SEA Audit: 7 Pillars to Optimise Your Google Ads Campaigns

Author: Mia El Jamali

Conducting an SEA audit is a major strategic imperative for any business looking to maximise its online performance. Practically speaking, entrusting this analysis to an expert agency allows you to pinpoint the flaws in your campaigns and map out clear optimisation paths for your digital acquisition.

This process is essential for transforming SEA from a simple cost center into a genuine growth lever. Choosing to run an SEA audit doesn’t necessarily mean your current marketing strategy is ineffective or poorly configured. Above all, it’s about consolidating your strengths, tracking down wasted ad spend, and activating concrete levers to maximise the return on every euro invested.

While dissatisfaction with results remains the most common trigger, other signals should prompt you to audit your paid search setup:

• A routine reassessment: to uncover the final margins for improvement, even when your campaigns seem to be running optimally.
• A drop in key metrics: in the event of a declining ROAS, soaring Costs Per Acquisition (CPA), or a shrinking volume of leads.
• A shift in your business: when significant changes to your business model are anticipated, or a major seasonal peak is approaching.
• A vendor transition: when you are changing agencies or simply want to challenge the effectiveness of your current provider.

Once the audit is launched, your account will be thoroughly dissected across several core pillars. Here is an overview of the main areas of analysis the expert will focus on:

1. Tracking performance

Tracking allows you to monitor the behaviour of prospects, from the moment they click on a sponsored ad right through to their final action (whether that’s an online purchase in e-commerce or filling in a contact form in B2B). This requires the installation of tags and pixels on the website in order to analyse users’ journeys.

For the data collected to be relevant and enable the algorithm to make effective optimisation decisions, these tags must be in perfect working order. Yet many advertisers still underestimate this issue, dismissing it as a mere technical formality. This is a strategic mistake: to measure the return on your investment, it is crucial that the data collected is reliable. Furthermore, campaign automation is placing an increasingly important role on algorithms (particularly with Smart Bidding) and AI, which draw directly on the data reported by tracking. If this information is incorrect or incomplete, the algorithm will target users who do not match the profile of those who actually convert, leading to a significant loss of your budget.

This is why, during an audit, the expert does not settle for a superficial check of whether your tags are firing: they ensure the technical consistency of your entire tracking ecosystem. They examine your Google Tag Manager (GTM) setup, which structures the data sent to Google Analytics (GA4) or Google Ads, as well as the health of your DataLayer. This DataLayer consolidates all the information passed from the website to GTM. It is what guarantees that the correct values (such as an e-commerce cart total or a B2B lead qualification) are transmitted accurately, regardless of any front-end visual updates to your site. The ultimate goal is to guarantee the absolute reliability of your statistics and the relevance of the optimisation decisions made by the algorithm.

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2. Budget management and bidding strategy

Ad visibility on Google depends, among other factors, on the allocated budget and the set bid levels. Indeed, capping your budget essentially restricts your ad delivery throughout the day, while limiting your bids reduces your ability to win top sponsored placements. In both scenarios, you are throttling your visibility. The goal of the audit is therefore to pinpoint these missed financial opportunities.

• Budget-constrained campaigns and allocation: An underfunded budget on a highly performing campaign, or during a seasonal traffic peak, results in a direct loss of revenue. The auditor will not automatically recommend increasing your overall spend: their primary focus will be analyzing your budget allocation. The goal is to identify budget wasted on unprofitable keywords or campaigns and immediately reallocate it to high-performing campaigns that are being throttled by their daily budget caps.
• Smart Bidding calibration: Today, bidding is predominantly driven by Google’s artificial intelligence via Smart Bidding. The audit is no longer limited to a simple manual benchmark. The auditor checks whether the profitability targets (Target CPA or Target ROAS) you have set for the algorithm are realistic given market inflation. If you feed the machine a target that is too aggressive and unrealistic, it will choke off your ad delivery. Your competitors will then outrank you before you can react, resulting in a direct loss of market share.

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3. Campaign structure and “granularity”

Granularity refers to the level of detail and precision in your account architecture. A strong Google Ads structure should not be a mere catalog of keywords: it must accurately reflect your business organisation (your various Business Units, your target audiences, your profit margins). The auditor will analyse this setup to strike the perfect balance:

• An overly granular campaign: A few years ago, the norm was to create hundreds of hyper-segmented micro-campaigns. Today, we have realised this method is toxic. It fragments the data too much. Indeed, the extremely low volume of individual clicks per ad group prevents Google’s algorithms from learning and optimising ad delivery effectively.
• A campaign lacking granularity: Conversely, consolidating all your offers into massive, generic campaigns is a strategic mistake. You give Google free rein to arbitrate at its own discretion among your various products or services. This leads to a loss of message relevance, a spike in irrelevant clicks, and above all, the risk that the algorithm will burn through your entire budget on low-margin products at the expense of your most profitable offers.

The key aim of the audit is to recommend a consolidated structure that provides the AI with sufficient data, whilst maintaining strict control over the profitability of each part of your business.

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4. The relevance of keywords

The auditor assesses the relevance of the keywords you are bidding on in relation to your adverts and the likelihood of a prospect converting, in order to help you avoid significant budget wastage:

• Brand campaigns: When a user types your company’s name into the search bar, your website naturally appears at the top thanks to organic search (SEO). However, in many industries, competitors won’t hesitate to bid on your brand name to display their sponsored ads directly above your free link. The audit assesses the competitive pressure on your brand name and determines whether it is necessary to set up (or adjust) a “Brand” campaign to protect your territory and secure this highly qualified traffic.
• The balance of match types (Broad, Phrase, Exact): The auditor will analyse the degree of freedom you grant the algorithm to trigger your ads across these three targeting types. A strategy that relies excessively on Broad match risks significant budget wastage on searches that are too far removed from your offering. Conversely, an account choked by too many Exact match keywords restricts your ad delivery and causes you to miss out on acquisition opportunities. In between, Phrase match targets searches that include the meaning of your keyword, offering a middle-ground control option. The audit’s goal is to analyse the exact distribution of these three options within your account to find the ideal sweet spot—specific to your business—to control delivery while maximising overall performance.
• Excluding irrelevant terms (Negative Keywords): When buying keywords, you shouldn’t just think about the queries you want to target, but especially those that will never generate a conversion. Paying for irrelevant clicks creates a twofold problem: you directly lose money, and it creates a major opportunity cost, as this wasted budget is desperately needed for your genuinely high-performing keywords. The audit therefore digs into the search term report to ensure a strict negative keyword strategy is firmly in place.

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5. Use of space and the quality of the advertisements

SEA is about more than just buying ad space to boost visibility. To maximise the chances of a potential customer clicking on your link, it is essential to attract them with clear and compelling adverts. Furthermore, Google does not choose to display your ad solely based on the bid you offer. It uses Ad Rank, which combines your maximum bid and your ad’s Quality Score.

This quality depends on three strict criteria, heavily scrutinized by the auditor:

• Expected Click-Through Rate (CTR): Based on historical performance data, Google estimates the probability that a user will click on your ad.
• Ad Relevance: Google analyses the degree of alignment between the advertising message conveyed in your ad and the search query entered by the user.
• Landing Page Experience: Google evaluates the quality, relevance, and load speed of the page the user lands on after clicking.

The financial stakes involved in this analysis are significant: Google rewards a high Quality Score with a direct reduction in your Cost Per Click (CPC). In practical terms, optimising these three criteria allows you to pay less per click than your competitors, whilst maintaining a better position than them.

The auditor therefore ensures that your adverts are relevant to the user’s search query and the experience offered on the website. They also verify (via your performance history and the effectiveness of your responsive adverts) that the ad creatives generating the highest conversion rate are indeed those receiving the majority of your budget.

Finally, the audit examines the use of visual space. The aim is to force your competitors to appear further down the user’s screen. To achieve this, it is strategically essential to systematically enhance your adverts with as many components as possible (additional links, call-to-action buttons, prices, headlines). This maximisation allows your advert to take up a much larger physical space on the results page.

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6. Selecting and engaging with audiences

Audiences correspond to the profiles of the internet users your campaigns are aimed at. It is important to define this audience precisely, as this helps Google’s algorithm to target the prospects most relevant to your business. The auditor will therefore analyse how you use your data:

• Integrating your CRM data (First-Party Data): Having precise customer data is essential, but properly transmitting it to Google (via Customer Match or offline conversion tracking) is what truly matters. This is how you concretely show the algorithm the exact profile of a qualified prospect for your business.
• Strategic segmentation: The audit verifies the relevance of your audience lists (such as website visitors or past buyers). Intelligent segmentation ensures that the algorithm receives the right signals to adapt its ad delivery based on the user’s profile.
• Audience exclusions: This involves explicitly telling the algorithm which profiles should not see your ads. For instance, if your goal is net-new lead acquisition, paying for clicks from existing customers who simply use your ad as a shortcut to log into their account is pure budget wastage. The auditor ensures your lists are actively used to exclude these profiles from your targeting, thereby protecting your investment.

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7. Managing campaign types

In recent years, automation has taken centre stage with the introduction of Performance Max (PMax) campaigns. These campaigns offer the advantage of displaying your ads across all Google channels (YouTube, Gmail, Display, Maps) via a single AI-driven campaign. However, it remains necessary to maintain traditional keyword-based Search campaigns and maximise the visibility of your products through Shopping feeds.

The auditor therefore ensures that these automated campaigns are tightly managed:

• Preventing cannibalisation: Automated campaigns are designed to drive new prospects and incremental traffic. The auditor verifies that they aren’t stealing traffic from your traditional Search campaigns or masking the performance of your already profitable Standard Shopping campaigns. They also ensure the AI isn’t artificially claiming credit for sales driven by searches for your own brand name.
• Conversion quality: The expert checks that the algorithm isn’t burning through a large chunk of your budget on irrelevant placements (particularly on low-quality partner sites) without a proven positive impact on your bottom-line profitability.
• Continuous algorithm control: To ensure that automation serves your profitability and not the other way around, the auditor makes sure your campaigns and Shopping product feeds are properly fueled by qualified audience signals, and strictly bounded through keyword and placement exclusions.

A thorough SEA audit is therefore the essential starting point for consolidating your existing achievements and unlocking new avenues for profitability. Would you like to assess your current performance or review the structure of your account? Please don’t hesitate to contact us to discuss this with the experts at ESV Digital.

Frequently asked questions