A PPC account audit aims to find quick wins in a new ad account using Google’s best practices. It’s also a good idea to audit your accounts at least once a year since more than one person often changes reports, new campaigns are constantly being started, and mistakes are always possible.
Use this handy self-audit PPC checklist to protect your work from external audits before you get started:
Review Targeting Settings
Setting up your campaign targeting is a simple task that takes no more than five minutes, but a small mistake here can affect how well your account does. (Here, you can see how some of our clients had to find out the hard way.) Look at the targeting settings for each campaign you just bought and make sure they make sense for your business.
Assess Ad Group Relevancy
A good rule of the thumb is that an ad group should not have more than 15 to 20 keywords. This is a good starting point for auditing. Look through the account. You just have to find ad groups with more than 20 keywords. Most likely, these groups will need the most cleaning.
Ensure Link to Google Analytics
The next step of the audit is to ensure that your Google Ads account is linked to your Google Analytics account correctly. Here is the official documentation from Google on how to connect analytics with Google ads.
Conversion Tracking Implementation
The next thing on the list is to ensure that conversion tracking is set up correctly so you can accurately measure your results. Without it, you cannot tell how well your advertising campaigns are doing. Most lead generation clients will ask you to track phone calls and form leads. Google Ads gives us a small piece of code we can put on your website manually or with Google Tag Manager. With this code, tracking conversions from paid ad campaigns when a conversion action happens, as if filling out a form, is easy.
Google Account Settings
The reputed PPC agency in Sydney ensures that your ad account settings suit your goals. Too many advertisers follow Google’s advertising suggestions, a common problem with Google Ad accounts. Google sometimes does what it thinks is best for you even when it may not be in your best interest. Remember that Google’s primary goal is to make money, and many of its suggestions can hurt your ad campaigns.
Google Ads Campaign Settings
Search Network
Making sure you choose the right networks is essential to the audit. Most companies should only advertise on the Search network.
Google Search Partners
When you make a new campaign on the Google Search Network, Search partners are turned on by default. Google’s Search partners include hundreds of sites not owned by Google and many properties that Google owns.
As part of the self-audit PPC checklist, it is also essential to ensure that you’re only advertising to people who are likely to become customers. For local businesses, this usually means targeting people regularly in your targeted locations and excluding people in or interested in your excluded areas.
The problem with Search partners is that you have no say over where your ads go. You don’t know where your ads are showing up, so you must trust that Google Ads is looking out for your best interests when advertising with Search Partners. However, Search Partner sites are also not as good as Google, so your results will probably not be as good as Google’s.
