Account organization:
-Make sure your brand and non-brand campaigns are separate.
-Is your naming convention clear? This is important for easy filtering and reporting.
-If using an Alpha/Beta structure, check that your match types are consistent and that you have updated alpha neg lists in place (or alpha negs in your Beta campaigns).
-If you have multiple keywords per ad group, are they closely aligned? If not, keywords should be separated into different ad groups so that ad copy can incorporate keyword/keyword theme.
Tracking:
-Are your pixels correctly set up to track conversions?
-If you are pulling in conversions from Analytics, are these set up correctly? Look in Tools>Conversions to view the conversion actions within an account. Click on Webpages to see where your conversions are firing. To separate out different conversions in reporting, create a custom column from the Campaign or Ad group tabs, or segment by conversion name.
-If using a 3 rd -party bidding platform, is tracking properly implemented?
Campaign settings:
Review campaign type (we recommend separating out Search vs. Display), location, language, bid strategy, budget caps, delivery method, ad rotation settings, ad scheduling, and device.
Audiences:
-Are the audiences in place the ones you want to target? Are there any additional opportunities?
-Retargeting and RLSA campaign audiences: are these set to target and bid?
-If you want to block existing users from seeing your ads, do you have negative audiences in place?
Keywords:
-Are there high-spend keywords that are not converting or high-converting keywords in lower positions that could be bid up?
-Are there duplicate keywords that should be deduped?
-Are there low quality score keywords that should be optimized or removed?
-Pull a search query report to see if there are opportunities to build out more focused keywords or if there are poorly performing queries that should be negged out.
-What is the Lin-Rodnitzky Ratio of the account? The Lin-Rodnitzky ratio (hyperlink to whitepaper page) is your overall non-brand CPA divided by the CPA of queries with 1+ conversions. L/R ratios lower than 2 are considered healthy.
*Note that if you are tracking conversions at different points in the funnel, you may want to segment your search queries by conversion name to do this analysis.
Negative keywords:
-Are there ad group-level or campaign-level negatives that should be removed or added to a shared list?
-Review your shared neg lists. Are there terms blocking wanted queries? Are appropriate campaigns attached?
Ads:
-Are any ads disapproved?
-Run a spellcheck on your ads.
-Do ads have proper punctuation?
-Are ads customized per ad group?
-Do active ad groups with active keywords have ads in place?
-Check the number of ads per ad group. Does each ad group have at least 2 ads in place? If not, consider launching a new set of ads to test out.
-If targeting mobile, do ad groups have preferred mobile ads with landing pages optimized for mobile?
-Are ads going to appropriate landing pages?
-Are any landing pages driving to error, 404, or “out of stock” pages?
Ad extensions:
-Are any of your ad extensions disapproved? (Note that your review extension will likely lose approved status if the review is over a year old.)
-Do you have all relevant ad extensions?
-As with ads, check your spelling and landing pages.
-If you have call extensions, check that your phone numbers are accurate and that you have appropriate scheduling.
Display network:
-Is there a shared negative placements list attached to relevant campaigns?
-Are there placements/keywords that are spending but not converting? (If not already in place, an easy win to block your ads from appearing in mobile apps is adsenseformobileapps.com.)
-Are retargeting campaigns set to target & bid?
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SVP, Search & Growth Labs