But auditing isn’t just about cleaning house and ensuring keywords are accurate. This spring cleaning should ensure your campaigns are built to scale efficiently, adapt to changing market conditions and are ready to squeeze the most value out of every dollar spent.
Not sure where to start? We’ve got you covered. Here’s our team’s spring cleaning checklist to help you evaluate the health of your search program and prepare for a strong second half of the year.
- Overall Campaign Structure - Let’s start at the top: do your campaigns still meet business goals and priorities? A lot has changed since Q1, and supply chains and margins are constantly in flux, especially for brands dealing with tariff changes or inventory challenges. If this is your brand, it’s worth reassessing your overall approach.
Action: Prioritize campaigns featuring products with strong inventory positions and healthy margins. Segment them accordingly and consider allocating higher budgets to maximize ROI.
- Campaign Consolidation - Do any campaigns have under 30 conversions in the past 30 days? Fragmented campaigns with low conversion volume often struggle to exit learning phases or provide useful insights.
Action: Look for opportunities to merge low-performing campaigns that share similar goals, audiences, and bidding strategies. Consolidation can lead to stronger signal density and more reliable machine learning optimization.
- Campaign Segmentation - Are any ad groups, asset groups, or product types eating up the majority of your daily budget? Not all assets deserve equal distribution of your budget. If certain ad groups or product types are dominating performance, they may be inadvertently stifling growth opportunities elsewhere in your account.
Action: This is an easy fix to drive more conversion volume: break out top-performing segments into their own dedicated campaigns. This gives them more budget control while allowing the rest of your account to breathe, gather data, and scale appropriately.
- Audit PMax Search Term CPCs - Google’s Performance Max (PMax) campaigns have historically been opaque, but that’s changing. With the inclusion of search term data in reports, you now have access to a previously hidden KPI: CPC by search term.
Action: Audit your PMax search terms. Should branded terms be excluded and run separately for better efficiency? Are competitor terms showing with extremely high CPCs? This is your chance to shift strategy, whether by expanding exact match search coverage or reallocating spend to more cost-effective campaign types.
- Keyword & Placement Scrubs - While these should happen on a regular cadence, step back and take a broader look. Spring cleaning requires a deeper dive! Have any keywords stopped serving or taken off in the past few months, compared to last year?
Action: Identify keywords that have dropped in volume or relevancy. Likewise, assess placements that may appear insignificant month-to-month but, when viewed YTD, justify exclusion due to cost inefficiencies or low engagement.
- Audience Alignment - Audience strategies shouldn’t operate in siloes. If other channels like social or programmatic are seeing success with new audiences, they should be used in paid search strategies as well.
Action: Test high-performing audiences from other channels and sunset segments that are outdated or no longer eligible to serve. Keeping audiences fresh is key to maintaining relevance and reach.
- Bidding Gut Check - Are campaigns meeting their targets and bid strategies actually achieving their intended goals? Performance can only be accurately evaluated once the attribution window has closed and full data is available.
Action: Compare average target metrics (ROAS, CPA, etc.) against actuals. Look for significant gaps that could indicate bidding inefficiencies, misaligned goals, or the need to test alternate strategies.
- Asset Scrub - Google demands a lot of assets within a single ad unit for ad quality excellence. Asset variety is crucial for Google to serve the best-performing creative combinations, but if assets go stale or fail to generate impressions, they become dead weight in your campaign structure.
Action: Identify underperforming or unused assets within responsive search, performance max, and display ads. If there are assets not getting any impressions over the last 30-60 days, refresh these with new variations to give Google more data points and maintain ad quality excellence.
As the second half of the year looms, complete with Prime Day, back-to-school, and the holiday surge, a clean, high-performing paid search account is non-negotiable. Yes, auditing takes time. But investing the effort now ensures your campaigns are agile, aligned, and ready to scale when it matters most.