A PPC audit allows you to assess the effectiveness of your paid advertising campaign and tweak key aspects of your strategy. A good pay-per-click (PPC) audit considers several strategic factors, such as ad performance, costs, and return on investment (ROI).
But how do you conduct a comprehensive PPC audit? We asked our paid advertising experts to share their tips and tricks on optimizing paid campaign performance.
Key Takeaways
- PPC audits help you optimize your ads for conversions, saving you money and improving your return on investment.
- An estimated 76% of Google Ads accounts waste a portion of their budget. Honing in on the right negative keywords can reduce irrelevant impressions.
- Organizing your campaigns by similar products, services, or themes makes managing them easier.
What Is a PPC Audit?
A PPC audit thoroughly examines the overall performance and structure of your paid campaigns, identifying areas that perform exceptionally well and shedding light on aspects that need more attention. Regular, comprehensive PPC audits can help you:
- Save money on paid advertising
- Create more effective campaigns tailored to your target audience
- Tweak current campaigns
- Identify new advertising opportunities
- Gain knowledge about target audience behavior
- Boost return on investment
Audits allow you to craft comprehensive PPC reports for advertising platforms like Facebook Ads, Bing, or Google, giving you a better idea of how your campaigns perform and addressing your PPC strategy as a whole.
PPC Audit in 10 Key Steps
Auditing your campaigns requires more than auto-generating reports and refreshing dashboards until your budget runs dry. A good PPC audit requires a proactive approach, often requiring tweaks on the fly or overarching changes that entail recalibrating your entire paid strategy.
Without further ado, here are the ten basic audit steps of well-performing PPC campaigns.
- Define your objectives
- Assess account structure
- Examine keyword performance
- Analyze ad copy
- Evaluate landing pages
- Check bidding strategy
- Review targeting settings
- Inspect conversion tracking
- Update negative keywords
- Audit competitor activity
1. Define Your Objectives
To know whether your campaigns live up to expectations, you need to define clear goals that provide a framework for performance evaluation. It’s imperative to set a clear goal before launching a campaign. Are you aiming to generate leads? Convert visitors into customers? Do you want to boost site traffic or raise brand awareness?
When defining your objectives, focus on those that fit within the SMART framework. Such goals are relevant, specific, achievable within a foreseeable timeframe, and can be measured with the help of marketing metrics (for instance, website visits, sales numbers, number of leads, etc.)
PPC campaign objectives should also align with your broader business goals. Let’s say your brand’s just launched a new product that would allow you to enter a new market. Your PPC campaigns should focus on that new product ensuring that the money you spend contributes to this business goal.
2. Assess Account Structure
Ensuring that your platform account is neatly organized is another essential step. To avoid confusion and reporting issues, try to keep your campaigns structured. For instance, you can organize them by keywords (brand keywords vs. non-brand keywords), product lines, target audiences, geographic areas, buyer journey stages, and more. Create a structure that makes sense for easier report generation and campaign management.
Ad group cohesion is another thing you’d want to examine. Organize keywords within ad groups to ensure they’re closely related to each other and the ads.
Ad groups should include keywords related to a specific topic. For instance, if you're selling camping tents, use keywords like 'best camping tents' or 'best outdoor tents.' This ensures that your ads are relevant to the keywords in each group.
Such cohesion can help you create better ad copy that directly addresses these specific key phrases. Optimized ad copy performs better by naturally aligning with search intent, attracting more clicks. This approach will also help you improve your Quality Score, which can help you achieve a better CPC (cost-per-click) and improved ad placement opportunities.
When looking at your ad groups, try to assess the spots where you could use different ad extensions to enhance ad performance. Ad extensions such as site links, callouts, and image extensions can help you offer more information to your target audience and improve their ad experiences with your brand.
3. Examine Keyword Performance
PPC keyword research should go hand in hand with thorough keyword analysis. Review key performance metrics, such as:
- CPC or cost-per-click: Shows how cost-effective your keywords are
- CTR or click-through rate: Illustrates how compelling your ads are to target audiences
- Conversion rate: Highlights how well your keywords and ads drive conversions
By regularly auditing your keywords, you can always refine your existing list, adding new possible opportunities and key phrases based on user behavior. You can also identify high-performing phrases in your current list that may drive more conversions, warranting a budget increase for them. Conversely, regular audits can also help you weed out underperforming keywords you may even consider removing.
This step involves checking your match types too. There are three distinctive match types and each has a specific role. For instance, exact matches are great for gathering qualified leads while broad matches are excellent for additional keyword research.
The worst thing you can do is run all your phrases under the same type, typically broad match. While it can increase traffic, most impressions will be irrelevant, harming conversions and lowering your ads’ Quality Scores.
Experimenting with different match-type combinations is the way to go, as most likely, there’s room for improvement. Identify which phrases could perform better in different categories to capture the right audiences.
4. Analyze Ad Copy
Ad copy and keywords are also closely tied together. The right keywords should help you find the correct user intent, which will also determine the route you must take with your copy. Ensure it matches your brand’s tone, and conveys a relevant message, addressing user intent directly, clearly, and in an easy-to-understand way.
Strategically placing your call-to-actions can also help you drive more clicks and encourage conversions. Using different keywords, messaging approaches, and CTA placements can be overwhelming and you might not get it right on your first try. This is where A/B testing comes in, allowing you to find the right combination that resonates the most with your target audience.
5. Evaluate Landing Pages
Whether you use dedicated landing pages in your PPC campaigns or your product or service pages, inspecting them before and during your campaigns to ensure they’re optimized for conversions is paramount.
Is the copy on the landing page optimized for the right search intent? Does it address the main pain points of your audience? Can the copy answer their questions or concerns? Do your pages lack high-quality product images? Would embedding a product highlight video help conversions? Would customer reviews and testimonials help build trust and social proof on your pages?
Answer these questions and evaluate every piece of content on the page.
Once the copy and content are perfect, it’s time to focus on the technical characteristics of your pages. Is the page layout user-friendly enough so that users can find their way to your CTAs? Ensure that design choices (color schemes and typography) don’t get in the way of readability and that there’s no unnecessary clutter on your pages.
Also, don’t forget to check your pages’ loading speed both on desktops and mobile screens. Slow, unresponsive pages can cause even qualified leads to abandon your page, wasting both opportunities and PPC budget. Google PageSpeed Insights can help you check load times and determine the elements that need improvement.
6. Check Bidding Strategies
Monitoring your bidding strategies helps optimize ad spend and maximize your budget. Are you automating your bidding or using a manual approach? The latter gives you more control over your budget, but automated bids typically offer greater efficiency.
Manual campaigns can be great for ‘always-on campaigns,’ where you’ve optimized audience targeting, keywords, and ad copy, consistently achieving strong results. Conversely, automated bidding can be more beneficial if you’re venturing into a new market. It allows you to effectively experiment with different bid amounts, creating a smoother learning curve as you familiarize yourself with the new environment.
Keeping a close eye on your bidding and budget also allows you to allocate more resources to campaigns that perform well and shut off ones that don’t.
7. Review Targeting Settings
The next key step is to revisit your audience research occasionally. Are you still targeting the right demographic? Are your ads shown in the right geographic locations, i.e., in the regions where your target audience lives? Are you still targeting the right devices?
Regularly reviewing your targeting settings helps you identify patterns that suggest changes in user behavior. For instance, if your data shows a steady decline in ad engagement with a specific demographic or location, consider excluding them from your strategy and refocus your targeting and budget on other segments that still convert.
8. Inspect Conversion Tracking
Don’t forget to check your conversions regularly too. PPC tracking is paramount to success as it is the best metric for finding out whether your optimization efforts are paying off. Data suggests that accounts on Google Ads waste 76% of their budget on non-converting search terms and fail to check their campaigns once every month.
To avoid that, ensure that your conversion tracking features are set up correctly. There are a few suspicious signs that indicate your strategy may need adjustments:
- Your sales numbers are low, but conversion rates are high: This may signal that your system measures every visit to your landing page as a conversion.
- Low conversion numbers but optimal sales: This can suggest that tracking codes on your landing pages are failing to capture conversion data.
- Identical click and conversion count: If you’re getting identical click counts and conversions, your conversion tracking code may only be placed on your landing page, not on your thank-you or order confirmation pages.
If you're struggling to set up your conversion tracking system, you can always turn to an expert PPC agency to help you streamline the process and set up your campaigns for success.
9. Update Negative Keywords
Your negative keyword list is your best defense against useless impressions and low-quality leads. Figuring out what must go on it shouldn’t include a lot of guesswork. In some cases, negative phrases will be self-explanatory. For instance, if you’re running a pet shop that specializes in cats, anything dog-related can be a negative keyword.
Regularly assessing your negative keyword list helps prevent budget waste, especially when running large campaigns with broad-match keywords. Use query reports to identify irrelevant terms that have triggered your ads in the past and add them to your negative list.
Also, try to be mindful of different types of negative keywords. Some exact-match negatives may not always work as expected, and your ads could still be shown to irrelevant audiences using broad-match negative keywords.
10. Audit Competitor Activity
Taking a closer look at what your competitors are doing can help you leverage their insights to improve your campaigns. Competitor analysis tools are excellent for gaining insight into their strategies. Are they using different messaging for the same keywords and getting better results? How did they design their landing pages? Are they using different content formats or just relying on a more optimized layout that helps them achieve more with less?
PPC Audit Takeaways
Regular PPC audits help you make the most out of your PPC budget, allowing you to maximize the potential of conversions and keeping impression costs as low as possible. Audits ensure your account health is in tip-top shape and provide the insights needed to spot emerging trends in a timely manner.
If you want to improve your paid strategies but lack the time or expertise to manage campaigns, consider reaching out to a dedicated expert team to handle your PPC needs and help you maximize their potential.
PPC Audit FAQs
1. What are the essential steps of a PPC audit?
The most important aspect of any PPC audit is checking whether your conversion tracking systems are up-to-date and working properly. You should also evaluate your ad structure to ensure that your ad sets and groups are set up correctly. Lastly, take a look at your keywords to identify low and high-performing terms.
2. Is PPC better than SEO?
For short-term traffic and conversion increases, PPC is the superior marketing strategy among the two. SEO, on the other hand, will always be a better long-term investment with higher ROI, and more digital leverage, as it allows you to build your visibility, backlink hierarchy, and content marketing prowess.
Typically, experts advise running both tactics together to maximize the potential of your website and make the best use of your traffic.
