Google Ads Scorecard: A Quick Way to Ensure Account Health

Time and time again we see it: new contacts come to us and don’t really know how to assess the health of their Google Ads account.

It’s an understandable problem. There is a lot of complexity when it comes to running accounts, and if you’re not in the weeds every day learning new strategies it can be hard to keep up. 

Right now everyone is trying to do more with less, and working on figuring out where it makes sense to invest their money, time, and effort.  For most marketing leaders, it is unclear to them if their Google Ads accounts are set up well or not.  We aim to help you make sense of what’s going on under the hood.

In order to help marketers and marketing leaders self-audit their accounts, we created the SEM Scorecard. It is a simple checklist that should give you a lot of insight into the health of the account. 

The SEM Scorecard should take an hour or two to complete. Each item doesn’t have to be in use for the account to run well, but they are items to consider, and this will give you a decent snapshot of how your account stacks up against well run accounts.

You can download the scorecard here.

Here’s a breakdown of what we cover in the scorecard:

Account Setup and Structure

• We start off with account structure because it’s the foundation of any successful paid media endeavor.

• Without things broken up properly or without proper conversion tracking you’ll never get anywhere. 

Keywords

• Keywords are the lifeblood of the account.

• Making sure you have keywords structured properly (not to mention making sure they’re relevant) is… key. 

Paid Search Ads

• Are you using all available ad headlines and descriptions? 

• Are the ads relevant to the ad groups and keywords? If not, you may be showing the right message to the wrong person. 

Ad Extensions

• This section is a good way to make sure your ad is taking up as much real estate as possible in the SERPs.  

 Audiences, Retargeting, and Display Ads

• Making sure the marketing pixels and retargeting tags on your site are set up properly

• Do you have the right audiences built out? This is crucial to effectively using RLSAs and Display ads. 

Landing Pages

• You can write the best ad in the world, but if the user is taken to an irrelevant or poorly optimized landing page when they click your ad they won’t be converting. 

This is a good exercise to go through if you’re taking over an existing account, if you’re managing an account that has plateaued, or you just need a quick pulse check on the health of an account.

If another person or agency is managing the account, running through this scorecard is a great way of understanding the current account status, and figuring out whether or not they are doing their job well. Periodic checks are always a good idea to make sure your account is optimized as best as possible. 

Be sure to download it and let us know how you score, If you end up with a low score on your account,  reach out and ask about a free full audit of your account.

Also check out our Facebook Ads Scorecard here!