How to Audit Your Business Ads to Stop Wasting Your Marketing Budget

Many ad audits begin incorrectly. Most often, what happens is that marketers access their dashboards, filter the entries by cost, and begin to eliminate the most expensive campaigns. But if your conversion tracking is failing, any decision you make based on that information will be incorrect.

Before you make any changes to your budget, you must confirm that your tracking pixels are functioning properly. Go to Google Tag Manager, or your corresponding tool, and confirm that conversion events are being recorded correctly, with one for each action. If a contact form submission triggers three tracking events, it will seem like there have been three conversions. Your ROAS will be inflated, poorly performing campaigns will seem profitable, and those mistakes will remain after your audit.

This step will take about an hour. If you skip it, the rest of your audit will be based on incorrect information.

Audit your ad formats, not just your creatives

One aspect of budget reviews people tend to overlook is that it might not be the creative in the ad, but the ad format itself that’s the issue.

The average click-through rate for most kinds of business is extremely low. This reflects an actual human reflex in users – they have conditioned themselves to ignore these ads on the periphery (and tops) of websites. You redesign the creative, rewrite the ad copy, and run color tests, but if it’s the same old banner that’s been scrolled past a million times by now, you’re sunk.

When auditing format performance, compare CTR and conversion rate by placement type. If standard display banners are always getting outperformed, reallocate part of that budget to formats that break the habit pattern. Many advertisers have found that banner and interstitial ads used in combination actually have a higher user attention rate together than static display alone.

The point isn’t to constantly chase new formats. It’s to stop paying for the ones that are no longer working for you.

Find your budget bleeders in search campaigns

After you’ve cleaned up tracking, download your search term reports. These are the actual reports that display what people searched for when they encountered your ad. It’s the second place wasted ad spend gets squandered.

You’ve undoubtedly got some irrelevant queries. These are the ones where a broad or phrase-match keyword you thought was targeting one kind of customer was interpreted by an overeager search engine as targeting a very different kind of customer. For instance, a company that makes industrial cleaning equipment discovering the ads are appearing next to search results for people looking to clean their homes. None of those clicks are free, and almost none of them convert.

Search term reports are the input for your negative keyword list. You’re going to add negative keywords to avoid your ad showing in irrelevant places, exclude whole low-intent categories of searches, and update the negative keywords at least monthly. Regular negative keyword updates in response to the search term report will shave off a good 15-25% of your wasted ad budget with no impact on exact-match impressions.

Next, check your demographics. You can usually sort your results by age, location, and device type. You will quickly discover that there’s one age group, one location, or one device for which your cost per acquisition is triple your average and you’re only getting couple-a-month conversions anyway. Exclude them. This is not guessing. This is looking right at your own performance data.

Check your frequency settings before your creatives

Ad fatigue can quickly deplete your advertising fund. When a user is exposed to the same ad from you ten times in a day, the first few times might create an impact. But after that, you’re essentially paying for that user to become increasingly disinterested.

Extract your frequency statistics from your campaign reports. Particularly on display and social campaigns, a high frequency paired with a diminishing CTR means you need to act fast to put the brakes on wasting impressions. The cure is simple: implement frequency caps that limit how many times a single user sees your ad within a given window.

The majority of platforms permit you to enter a cap by the day, over the course of a week, or during the course of your campaign. A weekly cap of five to seven impressions per user is a reasonable starting point for most awareness campaigns. Beyond that, you’re typically spending budget to irritate your audience rather than move them.

Don’t audit on last-click alone

The most frequent audit error is to measure every campaign based on last-click attribution. Since last-click awards 100% of the conversion to the touchpoint that directly spurred it, campaigns intended to raise awareness appear to have no effect.

For instance, a display ad that raised a user’s awareness of your brand, who then Googled your name and converted through a search ad, looks useless according to last-click. Remove it from your plan and you’ll notice search conversions decline.

Before pausing this type of ad when conducting an audit, look at how it contributes to assisted conversions. Most networks make this information available in the attribution reports. Ads that regularly appear in the conversion path but aren’t the last-click conversion often are generating leads at the top of the funnel.

An audit should not only be intended to reduce costs but to identify the locations where your money is working well – and reinforce those campaigns while removing the ones that truly aren’t working.