The pay-per-click audit is the analysis program that helps advertisers resolve the inefficiencies. It is a must to maintain an up-to-date campaign. There is so much to explore and know how to do a Google ads PPC audit. Here we are with the best guide for conducting a Google ads PPC audit.
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What Is A PPC Audit?
A PPC is a pay-per-click advertising system that enables businesses to run ads on Google. This is the most cost-effective way to increase brand awareness. A PPC audit is a detailed account of the performance of your PPC advertising campaigns.
The main goals of a PPC audit are to get valuable insights, increase conversions, find new opportunities, optimize the campaign, and get maximum return on investment.
Why To Do PPC Audit?
In this era of digital marketing, there are so many experts around and indeed very tough competition. To maintain your place in the market to need to keep checking your performance. There are so many benefits of conducting a PPC audit.
The PPC audit report will help you get to the point where you can cut the cost. This will help you to figure out the main problem sources. The audits may help you to improve targeting. You can keep a check on the ads interaction which will further improve your upcoming campaigns.
How To Do A Google Ads PPC Audit?
Let us now move to the guide and learn how to do a Google ads PPC audit. The first step you should do is to revise your campaign goals. You should start analyzing your Google ads by doing a PPC audit. To conduct a Google ads PPC audit you may follow these steps:
Step1: Check and optimize the Google account settings
Optimizing your Google ads account can also help you to reduce expenses. Match the setting with your goals. Check the targeted parameters. You can customize geolocation, customer categories, etc.
Organize your campaigns with proper categories. Check whether your PPC campaigns are named properly if not name them. This helps in better organization of your account. An organized place can be easily explored and modified. Similarly, an organized account can be audited and issues can be fixed swiftly.
Check that the geotagging of your ads is appropriate, revise the location list, and edit it according to your product demand. Check the devise targeting, bidding strategy, etc.
Step 2: Analyze the conversion tracking
The most important aspect of running an ad is to get conversions and potential leads. Track your websites to get valuable insights. Conversion tracking is the free tool provided with the Google ads account. The tools help you to know customers’ responses to the ad.
You can also find which keywords, ads, ad groups, or campaigns are giving the best results and which should be removed. If you are unable to check the conversion tracking you can:
Verify the Google ads can see and record the conversion tracking. Once you confirm that the conversion tracking has been recorded. Follow these steps to check the conversion tracking:
- Go to your Google Ads account
- Click the goals section
- Click the conversion drop-down from this section
- Click summary
- Select the conversion action you want to check
- The conversion tracking report appears
The conversion tracking tool also helps you to understand the return on investment. Smartly strategizes the bidding. The tool can also provide insights about the cross-device and cross-browser conversion rates.
Step 3: Form ad groups
The ad groups are groups of ads targeting similar keywords. These ad groups can help draw more traffic in lower investments. The ad groups control and maintain the structure of the campaign, separating each theme and product.
While Google Ads PPC audit checks the structure of the ad groups, and checks that the grouped ads are targeting different customer personas. Check that the headings match your messaging and product service goals. Figure out new opportunities to improve segmentation based on demographics, interests, etc.
Check that your ad groups contain at least 10 keywords. The ads grouped should complement each other rather than compete. They should be at an optimum cost-per-click level and should have having equal budget.
Step 4: Landing pages
Landing pages are often undertreated for ads and campaigns. Landing pages are the point where visitors turn into customers. Auditing and analyzing landing pages are a crucial part of Google ads PPC auditing. A creative and optimized landing page will help to improve your return on investment rates.
Check the loading speed of the pages, and make sure that the landing page is well optimized for mobile as well as desktop. If you are providing offers, discounts, etc. make sure they are highlighted. Make the visual experience of the visitors worth remembering. Above-the-fold content should be crisp and clear grabbing attention.
Step 5: Quality score
The quality score is the tool that scores your ad performance. The ads are judged on their relevance, keywords, and click-through rate. the score is another essential part to consider while auditing your Google ads. A higher quality score lowers the cost per click.
The score will help your ad rank better in the SERP ads section. The quality score depends on the historical impressions of the exact search record. By changing the keyword matches you cannot improve your quality score. To check the quality score
- Go to your Google Ads account
- Click the campaign icon
- Click the audiences, keywords, and content drop-down
- Click search keywords
- Click the column icon at the upper right corner of the table.
- Under the modify columns for keywords select the quality score section
- To view the quality score choose any of the attributes and add it to your table
To self-examine and check whether the keywords used and the ads are relevant to each other. Check whether the search intent of the keywords matches the ad campaign.
Step 6: Report and action
Once you have finished checking various elements of your campaigns. You should prepare a spreadsheet and a list of the sections that require improvements. The actual work starts after the audit.
The documentation of the audit report will help you plan the actions required to optimize your action plan. After re-analyzing the report, revise and modify your goals. Further, modify your Google ads PPC campaign.
5 Tools For Google Ads PPC Audit
You can perform the audit manually but it will be a very time-consuming long task. tools are always faster and better options when it comes to doing audits. The main reason is that there is very little chance of missing any point. Here are some tools that may help to perform these audits.
1.WordStream Google ads performance grader
The WordStream Google ads performance grader is a free tool that provides support to analyze the Google ads campaign. The tool helps marketers to understand the performance of their Google ads PPC campaigns. The tool doesn’t use your data. It only collects from Google ads PPC campaigns.
The report formed after the analysis highlights the key elements of an ad campaign such as quality score, usage of negative keywords, longtail keyword optimization, account activity, click-trough-rate, landing pages, etc. The reports will help to get a perfect ads campaign.
2. Clever audit
The clever audit tool is a web-based software designed specially to manage and optimize Google ads campaigns. The main features are keyword tracking, conversion tracking, and campaign and budget management. The teams can individually assess and work on the campaign ads.
The tool sends reminders for performing Google ads PPC audits. After the analysis is performed the tool provides a list of recommendations and tips to enhance the ad campaign.
3. HawkSEM free PPC audit
The HawkSEM free PPC audit comes in the top 3% of the PPC audit agencies. The tool has many exclusive features including a discussion of the goals of the campaign, 10 10-point point-free PPC audit, yearly performance projections, and a deep analysis of audit reports and projections.
The sole focus of the tool is to help small and big businesses generate revenues. The tool points out areas that require attention. It highlights the problems and the solution to quickly resolve them.
4. Adalysis
The Analysis software has been surveying businesses since 2012. the has amazing features for carrying out a Google ads PPC audit. The tool can perform in-depth audits by covering elements like finding keywords that are preventing your ads from ranking, negative keywords, etc.
It figures out the issues with the landing pages, networks, ad groups, and search terms. You can use this tool as a plugin for Google ads to analyze the ad campaign. It highlights the quality score and provides a statistical-based solution to enhance the PPC ad campaign.
5. Opteo
Opteo is a simple auditing tool. it detects errors and sends alerts. The exclusive features ping you when is find any issue in the campaigns. It alerts you when it finds any typos or budget-related issues. It observes performance metrics changes and provides reasons for the changes.
It offers templates to make the complex PPC dashboard easy to understand. it also detects payment errors, web errors, spelling mistakes, broken links, etc. In short, it is a package of tools for doing SEO for Google Ads.
This is how you can do A Google Ads PPC Audit. Having a Google ads PPC audit periodically is crucial to maintaining the position in the market and having a constant ROI for your business.