Steps to advance the AdWords search campaign audit

If you're operating in a niche market, the search networks on Google Ads and Bing often yield the most relevant traffic for your website. These platforms allow you to control which search terms to target, especially valuable when optimizing for long-tail keywords that generally bring higher conversion rates.

This approach may sound similar to SEO, where the goal is to rank for keywords organically. However, instead of waiting to climb rankings, you're essentially paying for immediate visibility. While this gives you instant results, staying on top of search results for all relevant queries can become extremely expensive. I've seen keyword bids go as high as $40 per click — that's roughly ₹2,800 just for a single visit. If you’re not careful, you can quickly burn through your entire ad budget before generating meaningful conversions.

That’s why you need to take a data-driven, surgical approach to search term bidding.

Start by generating a report of all search terms from the past year. This report should include the campaigns, ad groups, triggered keywords, impressions, clicks, conversions, total cost, conversion rate, and cost per conversion. Tools like Supermetrics can help you pull this data quickly from Google Ads or Bing Ads into a spreadsheet.

Once you have the data, your first task is to identify irrelevant search terms — those that may have been triggered due to broad match or broad match modifier bidding. These irrelevant queries drive up cost without contributing to conversions, so you should immediately add them as negative keywords. This alone can clean up a large chunk of inefficiency in your campaigns.

Next, categorize your search terms based on their cost per click (CPC) and cost per acquisition (CPA). You can define these categories using simple value ranges. For example, label keywords with a CPC above $12.50 as high-cost, those between $10 and $12.49 as medium-cost, and those below $10 as low-cost. Do the same for CPA: anything above $50 is high-CPA, $40–$49.99 is medium, and below $40 is low.

With these labels in place, you can analyze performance patterns:

• High CPC + High CPA: These keywords are costing you heavily without delivering results. Pause or optimize them immediately.

• High CPC + Low CPA: Expensive clicks but they convert well. You might want to scale this if ROI is strong.

• Low CPC + High CPA: These appear cheap but aren't effective. Unless they’re strategic, it’s best to stop investing here.

• Low CPC + Low CPA: The golden set — efficient and scalable. Double down on these.

This categorization helps you shift budget away from inefficient keywords and reinvest in high-performing ones. You’ll also be able to identify potential testing opportunities — such as refining ad copies for keywords that convert well but have high CPCs or restructuring landing pages for terms that get clicks but don’t convert.

While factors like Quality Score, Ad Relevance, and Landing Page Experience also affect performance, this CPC and CPA-based audit alone will give you a strong baseline. It helps you make smarter bidding decisions, reduce wasted spend, and ensure your search campaigns are aligned with your actual business goals.

Think of it as financial hygiene for your performance campaigns — simple, scalable, and effective.

Now that you've categorized your keywords based on CPC (categories A to Z, with each category representing a $0.5 interval) and CPA (categories A1 to Z1, with each representing a $2 interval), you’re set up to isolate what truly drives ROI.

The next step is to identify high-performing, efficient keywords — the ones that offer the best value for your ad spend.

Start by grouping your keywords according to their CPA categories (A1 to Z1) and then mapping their corresponding CPC values and total number of conversions. You’ll notice certain CPA categories, such as X1, Y1, and Z1 (which represent your lowest CPA buckets), consistently generate a higher volume of conversions.

Now look at the CPCs of these keywords in the low CPA categories. If these keywords also fall into lower CPC ranges (say categories T, U, V), it’s your signal to double down. These keywords are not only converting at a low cost but are also not expensive to acquire in the first place.

Here’s what to do next:

1. Increase Bids or Budgets: Scale up these keywords, but do it incrementally to avoid unnecessary CPC inflation.

2. Create Dedicated Ad Groups: Group them separately to fine-tune ad creatives, match types, and landing page experiences.

3. Replicate Intent: Identify patterns in the keyword structure (e.g., “best air purifier for babies” or “credit card for low credit score”) and find similar long-tail variants to expand reach.

4. Feed Back to Strategy: Use these insights to revise your overall bidding and budget allocation. Shift spend from keywords in high CPA and high CPC categories (like A, A1 or B, B1) toward those in low CPA, low CPC groups.

By focusing your efforts on the intersection of high conversion volume and low CPA, you're optimizing not just for efficiency but for scale. Over time, this sharpens your keyword strategy, trims wasted ad spend, and boosts profitability — all by acting on a categorization model rooted in simple CPC and CPA logic.

As you analyze the categorized data, you'll find that categories like X1 (low CPA) show a high volume of conversions and also belong to lower CPC ranges — a sweet spot. This combination makes them ideal candidates for increased investment and tighter ad refinement.

However, a caveat here is that many of the keywords in these buckets are often brand terms. These naturally have high intent, low CPA, and high conversion rates, especially for established brands. While they’re essential, they don’t always represent discoverability or expansion potential. So you’ll want to segment brand vs. non-brand within these categories and isolate the non-brand keywords for new opportunities — this is where your growth potential lies.

Once that’s done, reverse the analysis.

This time, take the CPC categories (A to Z) as the base and evaluate their associated CPA ranges and total conversions. You might discover, for example, that category U — which represents a moderate CPC — also has a disproportionately high number of conversions and still falls under a low CPA bracket.

This reverse perspective validates that not only are these keywords cheaper to acquire clicks on, but they are also delivering meaningful conversions efficiently. Such CPC categories, when matched with the right CPA bands, become high-leverage zones for scaling performance marketing efforts.

In short:

• Use CPA buckets (X1, Y1, etc.) to find undervalued conversion engines.

• Use CPC buckets (T, U, etc.) to validate cost-efficiency.

• Prioritize non-brand keywords within these intersections to unlock scalable, profitable growth.

This dual-layer analysis helps you surgically optimize search campaigns instead of broadly guessing what might work.

You may notice that the search terms in the best-performing categories — whether based on CPA (Cost per Acquisition) or CPC (Cost per Click) — often overlap.

This is a strong signal that those terms are consistently driving both efficient costs and meaningful conversions. But beyond the overlaps, what’s more important is the set of outliers you uncover. Some keywords might have slightly higher CPCs but deliver exceptional conversion efficiency, while others might be undervalued long-tail terms hiding in plain sight.

Once you’ve finalized your high-performing keyword list, the next step is to make sure you're maximizing their reach.

Open up your Search Lost Impression Share (Rank and Budget) reports, broken down by keyword. If a high-performing keyword is losing impression share due to rank, that’s your signal to raise bids manually. If it’s due to budget, then it may be worth reallocating spend from underperforming categories to ensure you capture more impressions on the ones that are working.

This simple but precise move — bidding manually on proven keywords — can immediately improve impression share and ad positions, giving you more volume at acceptable CPAs. It's the final execution layer that helps turn insights into scaled performance.