If you’re looking for an effective marketing tactic, PPC ads should be at the top of your arsenal. These ads are proven to increase web traffic and generate leads almost immediately; when done correctly, of course!
If your PPC Account is performing well, it’s generating traffic and increasing conversions, leads, and sales. Sometimes your ads perform well right off the bat, but more often, it requires analyzing the performance and metric data and making optimizations as necessary. But what exactly should you analyze and look for when making corrections?
A PPC account review will help you discover the opportunities for improvement. Our PPC audit checklist focuses on five key factors. The information below will focus on Google, but this information may be applied to other platforms.
Let’s get started!
1. Conversion Tracking
Reviewing conversion tracking includes auditing and troubleshooting to find areas of improvement and missing areas in a campaign. Conversion tracking can determine how effective an ad campaign is by measuring a customer’s key actions when interacting with your ads (think downloads, sales, or calls). It’s important to note that conversion tracking requires that goals be set up in your Google Analytics account and that the proper HTML code is added to the ad’s landing page.
During this part of the review, we like to ask ourselves a few questions:
- Are conversions set up properly, and are we measuring the right things?
- Are we spending money and time in the right places, or is there an opportunity to improve spending?
- Do the conversion goals match the company goals?
Once we’re happy with the conversion tracking, we’ll move on to a review of the ad structure.
2. Ad Structure
Your ad structure is the base of your ads. The overall goal is to ensure that your ads appear in searches, show to the right people, and increase your quality score while keeping your ads account organized.
How you structure your ads will depend on a few key factors, including:
- The budget allotted to the campaigns
- The competitive landscape surrounding the company or industry
- The specific audience you want to target
You’ll likely need more than one campaign for your ads to run efficiently and effectively. We recommend setting up different campaigns to target keywords, audiences, and competitors. For example, you may have one campaign for your products, one for company-specific keywords, and another targeting your competitors.
Once we’ve made sure that your ad structure is optimal, we’ll be able to confidently move into the next steps of the PPC audit review checklist.
3. Targeting
You will see no traction on your ads if they are shown to the wrong audience! When reviewing an ad’s targeting, we want to make sure the ads are targeting who they should be. The goal is to target key decision-makers in the areas you sell your products or offer your services. If you’re a commercial signage company serving Texas, having your ad shown to accountants in Canada wouldn’t benefit.
Targeting the right people in the right places is a great place to start, but you can create an even deeper understanding of your audience by researching the buyer’s journey of your customers. The buyer’s journey outlines the path a potential customer takes when making their purchasing decision. Knowing the customer path will show you the questions, pain points, and keywords associated with each phase of the journey, and all this information will help you craft a campaign that will catch your audience’s attention.
Now that the right people will see your ads, we’ll need to look at keywords.
4. Keyword Targeting
Like targeting the correct audience, you also want to target the right keywords. What are your customers searching to find solutions for their issues? What are your keyword rankings? We don’t recommend guessing these answers, though! Conducting keyword research will aid in finding the popular search terms customers type into a search engine to find your products or services. Regular keyword research will help you always choose the best and most effective keywords to make the most of your budget.
You want to look at the following when reviewing your keyword targeting:
- Keyword list and keyword setup
- The number of keywords you’re targeting
- Negative keywords
- Keywords that might be bidding against each other
- If you should be targeting new keywords
When it comes to the number of keywords, you should avoid bloating your campaigns with too many. Overtargetting can cause you to quickly deplete your ad budget (resulting in your campaign turning off). Targeting too many keywords can also lead to an ad account that is difficult to maintain. Remember, less is more sometimes!
At this point, the work has been done to create structured ads with various campaigns targeting relevant audiences and keywords. Still, your ad performance will suffer if your ad doesn’t get your audience’s attention and take them to the right place on your site. Let’s move on to the next and final step of our review!
5. Review of Actual Ad
Finally, you’ll want to evaluate your actual ad and what a potential customer might see when reading, clicking, and coming across your ad. During this step, we review copy, extensions, and landing pages.
- Copy: PPC Ad Copy should show a buyer their problem and how your business is the best solution. The copy should also consider your keyword research and buyer journey findings.
- Extensions: Utilizing extensions for your ads will increase your ad’s value by giving your ad better visibility in the SERPs. We want to make sure the right ones are being used to meet your goals when reviewing ad extensions.
- Landing Pages: Conversion! That’s the objective of your landing page. Whether you want your customers to make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, or download a whitepaper, the landing page should match the ad copy and make it easy for your customer to convert.
Ready to start your next PPC Account Review?
Setting up and analyzing a PPC Account is no easy task, especially for an already busy business owner. If you’re ready to take this next step, we’re here to help! All you need to do is contact us for a PPC account review.
Our digital marketing team has years of expertise, and we have proven success in creating a PPC Account that will generate leads, increase website traffic, and improve your rankings on Google. Business growth is only one call away, and we’re ready when you are!
