PPC audits make or break your deal closing with any prospect.
Presenting an on-point and engaging PPC audit is something worth having up your sleeve when pitching to your potential clients; ensuring you can deliver a unique PPC audit isn’t always easy, and time constraints do get in the way.
Discover all there is to know about a PPC audit tool that changes how you audit your prospects and how to put it into play within your sales process.
All You Need To Know About PPC Audits
What Calls To Perform A PPC Audit?
Any prospect that has current PPC efforts in place will have an account so you can perform a PPC audit. This is your opportunity to strengthen your PPC proposal pitch.
We also recommend that you continuously audit the PPC accounts you manage, regardless of performance, so that you stay ahead of any competitors trying to pry into your client PPC accounts.
Depending on the size and complexity of the PPC account, you would set the PPC audit frequency.
It’s Worth Investing The Time Into
To fully engage your services with your prospects, performing a PPC audit can sway them into trusting your marketing strategies worthwhile, especially since it’s based on their scenario and not someone else’s.
Many issues such as:
- High spend no results
- Conversion tracking not correctly setup
- Geo-targeting not optimized
- Limited negative keyword list
- and more
Can be identified and open a prospect’s perspective to want to improve their digital marketing management.
Why Perform A PPC Audit?
Ensuring your client is obtaining value from PPC efforts is the general reason why you should perform a PPC audit. It guarantees mutual engagement for PPC marketing and prolongs a lifetime relationship between you and your client.
MAXIMIZE BUDGET:
Hone in on areas of waste of the marketing budget and where it would otherwise serve a purpose to benefit your clients’ business.
CAN YOU MEASURE INVESTMENT?
You often find that your prospect cannot answer questions about key business metrics such as CPA (cost-per-acquisition), ROAS (return-on-ad spend), conversion rate, and more. A perfect opportunity to highlight the urgency to set up or make sure conversion tracking is set up properly.
BEST PRACTICES PRESENT
With PPC, best practices consistently change as Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and other PPC platforms launch new products and features. Therefore checking to make sure the latest best practices are being implemented within the optimization of the account is an excellent way to gauge the quality of management.
ARE OBJECTIVES BEING MET?
Comparing account optimization efforts to your client’s business objectives will give you full insight into whether or not they have a PPC strategy aligned.
Pro-tip: Including a new strategy in your proposal from this PPC audit finding is a plus.
Drawing Up A PPC Audit
Most agencies have a templated audit ready to plug in findings from analysis of the prospect’s account. But wouldn’t it be easier if the PPC audit was automatically put together for you? And all you have to do is connect their PPC account and review the audit generated?
We encountered this scenario, and after many trials with tools that claimed to perform the PPC audits we needed, we simply decided to build our own based on our experience and close rates.
Here’s a little of what is in the mix with our PPC audit tool, but before you start, make sure you have the following and ensure the main components are in your PPC audit to ensure its effectiveness at the time of pitching PPC.
PRE-REQS FOR PPC AUDIT TOOLS
To run a PPC audit as well as fully utilize all there is to a PPC audit tool, make sure you can gain temporary access to the following:
Google Ads Access (Required): As part of your initial questionnaire, requesting the client’s Google Ads ID will allow you to send an invite to sync their account with your MCC account.
Google Analytics (Optional): An important aspect to include in your audit is if conversion tracking is properly set up and registering through conversion goals.
PPC AUDIT COMPONENTS
✔️ Account structure
✔️ Keywords
✔️ Ad and landing page copy
✔️ Bidding
✔️ Tracking
When generating a PPC audit, make sure you consider these areas:
1. Ensure Conversion Tracking Is Working
First things first, check to see if conversion tracking is existent; if yes, then analyze further to see if conversions are registering correctly.
✔️ No conversions registered all time.
✔️ Abnormally high conversion rates
✔️ Goals imported to the account from analytics that are duplicating conversions. No matter the size
2. Data and Time Frame
Review which timeframe is best depending on the consistency of conversion tracking. It becomes challenging when you have hiccups in tracking when you want to highlight areas of opportunity. We recommend including 3-6 months’ worth of data within an audit.
3. How Are Keywords Checking Out?
How relevant are keywords to landing pages, ad copies according to the Google Ads algorithm? In the Ad Rank game, if you want to impress with a strategy to lower CPCs and CPAs and increase the budget with existing ad spend, you’ll find it worthwhile to look at these keywords below six quality scores.
4. Ad Copy Refreshing
CTR (click-through rate) and conversions are metrics to be on the lookout for with Ad copies. Knowing which ads to serve to your audiences is crucial to improving the performance of an account.
A/B ad testing is sometimes necessary to discover new content that engages with a select ad group.
5. Relevant Landing Pages
Just how effective is the landing page? Audiences rely on a good user experience to engage with services or products, and therefore making sure a landing page portrays this is essential to the performance of an Ad.
Questions to ask about a landing page upon review:
✔️ Are there 404 errors?
✔️ Is it loading on both desktop and mobile?
✔️ How quickly is it loading?
✔️ Is the content of the landing page congruent with the Ad displaying?
6. Where and To Who Are Ads Showing?
They are targeting the entire U.S. to all demographics with a local business, yikes. Just make sure that targeting makes sense, especially for the type of business and its capabilities to service or sell products to specific geo-locations and audiences. You’d be surprised where marketing dollars may end up.
7. Cross-Device Performance
Prioritizing devices based on performance, business type, and mobile website capabilities will give you an extra stream of ad spend to expand and improve overall performance.
8. Irrelevant Search Queries & Negative Keywords
No matter the size, any account should have a universal negative keyword list of no less than 200 negative keywords. Naturally, a search query review should grow this list upon every optimization.
9. Bidding Strategy
Ensure your bidding strategy is ideal for each specific campaign type and goal.
With conversion tracking set up correctly, smart bidding becomes an option; just make sure it’s ideal for the account performance.
10. Remarketing to Audiences
Remarketing to audiences who completed specific actions through conversion tracking is an opportunity to get them to finish signing up or purchasing or becoming a repeat customer. Enabling remarketing audience lists is crucial to being able to carry out a remarketing campaign.
Accelerate Your PPC Auditing With A PPC Auditing Tool
Now that you know what goes into a PPC audit, how likely are you to scale this process?
With a PPC audit tool, your agency can become efficient in the turnaround times of a PPC audit and shorten the sales cycle process, not to mention increasing sales at an exponential rate.
At White Shark Media, we have put together a sales enablement platform, Compass, that completes most digital marketing agencies’ missing gap in their sales process. In this platform, you can find a robust PPC audit engine tool that is entirely white-labeled for your convenience. Let’s talk!
