Managing a PPC account is a lot like playing a game: once you know the rules, you can start getting into creative strategy. Account auditing is an important part of understanding the rules—essentially preparing the board.
While different checks are required in a PPC audit—some weekly, some even daily—many of these can be boiled down to five key questions:
- Does your account structure support your business goals?
- Do you trust your conversion tracking?
- How well does your idea fit with your target persona?
- Are you falling into accidental waste?
- Should you scale or optimize?
In this post, I’ll go over each of these issues and provide tips and rules of thumb to help you solve each one. Each of these questions touches on a different aspect of PPC management, all of which apply to any account. If you’re not asking at least once a quarter, you’re hurting your account.
1. Does your account structure support your business goals?
Account Structure Arguably the most important element of an account.A poorly structured account even the best ideas and wasting valuable marketing dollars and time.
For example, a common structural error is to include too many ad groups in one campaign or too many keywords in one ad group.If a business needs to cover all services/markets/products, it’s understandable why there might be some overfilling – but ideally a campaign should only have 5-7 ad groups and no more than 3-5 keyword concepts. This is to ensure that the budget can support each ad group and that the keywords are grouped by price and relevance.
Knowing which structure is best for you boils down to the following business questions:
- How much is a customer worth?
- Are all markets worth the same or are they worth more?
- Do you need to invest in all parts of your business, or you can play to your liking?
These questions will provide context for existing account setups and inform the best path forward
return, Campaign should cover at most one country (ideally a time zone/major market). This is because ads are served in the account’s time zone, not the user’s time zone. Additionally, supporting multiple major markets with a single budget is challenging. If you’re asking your budget to handle too much, use impression share (and lost impression share due to budget) to guide you.
In some cases, there may not be enough budget to handle all parts of the business. Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) can be a powerful way to cover multiple parts of a business.
However, Dynamic Search Ads can also steal budget from general search ad groups/campaigns if negatives are not set correctly.
Both the regular campaign (top) and DSA campaign (bottom) are struggling due to competing for the same traffic.
The easiest way to apply a negative is by negative keyword list, which is why I recommend Dynamic Search Ads as your own campaign. Negative keyword lists cannot be applied only at the campaign level.If you choose to keep Dynamic Search Ads in the same campaign, be sure to Add all your aggressively bid keywords as exact-match negative keywords.
A final note on DSA: it is critical that you have set negative goals. This ensures that your DSA doesn’t waste budget on homepage or blog content.
Ad extensions can also help provide reasonable coverage to less profitable parts of the business without actively investing in marketing dollars. Use sitelinks, callouts, price extensions, and structured snippets to cover low search volume or expensive keyword concepts. This will ensure that your budget is not set to fail, while also increasing your ad’s click-through rate.
When working with your account structure, you will be able to determine which parts are consistent and which need to be adjusted.
Key Points:
- If you don’t have a budget for all parts of your business, consider using an extension or DSA to cover them all.
- A campaign with too many goals and too much content will get stuck. Check the number of campaigns/keywords, where they are targeting, and what products/services the campaign covers.
- Check for campaign/ad group level negatives, and if you are using a negative keyword list, make sure you are not missing ad group level negatives (to drive traffic).
2. Do you trust your conversion tracking?
Conversion tracking is an important part of a PPC campaign. However, this is also one of the easiest things to screw up (Conversion tracking hangs up here). When reviewing campaigns, it is easy to fall into false positives/false positives due to poor conversion tracking.
The first and more important check is to make sure you have conversion tracking set up and track actions that your business finds valuable. To do this, go to Tools & Settings > Conversions.
There, you’ll be able to see which actions are set as primary and secondary conversion actions.
Primary actions will count towards the record cost per acquisition (CPA) and acts as a bid signal. Minor actions will be logged, but will not affect reporting or bidding algorithms.
It is critical to ensure that the correct actions are tracked and specified correctly.
For phone leads, it’s also important that you don’t double-count conversions using phone tracking techniques. If you use a call tracking solution, chances are you have an analytics goal and should stick to it as your primary tracking. If your website doesn’t have any other form of tracking, Google Call Tracking is great for call-only ads and extensions.
Finally, it is crucial to check that there is no duplicate code. Many tools and channels require their own tracking snippets. Make sure your site doesn’t have duplicate Google Tag Manager (GTM) or tracking hardcoded into the title and GTM. You can use Google Tag Assistant or press ctrl/command u to view the source code.
Key Points:
- Make sure the correct conversion action is set as the primary action.
- Verify that there are no instances of duplicate code.
- If phone leads are important, be sure to use some form of call tracking.
3. How well does your copy/creation fit with your target role?
An ad account is more than just structure and bids.A big part of their success lies in Advertising proposal and creativity, and it tends to be associated with Target Audience.
When auditing an account, it’s important to check two key points:
- Does the copy/creation fit the unique market needs of the ad group?
- Are audiences being targeted/excluded for pre-budgeting?
As a general rule of thumb, you only want One key creative per ad group (A/B testing is still allowed). If you combine too many products/services/personas into one ad group, you won’t be able to directly address the needs of your customers, thus undermining the effectiveness of your creative.
This is especially true for Responsive Search Ads (RSA), which essentially supports A/B testing of copy/creative.
Make sure you’ve pinned the “Hook” to Heading One (H1) and the Call to Action (CTA) to Heading Two (H2). Title 3 is not always shown, so it should only be used for “happy” creatives.You can find more tips here Responsive Search Ad Copy Template.
Be sure to check audiences (targets and exclusions).If your campaign uses Smart Bidding strategy, any observed bid adjustments will be ignored. It’s a good idea to check in case you want to focus your budget on or away from a specific audience. Targeted audiences should always target and observe (Excluded if they are not ideal).
Key Points:
- Message map creative, so each ad group has a buyer persona.
- If you’re using Smart Bidding, make sure there are no bid adjustments for the observed audience.
- Save your best ideas for titles one and two in RSA.
4. Are you falling into accidental waste?
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: The advertising platform has no malicious intent and is ultimately invested in helping brands/advertisers succeed.
Some settings are so easy to enable (and possibly miss opt-out), which can lead to unintended waste. These settings are manual and automatic policies.
One of the biggest settings to look out for is the location option. when you locate a locationit can target people in + who showed interest in the location, only people in this location, or only people who showed interest.
The default setting is for everything, which can lead to spending outside the target area. Be sure to review each campaign’s settings and confirm that the location options are correct.
Another slightly hidden waste comes from one of the most useful parts of Google Ads: the Keyword Planner. It’s easy to accidentally add a lot of broad keywords to one ad group instead of having the keyword concept add to multiple ad groups of the right match type.
make sure you are Add keywords that won’t accidentally duplicate Or put you in auctions that you don’t value/can’t afford.
Key Points:
- Confirm that your location is set correctly.
- Make sure to add keyword ideas to the correct match type and in the correct location.
5. Should you scale or optimize?
many PPC Audit focus on Optimize account performance (i.e. eliminating wasted spending). However, knowing the signs of success and scale is just as important.
impression share is a good indicator to help you understand where your account is and may be. If your impression share is low due to position, it could mean there is a structural issue that is hindering ROI. Losing your budgeted impression share means more potential profit (as long as business operations can support the additional volume).
Another important metric for optimization and scale is your clickthrough rate (CTR) and conversion rate. If you have a high CTR and conversion rate, it means you can take this proven method and apply it to other markets/add budget to your campaign. If your CTR or conversion rate is low, you know you have a creative or targeting problem (and should stay in optimization mode).
Key Points:
- Use impression share to guide whether you’re in optimization or scale mode.
- Always contact sales and CS to confirm you can handle more business.
- If the CTR and conversion rate are good, then you have won the idea and the positioning.
Ask these questions at every PPC account audit
Auditing is never a one-and-done process. Make sure you keep asking these questions to your account and stick to the business metrics you need to be successful:
- Does your account structure support your business goals?
- Do you trust your conversion tracking?
- How well does your idea fit with your target persona?
- Are you falling into accidental waste?
- Should you scale or optimize?
our Free Google Ads Performance Scorer Can help with this process, identifying areas for improvement and strong areas for scaling. Try it out and see what you find!
