In this digital marketing era, pay-per-click (PPC) has shown its worth of being one of the finest platforms for online advertising. It has become so efficient with time, that even flourishing businessmen and digital marketing experts recommend it as a means to endorse businesses online successfully.
Now a quick question for you: Is your PPC campaign as effective as it should be? When it comes to running PPC campaigns, making sure you get the most out of every penny you spend should be your highest precedence. Investing your hard-earned money, valuable time, efforts, and other essential resources into your pay-per-click campaign management is not just enough to boost your business. The primary goals of these investments are to make certain that you are working towards achieving your goals.
The longer you focus on a specific strategy means your chances of overlooking other prerequisites. As a result, you will sit on your couch, assuming that everything is going up appropriately and perfectly. This is why professionals in white-label Seo Company say you have to take a step more into accomplishing your business goals by conducting an audit on your online ads account. This campaign is known as the PPC audit, as it helps you manage and evaluate the performance of your pay-per-click ads.
So, to help get the most out of your PPC ad campaign, here we have put together a step-by-step guide on what to look for when performing a PPC audit and how to go about it.
In this guide, we will cover everything from keyword match types to location targeting and more. Grab a cup of coffee because this guide is going to keep you engaged for the next few minutes! Let’s start with the basics!
What is a PPC audit?
PPC audit assess and evaluate the short as well. Long-term performance of the paid advertising tactics by looking at the cost, performance, and returns of your ad campaigns An PPC audit is a dive into your account to find the areas that need more attention or work to improve performance. PPC audits should happen periodically to maximize the performance of your PPC campaign.
Why should you conduct a PPC audit?
You would have heard people saying you should carry out an audit if you are running a PPC campaign. In view of that, what is the value in conducting the audit? If this is your question too, let me tell you, there are several benefits to auditing your PPC campaign. Listed below are just a few of them:
You can see how your ad strategy is performing over time: As you are investing money and time in the campaign, you must know that it is effective. A PPC audit helps you see how your approach is working overtime and see how you can enhance it.
You can find out performance issues: Significantly, you are continually monitoring and updating your ad campaign to make sure it performs its best. A pay per click audit will help you identify problems within your canvas and fix them as required.
You can see how you are competing with your rivals in the market: PPC audit gives you an insight into your PPC campaign‘s performance. You can use this info to see how your ads are performing compared to your rivals.
Discover where to improve your ad campaign: There is always room to improve your digital marketing campaign, campaign. All you should know is to find it. A PPC audit will help you in that. Through PPC audit, you can discover where to optimize your campaign to make it perform better.
Learn about your audience: The PPC audit will help you know how your viewers interact with your ads. You will find out what your audiences like about your ads and what aspects need more improvement to offer a better experience for them.
When should I audit?
There is never a wrong time to audit your PPC account as you will always find something to help perk up performance. However, the most important time to audit your PPC account when you have a performance issue. As discussed above, it is also a good idea to regularly audit the account if the same team manages it for a long time.
Who should perform the audit?
Well, that’s a tricky question since it depends. If there is a simple, specific issue in the account, take some time and audit it yourself. However, if you need a more comprehensive check, it might be better to contact professionals to do the audit for your account.
Well, the basics are covered. Now let us dive into auditing that PPC campaign you have been putting off for months!
PPC audit checklist:
What’s in here?
- Choose a date range
- Download the data
- Ensure your data is correct
- Review the Campaign Settings
- Review Ad Group Relevancy
- Assess your keyword
- Analyze your conversion and click-through rate
- Choose a Date range:
The first step to PPC audit is setting up the date range. You want to make sure that you have adequate data to analyze. Indeed, don’t look at the small set of data that only extends over 30 days. One month is not enough to evaluate how well the changes you have made are taking effect. It is best to choose a comprehensive data to make sure you can measure results accurately over time.
At least, look at three-month data. This is as much as necessary data to help you see if your strategies are effective. You can also check more, but three months will be enough.
- Download the Data:
As you will be analyzing a large set of data, downloading all the data is the best thing you can do. You can simply export the data from your Google ads account. You will have the choice to export all your PPC account data, or set custom exports. You can download into an Excel spreadsheet so that you can keep the data organized.
- Ensure your Data is correct:
Now you need to check if the data in your analytics is correct. Having incorrect data can often lead to over or under optimization of your PPC campaign. This, consecutively, will hurt the effectiveness of your PPC campaign. Ensuring your data is correct means making sure you have no broken pages and wasting your budget. You should also check the loading speed of your website.
These data will allow you to make improved decisions to enhance your PPC campaign and make sure that all your landing pages work as intended.
- Review the Campaign Settings:
Once you are sure you have the right data, it’s time to review your campaign settings. In most cases, you can quickly check the settings and move on. However, if you do not get it right the first time, you may need to come back to these settings and make adjustments based on your decisions for changes in other areas of the audit.
Before making any performance-based chances, here are some items to review:
- Is the geographic targeting accurate and appropriate?
- Is device targeting done right?
- Is the advanced location settings configured precisely as you want for your viewers?
- Are the budget, bid strategy, and ad delivery methods as you wish?
- Are you using dynamic search ads, and if so, are you aware using them for the right reasons?
- Review Ad Group Relevancy:
This is the only non-metric feature of your PPC campaign to monitor. When you are analyzing your ad campaign, it is vital to look at your ad contents. Your ad contents do impact how your targets respond to your ads.
First, check if your ads are targeted to a particular group of people. You must keep your target audience in mind when running a campaign. If you cannot decide whom to target, you have to find it because it will help you with better results.
Subsequently, see if your ad contents answer the question “what is in it for me?” When your prospects look at your ads, they must know what they get out of selecting your business. Also, check if your ad lists the benefits of your services or products.
You should also check if you have a clear call-to-action on your ad. CTAs call-to-actions are helpful for driving leads to convert. The CTA on you ad should be clear and effective CTA.
Another essential thing to note is if your target keywords are integrated on your page. To boost your ad relevancy, have to make sure that your keywords are incorporated in your ad text.
- Assess your keyword:
As you perform your pay per click audit, you have to audit your keyword selection. Keywords are undoubtedly the driving force behind the success of your PPC campaign. If you want to attract the right leads to your ads, you must choose related keywords.
The most significant part here is optimizing for long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are those that contain three or more words. These can help pull more relevant leads to your webpage. If you are not using long-tail keywords in your SEO campaign, now it’s time to rethink. It will help you create a more successful campaign for your business.
Some aspects of keywords to audit:
- Are negative keywords in use?
- Does the search query report show any keywords that are irrelevant to your conversion goals?
- Are there any keywords with the low-quality score?
- Are there terms with zero conversions but high clicks, impressions, and spend?
- Analyze your conversion and click-through rate:
Next, in our PPC audit checklist, we have placed these two metrics together since they go hand-in-hand with each other. Your click-through rate will affect your conversion rate, so it is vital to check both of them.
Click-through rate is a key factor that influences your PPC campaigns success. It is vital to monitor your ad’s click-through rate to see if your audiences are interested in your ads. This can tell you how many of them see your ads in the search results and choose to click on it.
If your click-through rate is low, you might have to rethink your ad copy. Your ad must have a high click-through rate because it means there is high interest in your ads. This also shows that your PPC ads appear relevant in the search results.
On the other hand, it is essential to note that a high click-through rate isn’t just enough. A high click-through rate with a low conversion rate means that the info your audience see in your landing page is not as relevant.
So, your ultimate goal should be to have a high click-through rate with a high conversion rate. And this means that your ads are relevant to what visitors are seeking, and they are converting. Observe both of these metrics to see where you could probably be falling short.
Take Away!
There you go! No Company wants to waste money. Suppose you are going to invest your time and effort in different digital marketing strategies. In that case, you must ensure that it is well worth your effort and money when your campaign is not optimised correctly you of risk having a high wasted spend. So, to get the most out of your PPC campaign, you must perform a PPC audit and ensure your campaign is running well. A pay per click audit will help you sort out where you can improve your campaign. Perhaps we have revealed some of the checklists to help you run your PPC audit like a Pro. However, we know that in spite of the many advantages of PPC audits, some businesses simply don’t have the time to perform them. This is why we at Submitinme, the white digital agency offer services to make sure your adverts are shown to the right people and in the right places.
