Identified key areas of improvement, beyond best practices.
Conducting a Google Ads Audit is always interesting — many people/agencies set up accounts in different ways, and while there isn't just one right way to set up campaigns, there are many mistakes that are commonly made that will greatly impact performance.
The biggest culprits are: still using SKAGs (single keyword ad groups) when this strategy is dead due to close match variants, conversion tracking not being set up properly (so your campaigns look like they are doing really good... when they actually are not), and relying heavily on broad match keywords with no guardrails (AKA fully trusting the machine). Those are just a few examples, but there are many things that can be hindering the performance of your campaigns!
Example questions I ask myself when conducting an audit:
How are the campaigns organized? By product/service? By stage of awareness? Does it make sense? Is there a better way that this could be organized?
Is the client taking full advantage of the ad extensions that are relevant to their business?
Are search campaigns enabled with display select?
What are the conversions in the account? Are what they’re tracking valuable? Are they tracking accurately?
How are search partners performing? Should it be disabled?
Are negative keywords applied? Are they organized well into clear lists? Are there any keywords that should be negative keywords?