can then be drafted and implemented into the rotation.

Keywords
Paid search campaigns connect ads to users’ search queries. Search queries are the exact words typed into the search engine, whereas keywords are what marketers use to target consumers based on what they’re searching for. When setting up a paid search campaign, you can decide how closely you want to match search queries to your keywords.

Paid Search Ads

Effective ads and ad formats (ad extensions) that correlate with landing pages and keywords increase quality scores, CTRs, and ad rank, decreasing the amount needed to outbid competitors and decreasing overall cost per conversion.

Responsive Ads
Google Ads Responsive search ads adapt to show more relevant messages to your customers by mixing and matching uploaded ad headlines and descriptions.

The more headlines and descriptions you enter, the more Google Ads can test and serve ad variations that match users’ search terms, improving your ad performance. You can create a maximum of 15 headlines and 4 descriptions.

Dynamic Ads
Dynamic Ads dynamically generate headlines and landing pages using content from your website. The advertiser gives the ads their descriptions. Dynamic Ads help fill in gaps between search queries that are being searched and keywords within your account.

You can’t know every available, relevant search for your products and services as an advertiser. 15% of searches on Google have never been used before. Therefore, Google Ads algorithms use dynamic ads to capture those relevant searches that do not correspond to keywords active within your account.

Ad Extensions
Ad Extensions are a vital factor in Google’s algorithms, used to determine whether your ads are displayed and how those ads rank relative to competitor ads. They are one of the main components of Google Ad Rank.

Ad extensions are additions to text ads that include additional information about your products and services, such as location details, links to pages on your website, and your phone number. Ad extensions increase CTRs as they take up more “real estate” on the search results page. The most popular ad extensions are site link, callout, call, location, and structured snippet extensions.

Paid Search Keywords

Paid search campaigns are all about connecting listings to users’ search queries. Search queries are the words, questions, or phrases used to conduct searches in search engines, whereas marketers use keywords to target consumers based on what they’re searching for. When setting up a paid search campaign, you can decide how closely you want to match search queries to your keywords. Usually, this is accomplished by conducting thorough keyword research.

Paid Search Bids and CPCs

Your bid is the maximum amount you will pay for your ad to show. This is also known as your Max CPC Bid. When you set your bid, you're telling Google Ads the maximum amount you’ll pay for a click on your ad. You often pay less and can change your bid at any time.

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Quality Score

Quality Score is a diagnostic tool that identifies the relevancy of your ad with the keywords you are targeting. The higher the score, the more valuable your ad or landing page is to those being served your ads. Quality Score significantly affects the position ads appear in the search results and the amount you pay per click. By improving your keyword’s Quality Score, you will improve your cost-per-click (CPC) and may decrease the average position, thereby making your campaigns more efficient. Three factors determine your score.

• Expected click-through rate (CTR): The Expected click-through rate reflects the likelihood that a user will click on your ad.
• Ad relevance to the query: Your ad copy should directly correlate to the user’s search query.
• Landing page experience: You should provide a remarkable landing page experience by meeting users’ expectations once they click on your ads.

Search Terms

Search queries are the words, questions, or phrases users use to conduct searches, whereas marketers use keywords to target specific search queries. When setting up a campaign using keyword match types, you can decide how closely you want to match search queries to your keywords.

Match Types

Advertisers value what keywords searchers are using and how their queries are structured. Selecting relevant keywords will help you match your products and services with relevant customers. Consider keywords the backbone of a campaign. The three match types are Broad, Phrase, and Exact.

• Broad: Broad match is the default keyword match type that reaches the widest possible audience. When using broad match, your ad can appear whenever a user’s search query includes any word in your keyword phrase, in any order, and synonyms of your keyword.
• Phrase: Phrase match keywords serve ads when the user’s search queries to match your keyword exactly as you entered it. However, there may be other words before or after your keyword phrase.
• Exact: Exact match is the most restrictive keyword of the match types. Exact match keywords match the user’s search query exactly, and sometimes a very restrictive set of plurals, synonyms, or other derivatives of your keyword.

Low Search Volume

Low-search-volume keywords are rarely searched for; therefore, your ads are unlikely to appear for those keywords. It would help if you paused low-search-volume keywords within your ad groups, as they are unlikely to result in clicks, conversions, or transactions.

Pausing these keywords is not necessary. However, it can improve your experience navigating and managing your Google Ads account.

Number of Keywords

It is best practice to have at least 10 to 20 keywords per ad group, with a maximum of 30. SKAG (single keyword ad groups) strategies may apply to some terms. SKAGs can be extremely helpful when keywords are in hyper-competitive ad auctions, or their average cost-per-click is extraneously high. In these circumstances, Quality Score can pay huge dividends to the amount you pay per click and per acquisition.

Impression Share and Budget

How much you can spend on Google’s (or Bing’s) search engine is directly related to your impression share. Your impression share metric is the number of impressions your ads have received on Google’s Search Network divided by the estimated number of impressions your ads were eligible to receive.

Eligible impressions are estimated using targeting settings, approval statuses, quality, and other factors. Impression share metrics are available for campaigns, ad groups, product groups, and keywords. Impression share is an excellent way to understand whether your ads might reach more people if you increase your bids or budget.

Additional Information on Impression Share

• Search lost impression share rank is the number of times your ad didn’t show on the Search Network due to poor Ad Rank.
• Search lost impression share budget: estimates how often your ad didn’t show on the Search Network due to low budget.

Networks

Google Search Network
The Google Search Network consists of the Google search engine and search-related websites and apps. When you serve ads on the Google Search Network, your ads show near search results with terms related to your keywords. These placements include but aren't limited to Google search results and sites like Maps, Shopping, and Google Images.

Google Search Partners
Google’s Search Partners Network expands the reach of Google Search ads by serving ads on hundreds of non-Google websites, Google Video, and other sites. Your ads will usually appear on smaller search engines, website-specific search engine results pages, directory pages, and other non-Google pages related to a person's search queries.

When you set up a campaign, Google serves ads on its search partner network by default. In many scenarios, ads served on the network do not perform as well as those on Google's Search Network.

Google Display Network
Google's Display Network consists of over 2 million websites worldwide and reaches over 90 percent of internet users.

Display ads are great for top-funnel objectives such as prospecting, brand awareness, and remarketing, bypassing the highly competitive search market. You will reach more people at lower prices when using display ads on the Google Display Network.

Google Ads Recommendations

Google Ads recommends these changes based on your optimization score. The optimization score on your Google Ads Recommendations page estimates how well your Search campaigns are set to perform. The score runs from 0% to 100%. The higher your score, the more your account reaches its full potential.

Google Recommendations analyzes your account’s performance history, campaign settings, and trends across Google to automatically generate recommendations that could improve campaign performance. The optimization score accompanying these recommendations measures how well your Search campaigns are set to perform. The score ranges from 0% to 100%. The higher your score, the more your account reaches its full potential.

Mobile-Friendliness

Google indexes websites “mobile first” when evaluating search engine ranking and landing page experiences. Your website must work well on mobile, so it’s imperative that you invest now to ensure that it is mobile-friendly. Below are a few reasons why adopting a “mobile-first” development strategy is crucial to your digital marketing success.

• Mobile-friendly sites rank higher within search engine results pages.
• Mobile searches make up more than half of searches on Google.com.
• Visitors to your website are five times more likely to leave if your site isn’t mobile-friendly.
• 91% of users reported looking up information on their smartphones when they want to know about, find, do, or buy something.
• 82% of smartphone users surveyed consult their phones while in a store, deciding which product to buy.

Audience Segments

Google offers a slew of audience segments that can be across both its search and display networks.

Google's Audience Segments

Affinity audiences
Google created Affinity audiences to help you reach people based on users’ interests and “affinities” as they browse the web. These audiences are helpful if you’re looking to raise brand awareness and drive consideration among affinity groups that have a strong interest in your products and services.

Detailed Demographics
Detailed Demographics expand upon Google’s Ad’s demographic targeting of age, gender, and household income, allowing you to target people based on their education, marital and parental status, and home ownership.

Life Events
Targeting people by life events allows you to reach users during important life decisions and milestones. Some of these targeting options include but are not limited to, retirement, moving, graduation, and business creation. Life events audiences are not available for video campaigns.

In-Market
In-market segments are segments created by Google based on signals of purchase intent. Using in-market segments is a powerful way to drive consideration among people actively researching the products or services you offer and those Google has inferred are in-market to buy them, including those thinking of buying from other places. Some in-market segments include men's apparel, childcare & education, and luxury vehicles.

Custom Segments (Formerly custom affinity & intent audiences)
Custom segments are audiences that allow marketers to target people online using relevant keywords, URLs, and apps used with Display, Discovery, Gmail, and Video campaigns. Creating custom segment audiences is the lowest-funnel marketing tactic that Google offers outside of paid search. While custom segments are available for display and video campaigns, they are not available for use in search campaigns.

Your Data Segments

Remarketing
Remarketing is a great tool for connecting with people who previously interacted with your website or app. It allows you to serve ads to previous site visitors as they browse online, increasing brand awareness and reminding those audiences to make a purchase.

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads
Google Ad's Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) feature allows you to bid higher for users who conduct further searches after visiting your website or mobile app.

Customer Match
Google Ad's Customer Match feature allows you to upload customer data into Google Ads and reach those customers and new audience segments across Google's networks. With Customer Match, you can find your loyal customers, exclude your ads from them, and expand your reach to a new audience that shares characteristics similar to your customers.

Similar Audiences
Similar Audiences helps you find new customers with behaviors and characteristics similar to your remarketing audience segments. Similar Audiences finds people similar to those on an original remarketing “seed” list. The people are similar in profile based on the seed list members' recent browsing interests, search terms, and videos watched on YouTube.

Paid Search Landing Page

A solid landing page follows the below emotional states, moving the user closer to taking action.

• Grabs Attention: You capture your visitor's attention with a highly relevant and “tasty" headline.
• Garner's Interest: Through the use of the video, you gain the interest of your visitor.
• Peek Desire: Desire is created through features and benefits appealing to your visitor's needs.
• Inspires Action: A strong call-to-action completes the story when your visitor is convinced your solution meets their needs. It uses contrast and color and defines what you'll get when you click the button. There is a little extra nudge in the copy beside the button.

Headline

The most prominent feature of a landing page is its headline, which is the first thing that people see. Your headline must describe what visitors will get from your company and reinforce why they're there. Ideally, your headline is short, punchy, and clear about your offering or the benefit. If you can, try to use PowerWords, numbers, or positive and negative sentiment.

Supporting Headline or Sub-Headline

Your headline can only communicate so much if it’s digestible and compelling. The easiest way to keep your headline short and sweet is to add a sub-headline. The sub-headline or supporting headline supports the headline. It adds more explanation to the headline and brings people one step closer to converting.

Offer

Your offer is something of value that captures the visitor’s attention. Your offer is why the person visited your landing page. If you have the right offer for the right audience, it’s a no-brainer for them to convert. Usually, but not always, the offer is the benefit.

Features and Benefit

Your audience isn't looking for your product or service; they're looking for the best solution to their problem. If that solution lies within your product, you win. You can differentiate yourself by promising a benefit that aligns with your audience's solution instead of highlighting features. Your headline can highlight a single prevailing benefit, whereas multiple benefits can be presented in a bulleted list.

Sometimes, features are necessary to present, especially with products. When introducing your features, it's best to frame them to accentuate the benefit(s) they deliver. It's good to remember that features describe what your product or service does, while benefits describe the value they provide. Features should assist in communicating benefits but not take the place of benefits.

Image

The image and headline are usually the first things people see on your landing page. People's eyes naturally gravitate towards images, so make sure they are attention-grabbing, align with your benefit, and are memorable. Attempt to raise an emotional response.

Call To Action

A call to action (CTA) is prompt, typically in the form of a prominent hyperlink or button on a landing page, that instructs the user to take some specified action written as an action phrase, such as “Sign Up” or “Buy Now.”

Your landing page's call to action is critical, letting the user know what to do next. Without a prominent and concise call to action, the user may not know the following steps to take and will likely leave the site without taking the action you desire. Poorly created calls to action can add unnecessary friction in moving the user down your marketing funnel.