A Comprehensive Guide And Checklist On Paid Search Audit

What Is PPC Audit?

An audit of our pay-per-click advertising plan will look at how well our ads are doing, how much they’re costing us, and how much money they’re bringing in, both in the short and long term. If we check our PPC account often, we can improve our strategy.

Importance Of PPC Audit

We may have read or heard from someone else that it’s a good idea to audit our PPC campaign. Why, then, would we want to do a PPC audit?

Having a campaign audit done has a lot of good points. Just a few examples are:

• We’ll keep track of how well our plan works over time: If we’re going to put money into a campaign, we should at least make sure it works, so we’ll keep an eye on how things are going to see how our strategy is doing over time. With the help of a PPC audit, we can see how well our strategy has worked over time and make changes if we need to.
• We will run into performance problems: If we want our campaign to work at its best, we need to keep it up-to-date and improve it. A PPC auditing can help us find and fix any problems with our campaign.
• We compare favorably with the competition: show how well our marketing efforts have worked. This information allows us to determine how well our ads compare to our competitors.
• We will find out what parts of our campaign could use some improvement: No digital marketing campaign is perfect. Using a PPC audit can help us find ways to make our campaign work better.
• We’ll learn more about our readers: With a PPC audit, we can learn more about our target audience and how they respond to our ads. We’ll learn what people like best about our ad and what changes could be made to reach our target audience better.

PPC Audit 10 Stages

What, have we never done a PPC audit? Then put this PPC audit checklist to good use! We can use it to start and end an audit of our first Pay-Per-Click account.

Choice Of Data Range

Before we start a PPC audit, we need to decide how long it will take. We must be sure that we know enough to make a good decision.

A 30-day period isn’t long enough to look at a small sample of data. We’ll need more than a month to determine how well our changes work. Choosing a larger data set lets us get a more accurate picture of how results change over time.

We can conclude from three months of data, but we can always look at more if we want to. If we don’t have data from the last three months, look at the last six. This information will help us figure out how well our plans are working.

Download The Data

Since we’ll be going over so much information, our best bet is to get it all together. If we have a Google Ads account, exporting our data is simple. We can export data from our PPC account as a whole, from a single campaign, or a custom report.

Especially if we also have ads on Google or Facebook, we should get the data for our Bing ads. We can see more clearly how well our PPC campaigns have worked.

One can download an Excel file with all of this information on it. The system will make it easier to keep information in order.

Create A Budget Document

When doing a PPC audit, it’s important to know how much money has been spent on each campaign. Keeping an eye on these details can help us determine if our marketing budget is enough to reach our goals.

Keep an eye on our cost per click and the total number of clicks our budget will allow. Before we post our audit, we should know much about this data to judge how well our campaign worked.

Review Ad Content

This is the most important thing we don’t need to measure about our PPC campaign. Our PPC campaign review isn’t complete until we consider what our ads say. Our ad’s content greatly impacts our response from the people we want to reach. Start by targeting a certain group of people with our ad campaign. When planning our advertising campaigns, remember who we want to reach. Choosing a target audience will help us succeed if we don’t know where to focus our efforts.

People who see our ad want to know how they can get something out of working with our business. Make sure that any marketing materials we make focus on the benefits of our offer. Also, ensure that our ad has a clear CTA. Call-to-action buttons are a must if we want our conversion rates to increase. Make our ad copy more interesting by including a call to action.

Check if our keywords are used in the content of our page when we look at our PPC ad. If we want our ads to be more relevant, we should include keywords related to our ads’ text. We need to look at a lot of different parts of our campaign. If we want our pay-per-click ad campaign to be profitable, we must ensure that our ad copy works.

Verify And Record The Quality Score

Every pay-per-click marketing strategy needs a quality score. If we want our ad to show up higher in Search Engine results, we need to raise its quality score. Our highest bid and quality score will affect where our ad will appear.

The number of times an ad is clicked on, and its relevance to the user are two things that go into the quality score (CTR). If we want more people to click on our ad, it should be as close as possible to what the user is looking for.

As we do our PPC audit, don’t forget to consider our quality score. If our rating for quality is low, we need to work to raise it. If our ad’s overall performance increases, so will its quality score. If our chosen keywords have a high-quality score, we can keep doing what we’re doing to stay where we are.

Access The Keywords We’re Focusing On

We should also look at the keywords used for a PPC audit. It will do better if we choose the right keywords for our PPC campaign. We need to use keywords if we want the right people to see our ad. Long-tail keywords should be our top priority when it comes to SEO.

We should start using long-tail keywords in our campaign if we haven’t already. Use these long-tail keywords to get more interested people to visit our site. It will help us make advertising for our business that works better.

Examine Our Conversion And Click-Through Rates

Our click-through and conversion rates affect each other, so it’s important to keep an eye on both. Since these two indicators work well together, the next part of this PPC audit checklist will look at them. Our ad’s click-through rate is very important. We can determine how interested people are in our ad by keeping an eye on the click-through rate. This tells us how many people click on our ad after seeing it in the search results.

Our ad copy may need to be changed if our click-through rate is low. If our CTR is high, we can be sure that people are looking at our ad. Our PPC ad will also show up in the search engine results if it is relevant. Remember that having a high CTR is not enough on its own. If we give users useful information in the search results but less useful information on the landing page, our CTR and conversion rate will increase.

The click-through rate and the conversion rate should be in the high 90s. This shows that our ad is helpful to customers because it meets their needs directly. Keep an eye on both to see where we may fall short.

Evaluate Our Bids

During our PPC campaign, don’t forget to add up how much we’ve bid on each ad. This metric is noteworthy because it shows how much money our business spends on possible customers.

We need room to move to make the most money from our business. 

The better choice would be to change our plan to see if we can lower our costs and get more people to click on our ads.

Look at our current bid; we can see if a lower price is likely. It’s a good plan to help us get more leads for our business.

Check Our Location Targeting

PPC audits can use location analysis to do a good job. When we run pay-per-click ads, they may appear in searches for many different areas. It’s true if we sell goods all over the country and have a large online presence.

With the help of location analysis, we can figure out where our ads will do the most good. When we use Google Ads, we can see where and how people watch our ads across the country. It is a great way to determine where we will most likely make sales.

We can use geographical targeting and analysis to move money for a better Google Ads campaign. Depending on what we find, we might decide to spend more on advertising in some areas. If ads do better than others in some places, we can put more money into those places, knowing that our money will make more.

Compile Wasteful Spending Areas

Nobody likes to spend money, so no business likes to do it. We need to know that the money we spend on different kinds of digital advertising will be worth it. If we don’t know how to optimize our campaign, we could be wasting a lot of money. The amount of money we’ve lost on a Google Ads campaign didn’t work. It shows how we could lose sales or spend too much on leads.

One wrong way to use keywords is to use words that have nothing to do with each other. Even if we use great keywords in our optimization, our ad may still appear in the wrong search results. People might be annoyed if they see our ad, click on it, and then find out it has nothing to do with what they were looking for.

How Are PPC Audits Performed?

During a PPC audit, all of our digital advertising networks are looked at and analyzed to figure out how to optimize them best.

Most of the time, we should wait to do a PPC audit until it shows big changes. Since we need the information to explain the state of an account, it’s best to collect data for at least a few months. Changes to the structure of an advertising program are big enough to affect statistics and make it harder to analyze data.

The scope and depth of PPC audits can vary a lot. In general, I like to put them into two groups:

• Tool-based PPC audits
• Comprehensive PPC audits

Tool-Based PPC Audits

A PPC audit can be done by staff in-house or by a consultant or agency from the outside. Most of the time, these audits combine software-based auditing methods with a small amount of human inspection.

Our pay-per-click advertising campaign should be free. Consultants and agencies often do this kind of PPC audit services to show their clients how good they are at PPC management. Then, they’ll offer to help us put the ideas into action at their normal prices.

There is nothing wrong with this. But there is no guarantee that these audits will be helpful and come with restrictions. That depends on how well the audit team uses its methods and learns about our business’s processes and goals.

Comprehensive PPC Audits

An experienced consultant or agency can do a full PPC audit to take a fresh look at our advertising accounts. Interviews are the first step in a more in-depth look at the factors that affect website traffic.

We should do full audits of our most important advertising networks and channels. Potential examples include:

• Google Ads
• Microsoft Advertising
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Google Display & Video 360
• Retargeting

PPC audits are often done on the Google Ads network because it is the market leader. Google owns 92% of the search engine business around the world. Bing only has about 3% of the market, while Yahoo only has about 2%.

Future Aspects

To gain the most out of their search ads, advertising managers must regularly audit their campaigns to ensure they are running well and getting the best PPC ROI possible. Data analytics are a big part of modern business; the more we use it, the better our sponsored advertising will work.

If we want a free audit for our PPC account, use the Account Audit Report from PPCexpo to get to the heart of our campaign’s problems, and then do an audit of our PPC campaigns to improve their performance.