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Google Ads audit (eCommerce business spending 30k/m) – what to look for?
What are the KEY areas of auditing a Google Ads account for an eComm business spending 30k per month with revenue returns of 3-4 million a year?
Currently utilizing all campaign types… pMax, search, DSA etc.
Brand and non-brand campaigns are currently active.
Also got lots of business feed schedules set up pulling in live price data from their Magento back-end.
I know there’s likely to be more questions than answers, but generally speaking, what is going to set me apart from other PPC’ers when auditing this account?
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1 Reply
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What’s their business objective? From what you’re saying it sounds like a completely fine setup where looking for hygiene measures or technical difficulties will most likely lead nowhere.
You should get together with the client and figure out their goals and then audit how their goals and their strategy aligns with the account setup and tactics.
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1. Check Tech
1. Conversion Tracking
1. Are all of your attribution windows as large as possible?
2. Are you using an attribution model that makes sense? I like using Data Driven (but using the Attribution Tool to compare them first)
3. Is your Purchase conversion excluding shipping & tax revenue. Is your repeat rate as close to 1.00 as possible?
4. Are you tracking Enhanced Conversions properly?
2. Tag Setup
1. Is your Google Tag firing all of the right parameters (item id, page type, events, value, etc)
2. Are all of your Google properties and tags linked together (UA + GA4, Merchant, Optimize, Search Console, etc)
3. Google Merchant
1. Do you have Automatic Improvements turned on?
2. Are all relevant programs active under “Manage Programs”? (Especially Dynamic Remarketing)
3. Does your feed have a rule to optimise your link so you can add UTM parameters to replace “sag_organic”?
4. Do your products have an optimised feed where every relevant attribute has meaningful information? (Title, description, highlights, product type, Google Product Category, size, colour, MPN, etc)
5. Do you have any issues with any of your feeds that you should deal with?
4. Google Analytics
1. Do you have Referral Exclusions setup?
2. Are you tracking site searches?
3. Do you have detailed Demographic & Enhanced Ecommerce setup?
4. Do you have enhanced link attribution enabled?
5. Conversion Path & Info
1. Do you know the Top Conversion Paths and roughly what flow customers go through?
2. Do you know how long the Conversion Lag is?
3. Have you checked the Assisted Conversions report to better see Campaign attribution?
6. Account Settings
1. Do they have Auto-Apply Recommendations turned off?
2. Do they have account-wide UTMs in place?
3. Have they accepted all data sharing policies so they can use features like Customer Match etc?
7. Audiences
1. Does the account have regularly updated customer lists in their Audience Manager? (ideally through Klaviyo or Zapier for an automatic option)
2. Do they have all possible remarketing audiences? (Durations, Product Views, Collection Views, Cart Abandons, Checkout Abandons, Scroll Depth, New Users, Paid Users)
3. Are they using “Optimised Audiences” from the “Audience Insights” tab from audiences like “All Converters” active in any campaigns?
2. True Campaign Performance
1. Performance Max
1. What’s the split between channels (Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Discovery, etc) by checking various reports? Which channel is most efficient?
2. Shopping – Which segments of products are getting the best performance, or are being under-utilised and can you create higher-quality ad content for them in their own Asset Groups or campaigns?
3. Shopping – Which segments of products are doing poorly, could they be added to a new PMax campaign with a minimum-standard tROAS to stop them from spending so much account-wide?
4. Search – Which collections or products are performing best? Could they benefit from new, high-quality content and be launched in their own Asset Groups or campaigns?
5. Are there previous Smart Shopping campaigns that were upgraded (or could be upgraded) to Performance Max? If so, have they been tested as Feed Only shopping campaigns? These generally perform the best out of all campaigns
6. What’s the “% New Sessions” from Google Analytics for these campaigns. Ideally it should be over 70%
7. In the Insights tab, what percentage of Conversion Value, in the last 28 days, is coming from brand-related search terms? Use this to estimate whether or not the campaign the mostly prospecting or remarketing
8. What Audience Signals are they using? Are they relying on Customer Lists (will push the campaign into remarketing)? Are they using “optimised” In-Market and Affinity audiences? Are they using top-performing search keywords or competitor URLs?
9. What’s the comparison between what the campaign budget is, and what the campaign spends on each day in the last 14 days (ie; If the budget is $500/day, does it spend the entire budget or not, does it ever go over $500? If so, that campaign has room to scale)
2. Dynamic Search
1. What Dynamic Ad Targets are they using? Are they using a smart selection of URLs and Categories?
2. Are they creating unique ad-copy and extensions for each Dynamic Ad Target?
3. Are they using “Similar To” audiences?
4. Have they applied Negative Keyword Lists?
5. Do they have any topics in Dynamic Search that perform very well historically that could be turned into Broad-Match, Standard Search campaigns?
3. Branded Search
1. Are they capturing 90-95% of Search Impression Share? If not, are they using a Manual CPC bid strategy that targets Exact Match variations of brand terms?
2. Do they have all audiences enabled for Observation so they can be used for other cold-traffic campaigns (like Shopping & Search?)
3. Do they pin their brand name to first-position to make sure the result is always relevant to the search? (Subjective, I understand)
4. Remarketing
1. Do they have a solid remarketing structure setup (Dynamic Search, Display, Discovery, YouTube)?
2. Are they using their audiences intelligently (ie; Excluding users that bounce within 10 seconds, excluding previous customers, product/collection-specific audiences for product/collection-specific ad groups or campaigns?)
5. Standard Shopping
1. Have they tested these campaigns thoroughly to make sure they’re capturing as much genuinely cold-traffic as possible?
2. Are they excluding brand wherever possible?​
I’ll have to stop there for now, but that should get you quite far. I’d also check things like Networks, Landing Pages, Results “by time”, Seasonality Adjustments, Promotions, Sitelinks, etc. Hopefully that helps (:
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I’m not too sure without additional context, but the initial answer of the audit could also be “the account is in good standing”? You don’t necessarily find anything bad in an account. I’m sure many of our peers do a decent job and there’s nothing wrong with mentioning it!
If their objective is to scale up, I’d look for solutions based on their current setup, and think about what they need to review the campaign structure in order to grow.
That’s where you’ll need to add value — if you have previous experience of having done so, that’s what’s going to set you apart from other PPCers, so quick case studies + a timeline of what you expect to do to improve the account (landing page, account structure, ad text, w/e).
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Did they give u any KPI’s? If not I would confirm them w the business
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We wrote out our [PPC account audit guide](https://www.takesomerisk.com/ppc-audit-guide/) to help answer this question. There is a lot you can look at and it really depends on what are you trying to get out of the audit. Audits can be done to make sure things are working or you can do them to look for wasted spend and or opportunities. You can do them to make recommendations for future growth.
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Hello there, Googler here,
Look at the bounce rate first, pages per session and average session duration on ad and keyword level. Figure out all higher bounce rate ads and keywords and trim the fat.
2 auction insights – look at how you’re trending against competitors , what is there impression share and what is your absolute top of page rate against them to identify lost business.
3 keyword quality score , very important your ads could not be showing as often as they should just because of this. Go to columns modify columns and type serch lost IS Rank
Look at the % how many times your ads didn’t show because of a poor ad rank
4 tracking accurate conversions and conversion value, if value is not being tracked then we can’t bid using advanced bid strategies like target roas and maximize conversion value.
5 attribution report to understand how many customers ads clicking after a second click on the ads to understand the funnel and use remarketing effectively.
6 performance on Google search vs search partner’s, CTr and CTA
And much more, dm me if you need a free audit. -
To run effectively, they will also need to ensure their product feed is optimised. This is the biggest data source for their machine learning to match with the right customers. Let me know if you would like a free product feed audit, this is what I do!
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As a business all they care for ROI, you need to demonstrate positive ROI with clear outline.
Going beyond the technical stuff about campaigns. What other things will increase revenue? Perhaps testing the landing page or looking at the keyword group/campaigns are relevant for what they are selling.
If they are spending 30k what’s that return on that investment and how can you increase that, focus on that.
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