Every successful PPC campaign gets its results thanks to regular audits that are done to analyze the data. Whenever a digital marketing company develops a paid search campaign, they will install metrics that are used to determine if the campaign is achieving its goals.
An audit is done at various milestone dates to determine what can be done to improve the performance of the campaign and maximize ROI. In order to execute a successful audit, it is important to know the key components of an audit and what information you are looking for.
Check The Mechanisms
Each audit should start with a check to make sure that all of the monitoring tools are working properly and all of the information being collected is accurate. Some of the more important information to confirm is traffic, conversions, and bounce rates. This information will be critical in determining what needs to be tweaked to lower ad spend rates.
Work With Your Quality Score
You will be tracking a lot of metrics during your PPC campaign and all of that data can be very helpful. One of the most beneficial metrics you will have access to is the quality score as associated with your keywords. It has been estimated that properly utilizing your quality score can save as much as 50 percent on your keyword and PPC campaign costs. This is a significant savings that can have a dramatic effect on your ROI and significantly improve your quality web traffic.
Know Your Average Costs
With Google Ads, the average cost per click (CPC) on the actual search platform is $2.69 per click. Why does this matter to your PPC audit? Because your campaign goals are projections based on historical data. When you compare your results to actual numbers, you are going to get a much more accurate picture as to how your campaign is doing.
Your projections might say that you should have a CPC of $2.40 per click, but the data available indicates that your projections are too aggressive. It is important to know the real averages that campaigns are getting when you create your campaign projections. This will help make the information in your audit much more useful.
Compare Platforms
The consumers who use smartphone apps are not necessarily the same as those who are affected by banner ads on standard websites. If your audit is going to be comprehensive, then it needs to compare data within each platform to be accurate. Comparing data received from different platforms is interesting, but it is not necessarily going to help you to adjust your campaign to make it more efficient.
Keep Sight Of Your Original Goals
The purpose of an audit is to evaluate the performance of your PPC campaign and then make changes to maximize ROI. But it is also important to keep your original campaign goals in mind before you make any changes. Some campaigns are done simply to collect data and are not necessarily focused on increasing revenue. As you evaluate the performance of each marketing campaign, you should always be comparing current results to the original campaign goals.
Constantly Review Priorities
Are the priorities in your Adwords account and your campaigns in the right order? It can easy to be sidetracked by monitoring numbers that you are hoping to enhance, but it is extremely important to remember why you launched each campaign in the first place. Is your focus on your product lines, or are you looking to enhance your company’s brand. These overall priorities, when aligned with project goals, will help your marketing to stay on course.
Make Sure Your Parameters Are Still Valid
One of the most difficult parts of an audit is to maintain your company’s marketing parameters as you review campaign information. If you find out that your company’s campaign is unexpectedly doing well in a geographic area you are not even targeting, then do you make changes to your overall demographic? Remember that marketing plans, just like business plans, are dynamic documents that change along with the company’s fortunes. If you are getting data that is forcing you to rethink parts of your overall business philosophy, then you need to be prepared to react to that data.
Always Update Your Keyword Groups
When you update keyword groups, you do not need to delete old groups to make way for new ones. The data you are collecting is going to be valuable when it comes to tracking the performance of certain keywords, and those keywords can be enhanced when put into groups. If you find new groups of keywords that work together effectively, then add those groups to what you have and expand your marketing influence online.
If you’re thinking of hiring a digital marketing agency as PPC consultants, make sure you learn how to hire a PPC agency for the best results. An experienced agency will know how to monitor your PPC campaigns and tweak them to maximize ROI and increase sales.