How to Conduct a PPC Audit

A PPC audit is a comprehensive evaluation of your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising campaigns to identify areas of improvement, inefficiencies, and opportunities for optimization. Whether you’re managing Google Ads, Bing Ads, or other platforms, conducting regular audits helps ensure that your campaigns are aligned with your goals and performing at their best.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to conduct a thorough PPC audit, what metrics to focus on, and best practices to improve campaign performance.

Why Conduct a PPC Audit?

Even well-optimized PPC campaigns can suffer from inefficiencies over time due to changes in the competitive landscape, keyword performance, or user behavior. A PPC audit helps you uncover issues, optimize for better performance, and ensure that you’re getting the best return on your ad spend.

Here are the key reasons why you should regularly conduct a PPC audit:

1. Identify Wasteful Spending

An audit can reveal underperforming keywords, irrelevant clicks, or poorly targeted ads that are draining your budget. By identifying and eliminating these inefficiencies, you can reduce wasted spend and focus your budget on areas that drive results.

2. Improve Conversion Rates

A PPC audit can highlight gaps in your strategy, such as poorly optimized landing pages or ad copy that isn’t resonating with users. Making data-driven improvements based on the audit can help boost your conversion rates.

3. Adapt to Market Changes

The digital landscape is constantly evolving, and so are the behaviors of your target audience. A PPC audit helps ensure that your campaigns stay relevant and competitive by updating targeting, bids, and strategies based on the latest data.

4. Optimize for ROI

By regularly reviewing performance metrics and making adjustments, a PPC audit helps you maximize your return on investment (ROI) by ensuring that your campaigns are aligned with your business goals.

Key Areas to Focus on During a PPC Audit

A successful PPC audit covers several key areas of your campaign, from keyword performance to ad targeting and landing page optimization. Here’s what to focus on:

1. Account Structure and Campaign Settings

Start by reviewing your overall account structure to ensure that your campaigns are properly organized and aligned with your business goals. A poorly structured account can lead to wasted spend and reduced performance.

Best Practices:

• Organize by theme: Ensure that your campaigns and ad groups are organized around specific themes, such as product categories or services, to improve relevance.
• Use appropriate campaign types: Make sure you’re using the right campaign type (e.g., search, display, shopping) based on your objectives.
• Check geographic and device targeting: Review your location and device settings to ensure your ads are being shown to the right audience at the right time.

2. Keyword Performance and Targeting

Your keywords are the foundation of your PPC campaigns, so it’s important to regularly review their performance. Identify underperforming keywords and make adjustments to optimize your spend.

Best Practices:

• Review keyword match types: Ensure that you’re using the appropriate keyword match types (broad, phrase, or exact) for your goals. For example, if you’re targeting a very specific audience, exact match may be more effective than broad match.
• Analyze search term reports: Use search term reports to see what actual queries triggered your ads and add negative keywords to filter out irrelevant traffic.
• Pause low-performing keywords: Identify keywords with low conversion rates or high cost-per-acquisition (CPA) and either pause them or lower bids to minimize waste.

3. Ad Copy and Relevance

Ad copy plays a significant role in attracting clicks and driving conversions. As part of your audit, evaluate the effectiveness of your ad copy and ensure it aligns with your keywords and landing pages.

Best Practices:

• Review CTR and conversion rate: Analyze the click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate of each ad to identify which ads are resonating with your audience.
• Test new ad variations: Continuously A/B test headlines, descriptions, and calls-to-action (CTAs) to find what drives the best performance.
• Ensure message match: Make sure your ads are consistent with the keywords and landing pages they’re linked to, providing a seamless experience for users.

4. Landing Page Experience

The user experience on your landing page is critical to converting clicks into leads or sales. A poor landing page experience can result in high bounce rates and low conversion rates, negatively impacting your overall campaign performance.

Best Practices:

• Check page load speed: Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to ensure your landing pages load quickly, especially on mobile devices.
• Align landing page with ad copy: Ensure that your landing page content reflects the message of the ad that led users there. For example, if the ad promotes a specific product, the landing page should feature that product prominently.
• Simplify navigation and forms: Remove unnecessary distractions, streamline forms, and ensure your CTAs are clear and easy to follow.

5. Bidding Strategies

Review your bidding strategies to ensure you’re maximizing efficiency. Whether you’re using manual or automated bidding, your bids should be aligned with your goals—whether that’s maximizing conversions, impressions, or clicks.

Best Practices:

• Evaluate bid adjustments: Use bid adjustments for devices, locations, or times of day where your ads perform best. For example, if mobile users are converting at a higher rate, increase bids for mobile traffic.
• Consider automated bidding: If you’re not already using automated bidding strategies like Target CPA or Maximize Conversions, test them to see if they can improve performance without requiring constant manual adjustments.
• Monitor CPC and CPA: Track your cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) to ensure you’re getting the best value for your ad spend.

6. Ad Extensions

Ad extensions provide additional information and increase the visibility of your ads, making them more likely to attract clicks. Evaluate how well your ad extensions are performing and whether they’re helping you achieve your goals.

Best Practices:

• Use all relevant extensions: Ensure that you’re using a variety of ad extensions, such as sitelinks, callouts, and location extensions, to enhance your ads.
• Test different extensions: Experiment with different types of ad extensions to see which ones drive the most engagement. For example, if you run a local business, location extensions may significantly improve performance.
• Track performance: Monitor the performance of each extension to identify which ones are generating the most clicks and conversions.

PPC Audit Checklist

To simplify the auditing process, here’s a checklist you can use to conduct a thorough PPC audit:

1. Account Structure:
   • Are campaigns organized by theme or objective?
   • Are the correct campaign types being used (search, display, shopping)?
   • Is targeting set up correctly (locations, devices, languages)?
2. Keyword Performance:
   • Are high-performing keywords prioritized?
   • Are low-performing keywords paused or adjusted?
   • Are negative keywords being used effectively?
3. Ad Copy:
   • Are ads relevant to the keywords and landing pages?
   • Are there ongoing A/B tests for ad copy?
   • Are CTR and conversion rates consistently reviewed?
4. Landing Page Experience:
   • Do landing pages load quickly?
   • Is there a strong message match between the ad and the landing page?
   • Are CTAs clear and compelling?
5. Bidding Strategies:
   • Are bid adjustments being made for devices, locations, and times of day?
   • Are automated bidding strategies being used effectively?
   • Are CPC and CPA in line with goals?
6. Ad Extensions:
   • Are sitelinks, callouts, and other ad extensions being used?
   • Are ad extensions driving engagement and conversions?
   • Are there opportunities to test new extensions?

Common Mistakes to Avoid During a PPC Audit

While conducting a PPC audit, there are several common pitfalls to watch out for:

1. Neglecting Negative Keywords

Failing to regularly update negative keywords can result in wasted ad spend on irrelevant clicks. Make sure you’re actively managing your negative keyword lists to filter out unqualified traffic.

2. Ignoring Quality Score

Your Quality Score impacts both your CPC and ad rank, so it’s important to regularly review this metric and optimize for relevance, landing page experience, and CTR.

3. Focusing Only on Clicks, Not Conversions

High click-through rates are important, but they don’t necessarily translate to conversions. Focus on metrics like conversion rate and CPA to ensure your PPC campaigns are driving real results.

Conclusion

Conducting a PPC audit is essential for ensuring that your campaigns are performing at their best and delivering maximum ROI. By regularly reviewing key areas such as account structure, keyword performance, ad copy, landing pages, and bidding strategies, you can identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to optimize your campaigns. Implementing the findings of your audit can lead to more efficient ad spend, higher conversion rates, and better overall campaign performance.