SEA audit: analyze and optimize your Google Ads campaigns in 5 steps

Are you running Google Ads campaigns but doubting their effectiveness, or looking to improve your ROI? There's no secret: you need to run an SEA audit!

Put simply: an SEA audit provides an analysis and a precise overview of the state of your campaigns, and identifies errors, weaknesses, opportunities and best practices. The goal is to refine your advertising strategy in order to optimize your campaigns.

In this article, we explain why an SEA audit matters and how to carry out this analysis in 5 clear steps. Let’s go!

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Why an SEA audit matters

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Running an SEA audit offers several significant benefits for your business:

👉 Efficiency: analyze your account and your Google Ads campaigns to identify strengths and weaknesses. Remove what doesn't work and reinforce what does, while uncovering new opportunities such as adding keywords and audience targeting.

👉 Cost reduction: optimize your campaigns to avoid unnecessary spending. Adjust bids based on keyword performance and improve ad quality to lower your cost per click.

👉 Better ROI: by becoming more efficient and cutting costs, you increase your profitability. Write more compelling ads to raise your click-through rate, optimize your landing pages for a better conversion rate, and adjust your offers to better meet your audiences' needs.

👉 Visibility: improve your ads' position on search engines. Select relevant keywords, write consistent ads, and create tailored landing pages to raise your Quality Score. Use ad extensions to gain more presence on results pages.

👉 Customer satisfaction: deliver a more enjoyable and personalized user experience. Target audiences according to their needs, adapt your message and offer to the context, and smooth the buying journey with simple payment and contact options.

In short, an SEA audit lets you optimize the performance, profitability and user experience of your ads, and therefore the achievement of your overall strategic goals.

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5 steps to run your SEA audit

1 - Assess your overall strategy

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Here are the key points to check:

👉  Clear advertising goals: make sure your goals are well defined, measurable and realistic. They may include increasing traffic to your site, generating leads, boosting sales or building customer loyalty.

👉 Appropriate advertising budget: check whether the allocated budget matches your goals and your company's financial capacity. This means setting a budget (monthly, weekly or daily), splitting it across campaigns, and adjusting it based on the results achieved.

👉  Consistency with your overall marketing strategy: examine whether your SEA strategy fits seamlessly with your overall marketing strategy and your company's positioning. In other words, define a unique value proposition, identify competitive advantages, and choose target market segments.

👉 Complementarity with other digital marketing levers: analyze how SEA fits with other digital marketing tactics, such as SEO, SMO, email marketing and content marketing. An integrated, complementary approach across channels can strengthen the overall effectiveness of your marketing.

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2 - Check the structure of your Google Ads account

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Here, you need to make sure that:

👉  The Google Ads account is set up correctly. For example, choosing the right currency, time zone, billing method, etc.

👉  The Google Ads account is well organized. For example, creating separate campaigns for each goal, each product or service, each network or each geographic area.

👉  Campaigns are properly segmented into ad groups. For example, creating themed ad groups to bring together keywords and ads related to the same topic.

👉  Ad groups are properly structured into keywords and ads. For example, choosing relevant and varied keywords, using the different match types (exact, broad match modifier, phrase or broad), writing consistent and persuasive ads, etc.

With this check, you ensure that audience targeting is optimal for reaching the users most likely to be interested in your offer and to convert.

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⭐️ Quick tip: in your campaign settings, double-check that the conversion set as your goal is the one you actually want to track. For example, in e-commerce, the purchase event is the one that should be set as the conversion goal.

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3 - Improve your audience targeting

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Now it's time to optimize your audience targeting! Check the following:

👉  Geographic targeting: make sure the targeted countries, regions or cities are the right ones, that irrelevant areas are excluded, and that bids are adjusted according to each area's performance.

👉  Demographic targeting: check that the age, gender and income of the targeted audiences match your target audience, and adjust bids according to their profitability.

👉  Behavioral targeting: analyze whether interests, purchase intent or browsing habits are properly identified and targeted, excluding unqualified audiences and adjusting bids according to their effectiveness.

👉  Contextual targeting: analyze the relevance of the keywords, topics or sites where your ads are shown, and make sure to exclude those that don't match your offer, while adjusting bids according to their profitability.

👉  Use of remarketing: check whether remarketing lists are used to target users who have already interacted with your site, and whether dynamic remarketing is set up for personalized ads based on browsing history.

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4 - Fine-tune your ad campaign

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The SEA audit should help you improve your ad campaigns. Here are a few recommendations:

👉  Ad appeal: use captivating headlines, relevant descriptions and compelling CTAs. Use questions, figures or emotional elements to grab users' attention.

👉  Ad persuasiveness: highlight the benefits of your offer, and use social proof (testimonials, ratings) or guarantees. Offer promotions or discounts to encourage action.

👉  Compliance with Google's rules: respect character limits, avoid spelling or grammar mistakes, and don't overuse capital letters or punctuation. Also make sure you comply with Google's content standards and advertising policies.

👉  Ad testing: create different versions of your ads to experiment with various headlines, descriptions or calls to action. Use responsive ads so Google can select the best combinations. This will greatly improve your conversion rate!

👉  Use of ad extensions: add extensions such as callouts, sitelinks, phone numbers or addresses to enrich your ads and increase your presence on the results page.

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5 - Optimize your landing pages

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For this final step of the audit, we check:

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👉  Landing page speed: optimize loading speed by reducing image sizes, using compression and caching, and removing unnecessary scripts or redirects. Use tools like PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse to assess and improve this speed.

👉  Landing page usability: adopt a simple, clear design, make navigation and reading easy, and use appropriate colors and contrasts. Make sure your pages are mobile-friendly, with a responsive design or a dedicated mobile version.

👉  Alignment with your ads: make sure the content of your landing pages matches the messages and keywords of your ads. Deliver a consistent experience by meeting users' expectations. Use appropriate HTML tags to improve the page's SEO.

👉  Calls to action: use catchy headlines, attractive visuals, persuasive copy and visible calls to action. Include reassurance elements such as testimonials and make the conversion process easy (for example, by minimizing the information requested and offering simple payment options).

👉  Landing page testing: create different versions of your pages to test elements such as the headline, images, copy or call to action. Use A/B or multivariate testing tools, such as Google Optimize or AB Tasty, to identify the best-performing versions.

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Here is an extract from an audit carried out by Growth Room for one of its customers:

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Would you like to start but are afraid to do it alone? You can consult our article on Top 5 Google Ads agencies or even better discover our page on our Google Ads support and how we can help you, via our expert recommendations to impress on this network!

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