In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, “set it and forget it” is a recipe for wasted ad spend and missed opportunities. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns are dynamic, and without regular attention, even the best-performing accounts can start to falter. This is where the power of a regular PPC audit comes in.
Think of a PPC audit as a comprehensive health check for your paid advertising account. It’s a deep dive into every element of your campaigns, from the highest-level strategies down to the individual keywords and ad creatives. A thorough audit is essential for diagnosing problems, identifying areas for improvement, and ensuring your budget is working as hard as possible to achieve your business goals.
Why Are Regular PPC Audits So Valuable?
Regular PPC audits are crucial for maximizing ad spend and ROI. They uncover wasted budget, pinpoint high-performing keywords, and identify opportunities for growth. Audits ensure your campaigns are optimized, improving quality scores and keeping you ahead of competitors in a constantly evolving digital landscape.
Stop Wasted Ad Spend
This is often the most immediate and tangible benefit. Audits uncover inefficiencies and “budget bleeds,” such as low-performing keywords, irrelevant ad placements, or broad match keywords that are triggering irrelevant searches. By pausing these campaigns or refining your negative keyword list, you can redirect your budget to what’s actually working.
Maximize ROI and ROAS
By identifying and eliminating waste, you can reallocate funds to your best-performing campaigns, ad groups, and keywords. An audit helps you pinpoint high-converting keywords with low bids or identify campaigns that are driving strong returns but have a limited budget. This strategic reallocation directly improves your Return on Investment (ROI) and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).
Uncover New Opportunities
An audit isn’t just about fixing what’s broken; it’s also about discovering hidden gems. By analyzing your search term reports, you can find new, high-intent keywords to target. By reviewing competitor strategies, you can identify gaps in your own campaigns and find new angles for your ad copy and landing pages.
Improve Ad Relevance and Quality Score
A higher Quality Score in platforms like Google Ads can lead to lower costs per click and better ad positions. A PPC audit helps you improve your Quality Score by ensuring your keywords, ad copy, and landing pages are all highly relevant to each other. By cleaning up your ad groups and ensuring a tight thematic connection, you can boost your score and get more bang for your buck.
Stay Ahead of the Competition
The digital landscape is constantly changing. Competitors are always launching new campaigns, ad creatives, and landing pages. A regular audit, which should include a competitor analysis, helps you understand what others in your market are doing well and where you can gain a competitive edge.
How to Do a PPC Audit Well: A Practical Checklist
A successful PPC audit is a systematic process. While the depth of the audit may vary depending on the account’s size and complexity, here are the key areas you should always examine.
1. Account and Conversion Tracking
Check for proper conversion tracking to ensure you’re measuring true ROI. A well-structured account with themed ad groups is critical. This initial audit step provides the foundational data and organization needed to make informed optimization decisions.
Check Tracking Setup
Is your conversion tracking correctly implemented and firing on the right actions (e.g., sales, form submissions, phone calls)? A broken tracking setup can lead to a completely inaccurate picture of your campaign performance.
Review Account Structure
Is your account logically organized? Campaigns should be segmented by product, service, or business goal, with ad groups containing a limited number of tightly related keywords. This ensures better ad relevance.
2. Keywords and Search Terms
Reviewing keywords and search terms is crucial. Analyze performance to identify under-performing keywords to pause. Use the search term report to discover negative keywords, preventing wasted spend on irrelevant searches. This step is about refining your targeting and finding new, high-intent terms.
Analyze Performance
Identify keywords that have a high cost but low conversion rate. Pause or bid down on these underperformers.
Review Search Term Reports
This is a goldmine of information. Go through your search term report to identify irrelevant searches that your ads are showing for and add them to your negative keyword list. At the same time, look for high-performing search terms that you’re not explicitly targeting and add them as new keywords.
Refine Match Types
Are you using the right balance of broad, phrase, and exact match keywords? Ensure your match types are optimized to drive the right kind of traffic without too much waste.
3. Ads and Creatives
Audit your ad copy for relevance and a strong call-to-action. Continuously A/B test new ad variations to improve click-through rates. Ensure you are using all relevant ad extensions to make your ads more compelling and visible, boosting performance.
Audit Ad Copy
Review all of your ad copy. Is it compelling? Does it include a strong call-to-action (CTA)? Is it relevant to the keywords in the ad group?
A/B Testing
Are you continuously testing new ad variations? An audit is the perfect time to review the results of past tests and launch new ones to improve click-through rates (CTR) and conversion rates.
Check Ad Extensions/Assets
Ensure you are using a variety of ad extensions, such as sitelinks, callouts, and structured snippets, to provide more information and increase your ad’s visibility.
4. Landing Pages
Your landing pages must align perfectly with your ads. Audit their relevance to ensure a seamless user experience. Analyze conversion rates and bounce rates to identify pages that need optimization, as a poor landing page can negate all your PPC efforts.
Assess Relevance
Your landing page should be a direct continuation of your ad. Does the landing page content align with the ad copy and keywords that drove the click?
Review Conversion Rate
Check the conversion rate for each landing page. If a page has a high bounce rate and low conversion rate, it may need to be optimized for a better user experience.
5. Bids and Budget
Strategically audit your bidding and budget allocation. Ensure your most profitable campaigns have the budget to scale. Adjust bids on underperforming keywords and test different bidding strategies to maximize your return and secure a competitive advantage.
Analyze Bidding Strategies
Is your current bidding strategy (manual, automated, etc.) aligned with your goals? An audit can help you determine if you should be more aggressive on certain campaigns or if a different strategy might be more effective.
Check Budget Allocation
Are your budgets distributed correctly across your campaigns? Ensure your most profitable campaigns have the budget they need to scale, while underperforming campaigns are not eating up valuable resources.
Final Thoughts
A PPC audit is not a one-time event; it’s a vital part of a continuous optimization cycle. For most businesses, a quarterly audit is a good rhythm to maintain campaign health and stay on top of new opportunities. By making regular audits a priority, you can ensure your paid advertising efforts are not only surviving, but truly thriving in the competitive digital landscape.
