PPC Audit - A Crucial Step to Assess Your Short and Long Term PPC Campaign Goals

PPC audit - List of Contents
1. What Is PPC Audit?
2. Why Is It Important To Audit Your PPC Campaigns?
3. When Should You Perform PPC Audit?
4. How to Conduct PPC Audit?
Step 1: Track Your Conversions
Step 2: Review Goals
Step 3: Structure the Account
Step 4: Campaign Settings
Step 5: Assess Ad Group
Step 6: Keywords
Step 7: Ads and Extensions
Step 8: Landing Pages
Step 9: Quality Score
Step 10: Create Your Plan

PPC AuditIt is no wonder PPC gives instant results when compared to SEO. But, have you ever wondered what the secret is to make your PPC campaign successful? While some marketers would tell you to target the right keywords,landing pages,Ad copywriting,others think it's all about how you are using it to reach the goals.

Well, I prefer to differ. Why? If you are focusing on the wrong things, all your efforts will lead to nowhere, no matter how hard you work.

Orison Swett Marden said it right, “All who have accomplished great things have had a great aim, have fixed their gaze on a goal which was high, one which sometimes seemed impossible.”

Imagine how hard it would be after all the efforts and money you have invested in PPC campaign? That’s why successful marketers have an effective strategy – Choose a goal, audit, and stick to it!

Maybe your PPC campaigns fail to achieve the expected ROI, or you have recently invested in adwords and can’t figure out. Perhaps you wanted to see how your strategy affects PPC performance. PPC audit is the right way to ensure your PPC campaigns are successful and brings you a good ROI.

What Is PPC Audit?

PPC audit is an analysis to determine the areas that need improvement or work out to improve PPC campaigns’ performance.  Through a PPC audit, you’ll be able to check the technical aspect of every strategy and ensure it is helping but not negatively impacting the PPC campaigns.

Believe it or not, PPC is complex. Yes, even if you are managing your PPC accounts with best practices, the chances are high that you may have missed something. Besides, things change rapidly in adwords. What worked yesterday might not work today. To keep up with the Google Ads new features and stand out of the competitors, it’s essential to regularly conduct PPC audits.

Why Is It Important To Audit Your PPC Campaigns?

We can’t deny the fact that PPC is one of the most effective digital marketing techniques that give you instant results without spending a lot. However, there is no shortcut to boost your rankings through PPC campaigns. But, the odds are high only if you set goals, review your strategies, measure your results, and optimize the campaigns accordingly.

PPC audits are crucial because it helps you to resolve the issues within your PPC campaigns. See, you might be thinking that this strategy would be working without knowing that the ad is not worth spending. That’s why PPC campaigns require constant reviews, adjustments, and optimizations to remain successful, more importantly, to ensure that the money you have invested in doing good for your business rather than harm.

Let’s take a look at the stats that indicate how PPC is beneficial for your business to understand the importance of auditing your PPC campaigns.

• About 77% of people say they’re confident they can recognize search advertisements in the results
• Paid ads have an 11.38% CTR on Google
• About 33% of people click on paid search AD because it answers their search query directly.
• Businesses make an average income of two dollars for every dollar they have spent in adwords.
• About 41% of clicks are from the top three paid ads on the search results.
• The average click rate for a PPC ad in the first position is 7.94%
• 50% of the users who click the ads are more likely to purchase than the organic visitors
• 70% of millions like it when they can click on a product they see in the ad
• Display advertising has proven to increase traffic to websites by 300%
• Adwords can help increase brand awareness by 80%
• Compared to other adwords, Google ads alone reaches more than $2million applications and websites
• About 40% of marketers increase their PPC budget as it is an effective and most influential platform.
• Within a day, PPC ads can put a website on the first page
• Measuring PPC is much easier than SEO because it is easier to track ROI and manage budgets.

As you see, PPC is very beneficial for businesses, regardless of the size. Adwords can help achieve your digital marketing goals, but only if you monitor, track the right keywords and audience, and track your PPC campaigns. This is when the PPC audit comes to the rescue. However, poorly targeted campaigns can not only affect your PPC performance but could also be annoying to the users who are searching. When the campaign is well optimized, you can increase the click rate, and the users will really appreciate.

By auditing PPC campaigns you could:-

• Increase conversions and Return on investment
• Ensure everything is working as per your strategy
• Helps to remain on a budget, saving money
• Save time
• Refine campaigns
• Help target the right keywords and audience
• Helpful strategy revisions

When Should You Perform PPC Audit? 

• PPC strategies are great, but you are not receiving the same results – PPC audit helps you find out the changes you have made and how to adjust the campaigns.
• You would like to make your campaign more effective – A chance to freshen up things and figure the opportunities you are missing.
• Just getting started with PPC and struggling to get the desired results – Help get the basics right.
• You are getting good results ad budget is out of control – Through PPC audit you can identify and implement the right strategies that help save money.
• No results even after implementing various strategies – Find out what went wrong.

How to Conduct PPC Audit?

Before starting the comprehensive PPC audit, make sure you have access to important platforms such as Google analytics, conversion tracking, and Google Ads ID number. Okay, now let’s get started.

Step 1: Track Your Conversions

When it comes to SEO campaigns or PPC campaigns, tracking the performance is crucial so that you could adjust the strategy accordingly. But, many PPC managers tend to ignore it, which could actually cost you more. Without this data, it is impossible to determine whether all your hard work and the money you have invested in is paying off or not.

In fact, this should be one of the important tasks that need to be completed once setting up the account. However, a recent report from leading research shows that, only 58% of the 2,000 accounts featured in their study had at least one conversion registered. Well, that’s not good!

Do you have this data? If not, that’s worse. Google has made this setup very easier. So, use it wisely. Please don’t fall into this group.

Step 2: Review Goals

Reviewing business and account goals is a crucial step to make sure you understand what you want to focus on, and the objectives are. There might be multiple conversion goals. But, understanding what they are and what performance you are seeking can help evaluate the campaign throughout the rest of the audit process.

See, a campaign without goals leads to nowhere. You’ll lose all your hard-earned money. Defining the goals and focusing on the same makes it easier to audit the account effectively.

Ask yourself – what are your conversion goals for your company? Have your goals changed? Has your target audience changed? Can you track performance beyond ads? What are the goals of Google ads? What are your campaigns up to? Ignorance or one wrong move could take off with your money. The more you ask, the better it could be.

When you are clear on what you want to accomplish with your account, you’ll start seeing the desired results by implementing the right strategies.

Step 3: Structure the Account

Disorganized account structure is bad! Having the right can help efficiently manage your campaigns and yield better data. This, in turn, helps to make the right decisions while auditing your PPC account. Structure the account based on your business activities, persona targets, product lines, service lines, and subject.

Of course, there’s no right or wrong way to structure the account. But, doing so will give you complete control over the more crucial elements and details of the budget, ads, bid, and overall management.

Step 4: Campaign Settings

Once you have verified the data you have collected, it’s time to start reviewing the campaign settings. Yes, you need to go through your account and review all the keywords you are targeting and the bids and individual settings.

In most of cases, you could just review your campaign settings and move on. But, you’ll have to come back to review the settings in order to make the adjustments based on your reviews and decisions in the other areas of the audit.

Spend a few hours looking and analyzing each of your campaign settings and make sure that everything is perfect as it should be.

Pay more attention to the networks you are advertising on, languages and location you are targeting, your campaign budget, and the bidding strategy that you have opted for. It is essential to explore and evaluate every aspect of these sections.

Step 5: Assess Ad Group

As a general rule, an add group shouldn’t have more than 15-20 keywords. For auditing purposes, this is a valid point. Scan all your accounts to find out the ad groups that contain more than 20keywords. Those are the groups that need to be cleaned up.

You may think why the ad groups are so important and why it needs a clean-up? Well, the ad group keyword won’t greatly affect the performance of your campaigns. But, aren’t you serving the same set of ads for every keyword in a group? If your keyword list is big, it includes various themes. It means that you’ll be forced to write a generic ad copy for each.

Instead, your ad group should have a list of similar keywords that all have the same theme. Then, you could create specific ads for each group which the users are looking for. In short, you should focus on ads, landing pages, quality scores, increase click rate, and convert users.

Hence, it is essential to regularly audit your ad groups and remove the terms that aren’t a good fit.

Step 6: Keywords

Keywords are the backbone of both PPC campaigns and digital marketing. So, it is of utmost importance to regularly audit the keywords to ensure whether they are performing well and give the desired results.

Adjusting the bids, match types, and even the keyword are the key elements to improve performance drastically.

Start with all of your enabled, live keywords, select the date range, and then sort them by cost or click rate. Doing so will give you a list to work through.

With the list, choose the performance metric like click rate and return on ad spent and optimize the keywords accordingly.

Try to reduce the bids if some of the keywords are costing you more but not great ROI. It is a good idea to run through the keywords regularly and identify relevant search terms you appear for.

Step 7: Ads and Extensions

Ads are often ignored in many accounts. But, you need to audit your ads frequently as it is one of the key components of your PPC campaigns. They act as the front of your bidding strategy. If your ads don’t communicate why the customer needs to click your site then they should be replaced with a new one. By auditing the ads you could be able to find certain issues, including two ad variations in each ad group, use of dynamic keyword insertion, use of call to action in headlines, and ads with low click rates and scores.

Don’t forget to use ad extensions as they help provide additional information and improve click rate. The more extensions your ads have, the bigger they are in the search result pages.

Step 8: Landing Pages

Although landing pages are external when it comes to Google Ads. They directly impact the performance of your ad campaigns and greatly influence the metrics you see throughout ads.

Having consistent wording and terms throughout the landing pages, clear call to action and positive reviews are the key factors to click rate and conversion rates.

Auditing your landing pages will help ensure it has the necessary elements as mentioned above. Check whether the inquiry forms work, is there a good headline and clear call to action on the page. Find out the dedicated call tracking number is working. Figure out is it worth adding more landing pages or reducing them based on ads and pages' performance.

Step 9: Quality Score

According to Google, a quality score is an estimate of the quality of keywords, ads, and landing pages. Every keyword you bid will be given a score anywhere from 1-10. How is quality score determined? Click rate, ad relevancy, and landing page experience are the three factors that help determine the quality score of a keyword.

Therefore, auditing your quality score is crucial. In fact, it has a significant impact on the effectiveness of your adword campaigns. An ad with a high score can reduce the click through rate, higher impression visibility, and boost rankings.

Step 10: Create Your Plan

Now that you have done all the work and compiled a list of items that needs attention, it’s time to curate an action plan to enhance the performance of your PPC campaigns and click rates. The first thing you need to do is document the audit data and prioritize the list.

Document your findings, your course of action, future plans, and other details when auditing all these key elements. By documenting your audit into a document, you could craft your action plan, share the insights with your PPC team, and more importantly, help maintain the accounts in tip-top shape.

The real work starts after documenting. Yes, you must start optimizing your campaigns based on the data you have.

If you had specific issues that might affect the performance, start working on it. Then, prioritize according to the things that impact your bottom line the most or the amount of time it will take to complete with the tasks.

However, don’t make too many changes quickly as chances are high doing more harm than good. You wouldn’t want to make things worse. So, make the changes slowly. Discuss with your PPC team and find out what works best to improve the performance.

Final Thoughts

PPC is suitable for any kind of business, regardless of size. Running PPC campaigns will ensure to attract your potential customers at the right time and boost your sales when compared to SEO. In fact, PPC gives quick results. That said, auditing and maintaining your PPC campaigns regularly is essential.

By optimizing your PPC campaigns, you are sure to reap the benefits from the qualified and conversion-oriented traffic. Don’t fret if you are a beginner. PPC campaigns are easier to run and optimize. Initially, it may be harder to understand how it works. The more you work on it, the more you could understand.

Need help with PPC audit? We, white label Google premier partner, could help you. Our PPC experts are well-trained and have the knowledge to audit your campaigns and suggest the right action plans to run the ads campaign and improve the performance effectively.

Happy Auditing!