Introduction
PPC auditing is a critical process that involves an in-depth examination of a PPC campaign to identify and rectify any blunders that may be causing financial losses. The importance of this process cannot be overstated, as it plays a vital role in ensuring the smooth and efficient functioning of your campaigns. Regularly conducting PPC audits is an indispensable component of any successful PPC campaign.
By delving deep into the intricate details of your campaign, you can identify areas that require improvement and fix them promptly. This not only ensures better performance but also helps you avoid squandering your hard-earned money on irrelevant clicks.
Our guide aims to provide you with a step-by-step approach to conducting a successful PPC audit. Our guide leaves no stone unturned, as we dive deep into identifying and resolving errors to ensure maximum results from your campaigns.
What Is PPC Auditing?
The PPC auditing process demands a meticulous, comprehensive, and judicious assessment of every facet of your PPC campaign. This rigorous analysis is geared towards ferreting out any lurking errors that could potentially hemorrhage your financial resources. Indeed, the key to an optimal PPC campaign lies in a multivariate approach, with regular and rigorous auditing serving as the proverbial yeast that leavens the dough of success.
A successful PPC audit is a proactive measure that significantly enhances the quality of your campaign, allowing you to optimize for better performance and effectively circumvent the perils of wasted funds that arise from unneeded clicks.
Why Is PPC Auditing Important?
The intricate process of PPC auditing holds immense significance owing to two cardinal reasons that can’t be ignored:
- By scrutinizing your campaigns with the help of regular PPC audits, you can foster seamless and efficient functioning, thereby allowing you to identify and rectify potential errors that may be responsible for causing substantial financial losses.
- Such audits not only help you avert financial disasters but also provide an excellent opportunity to identify avenues for growth by meticulously analyzing and identifying areas where your campaigns can be improved. In this way, you can make informed decisions that can lead to remarkable results.
However, failing to conduct regular PPC audits may result in a complete disregard of both of these crucial aspects, leading to missed opportunities and significant financial losses. Therefore, it is imperative to underscore the gravity of the situation and take necessary steps to ensure regular and effective PPC audits are carried out.
Types of PPC Auditing
While there are many different types of PPC auditing, the two most common are campaign audits and ad group audits.
Campaign Audits
Conducting a comprehensive review of a single PPC campaign, popularly known as a campaign audit, serves a pivotal role in enabling marketers to identify and address any inadequacies or complications that may be impeding the success of their campaigns.
The main goal of this audit review is to find potential errors, blunders, or other issues that may be causing financial losses, hindering your campaign results. By conducting these audits, you can know where your campaign is performing best and modify areas where needed.
The auditing process typically includes:
- To study the campaign settings.
- Review and examine the campaign’s performance or result data.
- Identifying any areas of waste.
- Recommending changes to improve the campaign’s performance.
Ad Group Audits
An ad group audit is a review of a single ad group within a PPC campaign. It’s designed to identify any errors or issues that may be costing you money.
The ad group audit process typically includes:
- Reviewing the ad group’s settings
- Checking for keyword cannibalization
- Examining the ad group’s performance data
- Identifying opportunities for improvement
- Making recommendations for changes to improve the ad group’s performance.
In the intricate process of conducting a PPC audit, it is recommended that you commence with a campaign audit, which presents a holistic overview of the entire campaign, allowing you to identify any overarching issues that may be hindering optimal performance.
Once done, now you can go deeper into auditing the individual ad groups, to conduct more detailed analysis for each ad group.
How to Perform a PPC Auditing
Manual or automation, you can do PPC auditing in these 2 ways.
Use automation tools like PPC Bee, or our own at 12 Channels to save time. However, if you don’t have access to any tools, or on a tight budget, you can still plan to perform a manual audit.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to performing a manual PPC auditing:
- Look for any potential anomalies or incongruities that might be jeopardizing the efficacy of your marketing strategy.
- Following the audit of campaign settings, delve into the performance data with a hawkish eye, and scrutinize the click-through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), and conversion rate with a fine-tooth comb. Discern the areas where the campaign’s performance is less than satisfactory and establish avenues for improvement.
- With a comprehensive understanding of the performance metrics, your focus now shifts towards ferreting out any potential waste. Conduct an exhaustive evaluation of the keywords that are failing to produce desired results and ads that are being shown to non-converting individuals.
- After unearthing the areas of waste, it’s time to employ your cognitive faculties to ideate innovative solutions. Based on the issues you’ve encountered, make astute recommendations for tweaks to the campaign settings, ad copy, keywords, or any other levers of marketing strategy.
- The denouement of the campaign optimization process is the implementation of the changes you’ve recommended, which must be followed up with an unwavering vigilance to monitor the results. Stay on top of the performance data to determine the efficacy of the changes made and make further adjustments as necessary.
Tools to help with your PPC Auditing
If you’re of the disposition to delve into the realms of PPC auditing, it is within the bounds of possibility to undertake this Herculean task manually. However, we must interject and recommend that you consider employing an automated tool to perform this futile labor. The quintessence of such tools, for instance, the formidable PPC Bee, lies in its ability to save you copious amounts of time and effort while uncloaking issues that might remain shrouded in the complex folds of your campaign.
In your search for the perfect tool to facilitate your PPC auditing, look no further than the venerable PPC Bee. This robust tool possesses the ability to unearth hidden errors, optimize your campaigns to ensure they perform to the best of their potential, and nurture the growth of your business.
Other than PPC Bee there are several other tools where you can perform the audit, including Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Woopra, StatCounter, GoSquared, or Chartbeat.
Whichever tool you choose, make sure it’s one that you’re comfortable using and that will give you the data you need to make informed decisions about your campaigns.
When Should You Conduct PPC Auditing?
Conducting PPC auditing is an important part of any successful PPC campaign. However, you don’t need to perform an audit every day. Conduct audits every month or whenever you are making changes to the campaign. This way the regular audit will help you gain access to errors and mitigate the potential dangers of losing money later on, and helps optimize your campaigns for better performance, and identify growth opportunities.
PPC Auditing Checklist
1. Check your account settings
Account settings are important because they should align with your business goals and should be apt as you want them to work efficiently.
2. Review your keywords
Once you’ve checked your account settings, the next step is to review your keywords with a keen eye for burstiness. Scrutinize your keyword list and eliminate any irrelevant keywords that do not resonate with your products or services.
3. Analyze your ad copy
After carefully reviewing your keywords, it’s time to analyze your ad copy with a focus on perplexity. Thoroughly examine your ads and verify that they are relevant to your keywords while also containing a clear and compelling call to action. If you come across any ads that are not performing well, make changes to your ad copy, and test again to achieve the desired results.
4. Examine your landing pages
Landing pages play a pivotal role in the success of your PPC campaigns. Ensure that your landing pages are aligned with your ads and keywords while also featuring a clear call to action. If you identify any underperforming landing pages, modify them to increase visibility.
5. Review your bid prices
Once you have scrutinized your landing pages, it’s time to delve into bid price review. It’s vital to make certain that your bidding is on the most appropriate keywords and that your bids are sufficiently high to contend with other advertisers. If you discover that your bid prices are too low, it’s crucial to increase your bids and test again, thereby gaining more insights into what works best for your campaigns.
6. Analyze your conversion rates
The final stage in conducting a PPC audit is analyzing conversion rates. This involves looking at your overall conversion rate and confirming that you’re attaining your desired outcomes. If your conversion rates are inadequate, modifying your campaigns is imperative. However, it’s important to continually test and optimize to ensure that you’re maximizing your results.
7. Search Query Report
Conducting a thorough PPC audit requires scrutinizing your Search Query Report, which illuminates the labyrinthine pathways that lead users to your ads. This ordeal of keywords demands careful curation, as irrelevant terms must be eliminated with surgical precision and added to your negative keyword list. Failure to do so risks compromising your campaigns, which must be calibrated to optimize their relevance and efficacy.
8. Competitor Analysis
While evaluating your own campaigns is important, to attain true superiority, one must also scrutinize the methods of one’s competitors. Immersing yourself in the raw data of their ads and landing pages can reveal the tactics they deploy to surpass your performance. Any differences in their success must be pored over with meticulous attention to detail, and any necessary adjustments made to your own campaigns, followed by rigorous testing, to elevate your campaign’s overall performance to uncharted heights.
Regularly conducting audits will enable you to identify and rectify any errors that may be draining your budget and capitalize on growth opportunities.
Tips to Get The Most Out Of Your PPC Auditing
Step 1: Focusing on One Task at a Time to Avoid Overwhelm
When embarking on a PPC audit, it’s easy to feel the need to conquer every aspect all at once. However, it’s crucial to focus on one thing at a time, or risk spiraling into overwhelm and making no real progress. By prioritizing and focusing on one area of your campaign, you’ll be able to optimize and see results more efficiently.
Step 2: Embracing Patience for Long-Term Success
As the old adage goes, patience is a virtue, and that applies to PPC campaigns too. Successful campaigns take time to learn what works and what doesn’t. Don’t expect overnight success, but rather remain patient, stay committed, and keep at it.
Step 3: Staying Flexible and Willing to Adapt
Always be ahead of the curve by staying in loop with new trends and market changes. You should know what works and what does not for your campaign to improve your performance.
Step 4: Monitoring Progress to Avoid Repetitive Mistakes
Keep track of your mistakes and continously monitor your campaign to review any errors and modify them immediately to lessen the burden and cost of the damage.
Step 5: Seeking Assistance to Enhance Your Campaign Performance
If you are experiencing difficulty in getting results, it is always advisable to seek expertise and there are several digital marketing agencies to help to get the best books and services. There also several resources available, such as books, online forums, etc to help you with campaign performance.
By following these tips, you’ll be well-equipped to conduct a successful PPC audit. Remember to stay patient, adaptable, and seek help when necessary to achieve long-term success.
Conclusion
A triumphant PPC campaign mandates a regular and rigorous auditing regimen to secure the zenith of success. The imperative nature of this practice stems from its potential to uncover concealed errors that could otherwise fiscally hamstring your endeavors, all while enabling you to augment your campaigns for optimal performance and illuminate untapped prospects for growth.
If you have yet to integrate PPC audits into your campaign strategy, consider taking the plunge to reap the spoils of victory. To enhance your prospects of success, implement the following tips to maximize your PPC audit potential. Alternatively, delegate the task to a specialized agency such as 12 Channels, whose proficient PPC experts are well-versed in this art form and can provide invaluable assistance in navigating this complex terrain. Contact us today to learn more about how we can propel your campaign to soaring heights of triumph!
