How to audit audiences in Google Ads

Sign in to your Google Ads Account
In the upper right corner, click ‘Tools and Settings’
Under ‘Shared library’, click ‘Audience Manager’

You should be seeing something like this.

By default you should be looking at the columns:

Membership status
Size:Search
Size:YouTube
Size:Display
Size:Gmail campaign

For ‘Membership status’ the default should be ‘Open’ unless chosen otherwise.
The duration of each audience should be set to maximum [540 Days].
For ‘Size:Search’, ‘Size:YouTube’, ‘Size:Display’, and ‘Size:Gmail campaign’ you should look if the size is large enough in order to serve ads.

Requirements [size]

Google Display Network must have a minimum of 100 active visitors or users within the last 30 days.
Google Search Network must have a minimum of 1,000 active visitors or users within the last 30 days.
YouTube must have a minimum of 1,000 active visitors or users within the last 30 days.
Discovery ads must have a minimum of 1,000 active visitors or users within the last 30 days.

Jump into the first audience ‘AdWords optimized list’ and have a look at the data inside

You should be seeing the ‘Segment members’, Eligibility, ‘Size’ per network, and ‘Segment Use’.

It should look something like this

Now let’s check the ‘active parameters’ [very important for ecom]

Sign in to your Google Ads Account
In the upper right corner, click ‘Tools and Settings’
Under ‘Shared library’, click ‘Audience Manager’
On your left, find and click ‘Your data sources’
Click ‘Details’, under the ‘Google Ads Tag’

It should look something like this

For ecom it should look something like this

Notes
The audience source should be active [green]
There should be ‘Hits’ within the last 24 hours
There should be at least one ‘Active parameters”. For ecom, there should be more.
There should be ‘Lists’ connected with the tag
Each parameter should have a ‘value’ attached to it
For ecom, each parameter should have a ‘value’, ‘hits with feed key in feed’, ‘Match rate’

If you want to know more about Google Ads audits, then visit the following link

Google Ads Audit guide & free [Notion & Google Sheets] template

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