Google Ads Audit Checklist (Ecommerce)
An itemized, ecommerce-oriented audit of a live Google Ads + Merchant Center account: 32 checks across 11 categories, built to find wasted spend, uncover prospecting opportunities, and surface incremental revenue before scaling.
Load audit-guardrails.md first — it governs how every item below is scored. Each check resolves to exactly one of pass / fail / unknown / not applicable. An unknown (evidence unavailable) reduces coverage, never health. Not applicable (e.g. Shopping checks on a lead-gen account) affects neither. Do not grade what you couldn't see, don't invent negative keywords, and draft every change before touching a live account.
Work top to bottom. For each item, record the result, the evidence you saw (or the missing source), and — on a fail — a draft fix, not an applied one.
Tracking
- Conversion tracking configuration — Confirm a single source of truth for purchases. Two systems counting the same order (GA4 import + native tag, or a duplicate gtag) inflates conversions and makes the bidder optimize toward phantom volume. Fail if double-counting or missing purchase value; pass on a verified test conversion with the right value + currency. Deep dive: conversion-tracking.md.
Targeting
- Customer list for audience targeting — Check that a hashed customer email list is uploaded and actively used — as a signal/lookalike source for prospecting and as an exclusion where it should be (existing buyers on non-upsell campaigns). Uploaded-but-unused is a fail. Deep dive: Customer Match in audience-targeting.md.
- Negative keyword lists (Search, Shopping) — Review shared and campaign-level negatives for irrelevant, out-of-market, or unprofitable queries draining budget. No search-terms report → unknown, not fail. Never name candidate negatives from imagination; request the report and run the overblocking review (see audit-guardrails).
Campaign Structure
- Branded vs. non-branded split — Isolate brand traffic into its own campaign. Brand terms buried inside "generic" or catch-all campaigns inflate blended ROAS and hide non-brand inefficiency. Fail if brand and non-brand share a campaign with no way to read them apart.
Merchant Center (GMC)
- Shipping settings — Confirm configured shipping speeds/costs match real fulfillment. Understated speed loses the auction; overstated speed risks disapproval. Free-shipping thresholds should be reflected.
- Promotions — Check that live sales, discounts, and evergreen offers are set up as GMC promotions so they render as promotion links on Shopping ads. Missing = leaving CTR on the table.
- Product feed titles — The title's first ~70 characters do the ranking and the clicking. Verify the highest-intent keyword, then key feature/benefit, sit before truncation — brand-first titles waste that space unless the brand is the query.
- Product images — Assess whether images stand out in the Shopping carousel (clean, on-white where required, but distinct from competitors). Weak imagery caps CTR no matter the bid.
- Store quality overview — Read the Merchant Center diagnostics: disapprovals, missing/invalid attributes (GTIN, availability, price mismatches), and feed warnings. Disapproved products = silent zero-impression revenue leak.
- Product ratings — Verify individual product ratings sync from the review source and render as star annotations. A configured feed that isn't showing stars is a fail worth chasing.
- Impressions on eligible products — Check the full catalog is actually getting served, not a head of hero SKUs soaking all impressions. Zero-impression eligible products are untested inventory.
Shopping
- Campaign segmentation — Confirm each Shopping/PMax segment has enough conversion volume (~30–50+/month) to let the bidder learn. Over-segmentation starves every bucket; consolidate before adding structure.
- Budget allocation across products — Trace whether spend flows to positive-ROI SKUs. If losers eat budget while winners are capped, that's a reallocation fail (draft the shift; don't restructure a learning campaign as a reflex).
Bidding & Budget
- Bidding strategy — branded (Search) — On brand, high-intent clicks are cheap and near-certain; basic tROAS/Max-conversion-value can let Google overpay for volume you'd win anyway. Prefer manual/portfolio control or a tight target on brand.
- Campaign bidding targets — Sanity-check every Target ROAS/CPA against campaign type (brand vs. non-brand, hero vs. long-tail). A single blanket target across mismatched economics is a fail — and per audit-guardrails, one budget-to-CPA ratio doesn't fit all objectives.
- Non-branded terms in brand campaigns — Read the brand campaign's search terms for generic, non-branded queries that leaked in. Move them to non-brand so brand ROAS isn't propped up by prospecting spend.
- Bidding strategy — non-branded (Search, PMax, Shopping, Demand Gen) — Match strategy to volume and goal: value-based bidding needs conversion data; thin campaigns may need manual/tCPA first. Mismatched strategy on low volume never exits learning.
Search
- New search terms for expansion — Mine the search-terms report for converting queries not yet directly targeted; expand into keywords, and feed the language back into product titles and content. (Same report gates item 3 — pull once, use for both.)
- Ad copy performance — Check CTR relative to impressions, ad strength, and whether underperformers are being refreshed. Weak copy raises CPC via Quality Score before it ever costs a conversion.
- Brand keyword match types — Brand-protection keywords should run exact or phrase only. Broad on brand invites Google to spend brand budget on loosely related, lower-intent queries.
- Brand ad copy quality — Verify brand ads use consistent formatting, lead with USPs, and track the promotional calendar. Brand is your highest-intent surface; generic brand copy underconverts a captive audience.
- Quality Score — Low QS means higher CPC and lower rank for the same bid. Read it as a diagnostic (expected CTR / ad relevance / landing-page experience components), not a metric to game.
Performance Max
- PMax signals — Check asset groups actually carry audience signals — search themes plus the customer list — rather than empty signal fields. Signals are advisory, not deterministic, but empty ones forfeit a real optimization lever.
- PMax budget on Shopping — Shopping is usually the money placement inside PMax. Confirm a meaningful share of PMax spend lands there (via the account report or product-level data) rather than bleeding into low-intent display/video.
Landing Page
- Comparison page funnel — Look for a listicle-style review page on an independent domain that positions the brand as #1 — a proven cold-traffic funnel Shopping/PMax can point to.
- Head-to-head competitor pages — "Us vs. them" pages that capture comparison-stage demand. Absence is an opportunity, not a defect.
- Advertorials — Check whether cold Google traffic is met with advertorial (story-led, editorial-feel) landers, not just a raw PDP.
- Landing page optimization — Confirm the ad's promise (offer, price, hero product) appears clearly above the fold on the lander. Ad-to-page scent mismatch wastes the click regardless of bid — the highest-leverage post-click fix.
Demand Gen
- Performance by format — Segment Demand Gen results by network (Shorts, In-Stream, In-Feed + Discovery, Gmail, Display) to find which format actually drives efficient conversions; a blended DG number hides the winner and the drain.
- Quiz funnel for cold traffic (Landing Page) — A quiz funnel warms and segments cold Google/Demand-Gen traffic through a personalized path. Its absence is a prospecting-funnel gap to flag.
- Demand Gen demographics — Analyze performance by age, gender, parental status, and household-income bands to catch mis-serving and inform exclusions/bid adjustments.
- Top-of-funnel campaign (Search) — Confirm something is reaching cold audiences who don't yet know the product — with a conversion goal, not a bare awareness objective. All-bottom-funnel accounts cap out at existing demand.
Rolling it up
- Score only verified items. Present health (pass/fail ratio on verified checks) and evidence coverage (share of applicable checks you could verify) as two separate numbers — never blend them.
- Below 60% coverage, report findings and unknowns instead of a single health score (see audit-guardrails coverage bands).
- List every unknown with the exact evidence you'd need to resolve it (usually: search-terms report, Merchant Center access, conversion-action settings, or account-level PMax/DG reports).
- Deliver fails as draft fixes — current state → proposed change → expected effect → rollback — and apply only with explicit approval.
Adapted into this skill's framing from ECHELONN's public Google Ads Audit Checklist (Jackson Blackledge, ECHELONN.IO). Item structure credited; descriptions and scoring are rewritten to this skill's voice and paired with the four-state audit model in audit-guardrails.md.