conversion tracking
the part everything else depends on. if this is wrong, you're optimizing very precisely toward the wrong place.
- the primary conversion has to map to revenue. "form submitted" isn't a goal — a qualified lead or a booked demo is. optimize to a form and the algorithm gets very good at finding people who fill out forms and never buy.
- there has to be enough conversion volume to learn from. a campaign starved of conversions can't optimize against the goal. if you can't feed it, move to a shallower event until volume catches up.
- fire a test conversion and watch it land. client-side tracking loses a chunk of conversions to ad blockers and browsers. half the time something's broken and nobody noticed, because nothing looks broken on the surface.
keywords
where a search account quietly lives or dies. most accounts bid the vague category terms everyone's fighting over and skip the ones that actually signal intent.
- bid the language your buyers use when they're already in-market. not the broad category terms everyone's fighting over — the specific phrases that carry pain, context, and urgency. the words someone types when they already know what they need, not when they're still working out they have a problem.
- go after use-case, solution, and integration keywords. someone searching "[tool] integration," "[problem] software," or "[workflow] solution" is usually much closer to buying than someone on a generic top-of-funnel term. and almost nobody bids on them.
- match types matter as much as the keywords. broad match is too loose at this stage, and phrase match is basically broad with better PR. if the goal is high intent, keep query control tight — exact match, a tightly themed phrase where it earns it, and a negative keyword list you prune every week.
- bid competitor terms — but only when you can win the click. showing up on a rival's name only pays off if you can state your uvp clearly and land them on a page built for the comparison, you vs. them. without that, you're paying premium cpcs to send buyers back to the brand they were already looking for.
the settings that are usually wrong
none of these are hard to fix. they're the switches that stay flipped the wrong way because nobody goes in to look.
- turn off the search partner network. that traffic comes in at worse quality and higher cost, and pads your numbers so the whole account looks busier than it is.
- fill every ad extension. sitelinks, callouts, images. they give google more to serve and lift performance for free. most accounts leave half of them empty.
- set device bid adjustments. mobile and desktop convert very differently in b2b. bid them the same and you're overpaying on the weaker one.
- exclude existing customers, and check geo and language. basic, and wrong often enough that i always look. you don't want to spend premium money advertising to people who already bought.
- set location targeting to "presence," not "presence or interest." google's default is "presence or interest," which shows your ads to anyone who's merely searched about your target location — not just people actually in it. for most b2b that's spend leaking to the wrong country. switch it to presence: people in, or regularly in, the places you target.
- lower bids before you cap budgets. short term, a cap is fine. long term, a campaign pinned at its cap is buying your worst traffic.
what an audit can't tell you
a checklist finds what shows up inside the account. that's useful — most accounts have several of these set backwards. but the things that actually explain underperformance usually don't appear in any settings panel.
a competitor doubled their spend. tracking quietly broke but still reports numbers. it's the slow season and it's slow every year. a landing page got changed by someone who didn't tell anyone. none of that shows up in a change log. none of it is auditable from inside the account.
that's the gap between checking an account and diagnosing one. a checklist tells you what's set wrong. it can't tell you why the account is struggling — the answer usually lives outside the four walls of the platform, and the obvious answer in the dashboard is frequently not the real one.
so run the checks. they'll help. just don't mistake a clean audit for a working account. those are two different things.
google ads audit, quickly answered
how often should you audit a google ads account? a full audit when you take it over, then a lighter pass each quarter. negatives and search terms get checked weekly — that's where b2b qualification quietly slips.
does any of this change for linkedin? the tracking and exclusion logic carries over, but the keyword and bidding sections don't. if your buyers live on linkedin instead, that's a different decision before it's a different audit.
this is the same checklist i run on client accounts. if you'd rather have someone run it on yours — happy to take a look. no pitch, just a conversation.