What a SEM audit includes: complete guide

Running Google Ads without periodically reviewing how your account is configured is like driving with your eyes closed. Money goes out, clicks come in, but nobody really knows if the budget is working efficiently. A well-executed SEM audit answers exactly that question.

This guide explains what a SEM audit should include and which signals indicate your budget is leaking. Boost doesn't manage SEM, but understanding this analysis will help you demand more from whoever does it for you — and to grasp why the landing page receiving that traffic is just as critical as the campaign itself.

What is a SEM audit and what is it for

A SEM audit is a structured review of a pay-per-click advertising account (Google Ads, Microsoft Ads) aimed at identifying inefficiencies, improvement opportunities and budget leaks. It's not a monthly performance report — it's a deeper diagnosis typically performed every 6–12 months, or when results deteriorate without obvious cause.

The main objectives:

• Detect spend on irrelevant or low-quality clicks
• Identify campaigns or ad groups with poor structure
• Evaluate the alignment between ad and landing page
• Verify that conversions are correctly configured and attributed

Quality Score: the efficiency thermometer

Google Ads' Quality Score (QS) is a rating from 1 to 10 that measures the relevance of your keywords, ads and landing pages. It's not a business KPI, but it is an efficiency indicator: a low QS means you're paying more per click than competitors with better relevance.

The three components of Quality Score:

Component	Approximate weight	What it measures
Expected CTR	High	Likelihood of a click vs. competitors
Ad relevance	Medium	Match between keyword and ad copy
Landing page experience	High	Speed, relevance and UX of the destination page

A SEM audit should identify all keywords with a QS below 5 and propose concrete actions: reorganize ad groups, improve the copy or update the landing page.

Campaign structure: the skeleton that holds everything together

A well-structured account is easier to optimize, measure and scale. The most common structural issues that appear in audits:

Overly broad ad groups. When a group contains 50 keywords with different intent, it's impossible to write a relevant ad for all of them. Best practice is SKAG (Single Keyword Ad Group) or tightly themed groups.

Mixed match types. Using broad match without modifiers alongside exact match in the same group creates overlap and complicates analysis. An audit should map what match type is used at each level and why.

Campaigns without geographic or device segmentation. If your business performs very differently by city or by mobile vs. desktop, campaigns should reflect that difference — not average everything together.

Landing page alignment: where conversion is lost

This point connects directly to CRO. One of the most costly mistakes in SEM is sending paid traffic to a generic homepage or a page that doesn't fulfill the ad's promise.

The message match rule: the landing page headline must reflect the keywords and the promise of the ad. If the ad says "Women's running shoes on sale" and the landing shows the entire sports catalog, there's an alignment problem that destroys conversion.

A thorough SEM audit reviews:

• Does each campaign have its own landing page, or do they all use the same one?
• Is the load speed of landing pages adequate for paid traffic?
• Is the main CTA on the landing page consistent with the search intent?
• Is conversion tracking installed and verified on those pages?

Negative keywords: the filter that saves budget

Negative keywords are one of the most undervalued yet most profitable elements to manage. Without an updated negative list, your campaign may be showing up for completely irrelevant searches.

Example: a B2B software company that hasn't added "free" or "freeware" as negatives may be paying for clicks from users who will never buy.

An audit should review:

• The search terms report for the last 90 days
• What percentage of spend goes to terms with zero recorded conversions
• Whether shared negative lists exist across campaigns
• Whether negatives are applied correctly at campaign vs. ad group level

Conversions: are you measuring the right things?

A SEM audit must always include a review of the conversion setup. It's common to find accounts counting every pageview of the thank-you page as a conversion — artificially doubling the data — or with conversions configured but no economic value assigned.

Key questions:

• Do the recorded conversions correspond to real business actions (purchase, lead, call)?
• Are there active duplicate conversions?
• Is Smart Bidding being used with enough historical conversions to be reliable?
• Does the chosen attribution model make sense for the sales cycle?

What to do with the findings

An audit without an action plan is a nice-looking document that serves no purpose. Findings should translate into a prioritized roadmap: what to change this week, what to restructure this month and what to experiment with next quarter.

If your SEM agency doesn't deliver this kind of periodic analysis, it's time to ask for it. And if the problem isn't in the campaigns but in what happens after the click — on the landing page and through the funnel — that's where conversion optimization comes in.

You can also run a quick diagnosis of your site with Scan&Boost, our free conversion analyzer.

---

Adrià Vidal — Boost · Conversion Rate Optimization