After investing money, time, and effort into a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, you hope to see positive results that bring value to your business. This is vital regardless of whether you’ve been running paid ads for years or a brand-new business. Fortunately, there’s a way you can do this by conducting PPC audits.
Carrying out PPC audits is essential because you must never settle even if your PPC marketing campaign has been a success. Aim for perfection all the time instead, which is what PPC audits help you accomplish.
This way, you’ll be able to avoid trivial mistakes or learn new ways of doing this better without many issues later on. Besides, you may refer to Digital Autopilot to determine how to filter out trusted digital marketing agencies.
Check out the following tips on how you can effectively audit PPC accounts:
1. Analyze Your Keywords
An excellent way to start an audit of your PPC accounts is to analyze your keywords. Then, know the answers to the what, why, where, how, and when behind the keywords you chose to use.
This may seem like a lot of information to dig up about each keyword, but it’s an essential task to allow optimal optimization of your PPC campaign.
Some of the things you should include in your PPC audit checklist include;
- Finding and testing new keywords regularly
- Narrowing down the target for specific ads, landing pages, and keywords
- Removing every keyword overlap
- Reviewing and minimizing cost per acquisition to boost lead quality
- Double-checking to confirm you don’t bid against yourself
- Aligning the keywords with your conversion objectives
Analyzing your keywords is critical because you can’t make informed decisions about optimizing your account without a clear picture of what’s working and what’s not.
This is why PPC auditing is something you should do at least once a month, so you have enough time to react to any changes that may have occurred in your account since the last audit.
2. Examine Your PPC Goals Closely
It’s essential to know what you’re looking for when auditing PPC accounts. Doing this is vital because there are different goals you can have for your PPC campaigns.
This is why you should first know what your goal is; otherwise, it’s going to be hard to figure out whether you’ve gotten closer to that goal or not.
In addition, not clearly understanding why you’re performing the audit in the first place increases the chances of getting wrapped up in PPC auditing for auditing’s sake. As a result, you may lose sight of your actual goal easily.
3. Monitor Unnecessary Spending
If you’re responsible for managing an account with PPC ads, it’s crucial to understand what’s going on in your account.
This means being aware of the performance of the keywords and how much you’re spending. If you don’t do this, there’s a chance you might end up wasting money on unnecessary ad spending.
Monitoring your spending is essential because it’s a common mistake for account managers to assume that their PPC campaigns are running as efficiently as possible. You don’t want to make the same error even though you can get away with this assumption in some instances.
Thus, it’s worth the time to audit your accounts if you notice a sudden dip in performance or are just trying to squeeze a little more from your budget. The good thing is that there are several ways you can keep an eye on your spending without missing out on efficiency.
4. Run Campaigns Regularly
Running your PPC campaign audits regularly is critical to keeping your PPC account in top shape. Audits allow you to be proactive in identifying issues with your account and make changes as they arise versus waiting to see if there’s an issue and then trying to fix it.
Moreover, audits provide you with relevant data to benefit your business. Thus, you must perform regular auditing to improve your PPC account’s performance.
Ideally, you should run a manual campaign audit at least once a month and include the following:
- Account Health Check Report: This report shows how effective each campaign is to achieve its goals. It also points out where each campaign has opportunities for optimization.
- Quality Score Report: This report reveals a detailed analysis of each keyword’s quality score. It will allow you to know what needs improvement and where you can find your biggest opportunities for improvement.
5. Check Your Competition
Another tip to consider when auditing PPC accounts is to keep an eye on the competition to get insights into how your competitor’s ads perform.
If you’re in a challenging field, it can be hard to keep track of your PPC performance without any benchmarks from others. The trick is to find ways to gain insight into what other businesses are doing that can help you improve your performance and increase conversions.
Keeping an eye on your business rivals will give you an idea of what’s working for them and how they go about their ad campaigns.
You should also check search queries that drive traffic to your competitor’s site. Such data can help you understand which keywords drive the most conversions and inform future optimization strategies.
Monitoring your competition will also tell you what the market will bear and how far ahead or behind you are in terms of ad spending. It will also give you an idea of which kind of ads work best for your competitors, which you can then use to help improve yours.
Remember that keeping tabs on what your competition is currently doing becomes an easy task because we live in a digital era surrounded by daily interactions using Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
Takeaway
Auditing your PPC campaign as often as possible can help you find overlooked opportunities and detect mistakes to market your brand effectively to your clients.
This audit enables you to achieve such goals because it allows you to get actionable feedback you can utilize to better your marketing campaign. Feel free to incorporate the detailed tips presented here into your PPC campaign to boost its chances of success.