The 15-Step PPC Audit Guide & Checklist
In this PPC audit guide, we’ll walk through a 15-step checklist for conducting an in-depth audit of your company’s PPC campaigns. If you need help conducting your PPC audit or would like a free one, call us today at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist.
Let’s get started!
What is a PPC audit?
A PPC audit assesses the short- and long-term value of your paid advertising strategy by looking at the performance, cost, and returns of your ad campaigns. PPC account audits should happen on a routine basis to maximize the performance of your PPC strategy.
Why should I conduct a PPC audit?
You may have heard that you should conduct PPC auditing if you’re running a PPC campaign. But why? What’s the value in conducting a PPC audit?
There are numerous benefits to auditing your campaign. Here are just a few of them:
- You’ll see how your strategy performs over time: If you’re investing time and money into a campaign, you want to know that it’s working. A PPC audit allows you to see how your strategy is working over a given time period and how you can improve it.
- You’ll discover performance issues: It’s important that you’re consistently monitoring and updating your campaigns to perform at their best. A PPC audit will help you pinpoint issues within your campaign and fix them as needed.
- You’ll see how you stack up to the competition: PPC audits give you insight into your campaign’s performance. You can use this information to see how your ad performs compared to your competition.
- You’ll discover where you can improve your campaign: Whenever you run a digital marketing campaign, there’s always room to improve it. A PPC audit will help you discover where you can optimize your campaign to help it perform better.
- You’ll learn about your audience: A PPC audit will help you understand how your audience interacts with your ads. You’ll discover what your audience likes about your ads and which aspects need improvement to provide a better experience for them.
The 15-step PPC audit checklist
Download Now: PPC Audit Checklist
Never done a PPC audit before? Then this PPC audit checklist is for you! Use it to start (and complete) your first PPC account audit using the following steps:
- Choose a date range
- Download the data
- Document your budget
- Look at your ad content
- Review and revise your landing pages
- Check and log your quality score
- Assess your keyword targeting
- Analyze your click-through and conversion rates
- Review your bids
- Check your location targeting
- Assess the effectiveness of your ad schedule
- Compile areas of wasted spend
- Double-check your conversion tracking
- Conduct a competitor PPC analysis
- Evaluate your automated ad campaigns
Learn about each of those steps in more detail below!
1. Choose a date range
The first step to creating a PPC audit is to set the date range. You want to ensure that you have enough data to analyze.
You don’t want to look at a small set of data that only spans over 30 days. A month isn’t enough time to analyze how well your changes are taking effect. It’s best to choose a wider set of data to ensure you can accurately measure results over time.
At the very least, you’ll want to look at three months’ worth of data when doing a paid search audit. This is enough data to help you see if your strategies are working. You can also look at more data than this to see a fuller scope of your campaign, but three months will often be enough.
2. Download the data
Since you’ll be analyzing a large set of data when PPC auditing, it’s a good idea download all of that data. You can easily export your data by going into your Google Ads account. You’ll have the option to export all your PPC account data, or you can limit it to data from certain campaigns.
If you run Bing ads, you’ll also want to download the data for those ads, especially if you’re running the same ads on both these platforms. It will help you get a better scope of your PPC efforts.
You can download all of this data into an Excel spreadsheet. It will help you keep the data organized.
3. Document your budget
When you’re conducting your PPC audit, make sure you know how much you’re spending on each campaign. Record that data so you can see how much you’re spending to generate the results you have for your campaign.
You’ll want to record your cost-per-click (CPC) and how many clicks you get for your budget. This is important information to know when you’re setting up your paid search audit because it will help you understand how successful your campaign is.
4. Look at your ad content
This is one of the only non-metric aspects of your PPC campaign you’ll want to monitor. When you’re analyzing your PPC campaign, it’s important to look at your ad content. Your ad content strongly impacts how your audience responds to your ad.
First, you want to check that your ad is targeted to a specific group of people. You should have a target audience in mind when you run your campaign. If you can’t determine who you’re targeting, you’ll want to set a target audience because it will help your campaign product better results.
In addition, you’ll want to make sure you have a clear call-to-action (CTA) somewhere in your ad. CTAs are essential for driving leads to convert. It’s also a good idea to integrate your target keywords into the ad copy.
These are just a few aspects of your ad copy that you’ll want to analyze. If you want people to click on your ads, you first have to ensure that your ad copy is effective.
5. Review and revise your landing pages
Getting people to click on your ads is only half the battle. After someone clicks, you still have to get them to convert, and that happens on your landing pages. So, in addition to auditing your ad copy, you should also audit the pages those ads link to.
Here are some things to optimize your landing pages for:
- Relevance: Make the landing page relevant to the ad copy. If your ad copy promotes running shoes, don’t make the landing page about dress shoes.
- CTA: Your call to action (CTA) should be clear the moment users land on the page, with all the other content on the page directing users toward it.
- User experience: Double-check that your landing page loads quickly and is optimized for users visiting it on mobile devices.
6. Check and log your quality score
Quality score is one of the most important aspects of your PPC campaign. Your quality score and maximum bid determine your ad’s placement.
Your quality score is determined by factors such as your ad relevancy and click-through rate (CTR). The more relevant your ad is to someone’s search query, the more likely they are to click on it.
For that reason, pay attention to your quality score when you’re conducting your PPC audit. If it’s too low, you’ll want to take steps to improve it. Improving your quality score will improve your ad’s overall performance.
If you have a good quality score for your keyword selection, you can continue your practices to ensure that you keep your ranking.
7. Assess your keyword targeting
As you conduct your PPC audit, you’ll want to consider your keyword selection. Keywords are a driving force behind your PPC ad’s success. If you want to drive the right leads to your ad, you must choose relevant keywords.
The most important part is that you optimize for long-tail keywords. These are keywords that contain three or more words. An example of a long-tail keyword is “flower shops in Harrisburg, PA.”
These long-tail keywords help drive more relevant leads to your page. If you aren’t currently using long-tail keywords in your campaign, now is the time to optimize for better keywords. It will help you create a more effective campaign for your business.
8. Analyze your click-through and conversion rates
Next in this PPC audit checklist, we’ve pieced these two metrics together because they go hand-in-hand with one another. Your click-through rate (CTR) will influence your conversion rate, so it’s important to look at both of them when PPC auditing.
CTR is a key factor that influences your ad’s success. It’s important that you monitor your ad’s CTR to see if people are interested in your ad. This tells you how many people see your ad in the search results and choose to click on it.
If you have a low CTR, you may need to rethink your ad copy. You want to have a high CTR because it means there is high interest in your ad. It also means that your PPC ad appears relevant in the search results.
It’s important to note, however, that it isn’t enough to have a high CTR. A high CTR with a low conversion rate means that the information your audience sees in the search results is relevant, but once they click on it, your landing page isn’t as useful.
The ultimate goal is to have a high CTR and a high conversion rate. This means that your ad is extremely relevant to what users are seeking, leading them to convert. Monitor both of these metrics in conjunction with one another to see where you can improve.
9. Review your bids
When you run your PPC campaign, keep track of your bid amounts. You’ll want to monitor this number to see how much you are spending to obtain leads for your business when conducting a paid search audit.
You want to leave enough room for your business to make a profit. If you’re spending $10 each time someone clicks on your ad, and they’re buying a $15 product, you’re bringing in a pretty thin profit. You may be able to reevaluate your strategy to lower your costs and allow for more clicks.
Analyzing your bid amount will help you figure out if you can afford to lower it. If you can, go for it. That’s a valuable way to help your business earn more leads.
10. Check your location targeting
Location analysis is a valuable tool to your PPC audit. When you run your PPC ads, your ads may appear in search results for different cities or states. This is even truer if you have a strong online presence and sell your products to people across the country.
With location analysis, you can see where your ads perform best. Google Ads allows you to see the different cities where your ads appear, and how your ads perform there. It’s a great way to see where you’re most likely to drum up business.
This also helps you figure out where you can increase ad spend. If certain cities are driving better results than others, you can allocate more funds towards ads in those cities because you know you’ll get more with your return on investment.
Ultimately, location analysis helps you figure out where to move funds to drive the most successful results for your Google Ads campaign.
11. Assess the effectiveness of your ad schedule
Another important thing to check is when your ads are appearing. Most ad platforms enable you to set specific days and times when you want your ads to appear, a feature you should be taking advantage of if you’re not already. And if you are taking advantage of it, make sure to include it in your PPC audit.
Do some A/B tests to see which days and times drive the most engagement for your ads. Then narrow your ad targeting to those specific times. For example, you might currently be running your ads from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. But your audit might reveal that your ads actually drive the most conversions between 4 and 6 p.m. That shows you that you should adjust your ad schedule.
12. Compile areas of wasted spend
Companies don’t want to waste money. If you’re going to invest time and effort in different digital marketing strategies, you want to ensure that it’s well worth your investment. When your campaign isn’t optimized properly, you risk having a high wasted spend.
Wasted spend is the amount of money you’re losing from your Google Ads campaign. It shows you different aspects where you miss out on conversions or spend too much money to obtain leads.
One of the biggest culprits is irrelevant keywords. Sometimes you’ll target a particular keyword, but your ads will then appear for different variations of those keywords as well. Not all of those variations are relevant. People who see your ad in irrelevant search results might click on it, only to find that it isn’t relevant to their search.
For example, let’s say you own a bakery. You create a PPC ad to advertise your red velvet cakes to brides, party-throwers, and more. Your long-tail keyword is “red velvet cake.”
Now, let’s say someone is looking for “red velvet cake pops.” Even though your bakery doesn’t make cake pops, your ad is appearing in search results because you’re targeting “red velvet cake.”
So, people who are looking for the cake pops will click on your ad, only to find that you don’t have what they need. You end up spending money on ads that people don’t find useful, which results in an unprofitable campaign.
This is where negative keywords can help. Negative keywords are keywords that you specifically tell your ad platform not to show your ads for. In this case, you would make “pop” a negative keyword to ensure you don’t appear in search results for cake pops.
By implementing that simple trick, you reduce your wasted ad spend.
13. Double-check your conversion tracking
Tracking conversions is a crucial part of any PPC campaign. You need to know whether your ads are successfully driving conversions that lead to revenue. But your conversion tracking will be useless if your data is compromised in any way.
That’s why the next step in your PPC audit should be to verify that your conversion tracking is correctly set up. Whatever data tracking tools you’re using, ensure that they’re tracking the right data and storing it in the right places.
You should also check your data quality. If any of your data is duplicated, incorrect, or left out, it could badly skew your PPC analytics and cause you to draw faulty conclusions about your campaigns.
14. Conduct a competitor PPC analysis
Looking at your PPC strategy in a vacuum isn’t a very effective way of evaluating it. To get a fuller picture of how well it’s performing, you should look at what your competitors are doing as well. That means you should include a competitor analysis in your PPC audit.
You can use tools like Semrush and SpyFu to analyze your competitors’ PPC campaigns and identify what they’re doing differently from you. If you find that they’re using a particular tactic that’s working great for them, you might want to use the same tactic in your own ads.
Conversely, you might find some big PPC opportunities they’re missing out on, which gives you the chance to take advantage. For example, maybe your competitors are failing to target some of their branded keywords, giving you the chance to target them instead and “steal” that traffic.
15. Evaluate your automated ad campaigns
Many businesses use automated PPC campaigns, which rely on machine learning to set optimal bids and test different ad variations. Google Ads, for example, offers tools like Responsive Search Ads and Performance Max campaigns.
It can be easy to leave your automated campaigns on autopilot and forget about them, but it’s important to evaluate their effectiveness every so often to make sure they’re still working correctly.
When you conduct a PPC audit, take the time to check in on any automated campaigns you may have. Are you happy with the bids they’re making? Are they still in line with your campaign goals? And most importantly, are they driving conversions?
If the answer to any of those questions is “no,” then you may want to reoptimize those campaigns.
Get a free PPC audit today from WebFX
If you want to get the most out of your PPC campaigns, you have to conduct regular PPC audits to ensure that those campaigns are running properly. But you may want some help doing that. If so, WebFX can help.
We’re a full-service digital marketing company that specializes in PPC. Our team of over 500+ experts has over 29 years of experience improving PPC campaigns for our clients, and we can’t wait to do the same for you. We’ll help you create a campaign that drives valuable results for your business.
Don’t believe us? Just ask our clients! Check out our 1,100 client testimonials that attest to the great work we do for our clients!
If you’re ready to start running PPC audits that help you improve your campaign, contact us online or call us today at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist.
We look forward to helping your business grow!