Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Audit Checklist
Work through every campaign type — goals, overall performance, display and search — and find where your budget is leaking before you spend another dollar.
Goals
- ✓
Reiterate your campaign goals, especially if you’re presenting to internal/external stakeholders.
- ✓
Benchmark your paid search performance to other marketing channels, like social, email, etc.
- ✓
Use industry benchmarks to compare your performance of paid search KPIs.
- ✓
Identify which campaigns contributed to your goals and at what cost. Then, identify what may have hurt your goals.
Display Campaigns
-
✓
Examine your audiences & placements for performance in the following areas:
- ✓
Identify successful and engaged audiences. Find opportunities to reallocate more of your budget to these.
- ✓
Investigate successful placements for your business goals. Consider whitelisting successful websites for future campaigns.
- ✓
Exclude placements that aren’t working. Do this on an ongoing basis, around once per month.
- ✓
Identify top performing ads and banner creative. Make sure to compare the performance of mobile vs. desktop sizes.
Overall Performance
(repeat for each campaign type)
- ✓
Identify the top performing campaign that impacted your business goals.
-
✓
Analyze and sort the campaigns based on the following criteria:
- ✓
Evaluate the average cost per click and cost per conversion, determine if this cost is justified based on the conversion value.
- ✓
Leverage industry benchmarks for each campaign type to evaluate where your business stacks up.
- ✓
Identify the top performing landing pages from the campaign. If multiple, were there similarities in layout, content or landing page events?
- ✓
Identify the top performing ads from the campaign. If multiple, were there any similarities in tone/messaging?
- ✓
Pinpoint where you spent the majority of your budget.
- ✓
Evaluate the ROI.
- ✓
Look for opportunities to re-allocate underperforming campaigns to successful ones. Identify underperforming campaigns and set an action plan to improve or remove them.
Search Campaigns
-
✓
Analyze historical keyword performance. We recommend exporting a CSV to slice and dice your data.
- ✓
Remove keywords that aren’t converting or producing results.
- ✓
Add negative keywords on an ongoing basis, weekly while your campaign scales & bi-weekly/monthly once it’s been running.
- ✓
Identify top performing ad copy and headlines by quality score. Ensure they are getting their fair share(or more) of the budget.
- ✓
Mix in a variety of ad types, like text, dynamic or responsive ads
Questions About the SEM Audit Checklist
It's a free resource that walks through auditing every campaign type in a search engine marketing account — covering goals, overall performance, display campaigns, and search campaigns — to help identify where ad budget is being wasted.
It has 4 sections and 23 total audit points, and it's meant to be repeated separately for each campaign type you run (e.g., once for Search, once for Display, etc.).
It has you revisit your campaign goals (useful when presenting to stakeholders), benchmark paid search against other channels like social and email, compare your KPIs to industry benchmarks, and identify which campaigns helped vs. hurt those goals.
It focuses on reviewing audiences and placements by CTR, conversions, and CPC; identifying strong-performing audiences to reallocate budget toward; whitelisting successful placement websites; excluding underperforming placements (roughly monthly); and comparing top-performing ad/banner creative across mobile vs. desktop.
This is repeated per campaign type and includes identifying your top campaign, sorting campaigns by clicks/impressions/conversions/CTR/cost-per-conversion/CPC, evaluating whether your costs are justified by conversion value, benchmarking against industry standards, spotting top landing pages and ads (and what made them work), pinpointing budget allocation, calculating ROI, and reallocating budget from underperforming to high-performing campaigns.
It covers analyzing historical keyword performance (Quality Score, CTR, conversions, CPC — exporting to CSV is recommended), removing non-converting keywords, adding negative keywords on an ongoing basis (weekly while scaling, then bi-weekly/monthly), identifying top ad copy/headlines by Quality Score, and testing a mix of ad formats (text, dynamic, responsive).
Weekly while a campaign is still scaling, then bi-weekly or monthly once it's more established.
About once a month, on an ongoing basis.
Yes — it's offered as a free resource on Digital Drew SEM's site.
The page offers a free marketing audit/consultation with Digital Drew SEM via their contact form or a Calendly booking link.
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