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.

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Anyone who has had any experience with marketing over the past couple of years is privy to how quickly the rules and regulations of the field can change. As marketing technology becomes more refined and the number of platforms being utilized increases, the old guidebook for how to run a successful marketing strategy has become almost obsolete.

While some marketing managers are desperately trying to keep making the old strategies work, others have shifted their sights further and gotten on-board with a whole new approach.

Agile principles gained prominence in the software development sphere where iterative and incremental development is prioritized. However, it wasn’t long before the benefits of the approach were tried and tested in the marketing world.

What is Agile Marketing?

Agile marketing can be defined as an approach where the priority is being open and responsive to change instead of following a specific rigid plan.

Firms implement agile marketing tools because they improve efficiency, transparency, predictability, and the ability to adapt to change. For example, instead of writing a 50-page marketing plan every once in a while, you would write a one-page proposal every quarter. The proposal would specify your firm’s goals and aspirations and ensure everyone is on the same page. After a month, your team would come together to reset priorities and make a plan of action for the next month.

The Agile Marketing Manifesto & Principles

The Agile Manifesto was created in 2012 by a team of savvy marketers who wanted to establish an agreed-upon set of values and principles to guide marketers as they adopted this approach.

According to the manifesto, Agile marketers value:

  1. Validated learning over opinions and conventions
  2. Customer focused collaboration over silos and hierarchy
  3. Adaptive and iterative campaigns over Big-Bang campaigns
  4. The process of customer discovery over static prediction
  5. Flexible vs. rigid planning
  6. Responding to change over following a plan
  7. Many small experiments over a few large bets

They didn’t vote on a set of principles, but these are the current proposed ones:

  • Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of marketing that solves problems.
  • We welcome and plan for change. We believe that our ability to quickly respond to change is a source of competitive advantage.
  • Deliver marketing programs frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
  • Great marketing requires close alignment with the business people, sales, and development.
  • Build marketing programs around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
  • Learning, through the build-measure-learn feedback loop, is the primary measure of progress.
  • Sustainable marketing requires you to keep a constant pace and pipeline.
  • Don’t be afraid to fail; just don’t fail the same way twice.
  • Continuous attention to marketing fundamentals and good design enhances agility.
  • Simplicity is essential.

Benefits of Agile Marketing

As a result of these values and principles, there are plenty of benefits to agile marketing and agile marketing automation. Here are four of the main ones:

1.   It allows you to adapt.

Obviously, the most important and vital benefit of agile marketing is that it ensures you and your firm are in a position where you can adapt. You could even use SMS as a method of communicating, test the idea and adapt it with this method.

Marketing professionals in 2017 know that another algorithm change or marketing trend is around the corner at any given moment. While we don’t necessarily know what the modification will be, we can be sure that platforms are gearing up to serve us something new. That means that marketing plans have to be able to adjust swiftly and flawlessly and agile marketing is the way to do this. It is why 23% of senior marketers say Agile marketing delivers higher marketing metrics and KPIs.

  • It is more efficient.

No matter what context the term is used in, agility is associated with speed. In fact, 93% of CMOs who employ Agile practices say their speed to market for ideas, campaigns, and products has improved.

Issues, obstacles, and scheduling dilemmas show up sooner when using Agile and campaigns can be released faster.

  • It focuses on the correct timing.

At the end of the day, no matter how great a marketing campaign is, if it is the wrong time, it isn’t going to work.

By implementing agile marketing strategies, your team will be able to interpret and adjust to new data in the timeliest of fashions. Agile reduces the number of approvals needed to get work off the ground and allows teams to be more responsive to customers. These are just a couple of reasons why 21% of senior marketers enjoy more efficient marketing iterations once they’re Agile.

  • It leads to greater communication.

A key aspect of agile marketing is transparency, meaning that communication and feedback between team members is vital. This greater communication benefits the whole firm because the constant loop of feedback ensures that the whole business stays as adept as possible.

Many marketing departments who have implemented Agile find that their teams are now more in sync than ever about the department’s priorities.

Agile marketing can transform your marketing department and can make it a lot easier to build and manage a team that creates marketing magic. If you decide to implement Agile marketing, remember that simplicity is key. You want your plans to be more of a flexible outline than a 50-page book and your teams to be working in frequent, short periods of intensive work. By operating in this way, you can quickly measure the impact, timeliness, and efficiency of campaigns and continuously use that information to improve results over time.

By experimenting with lots of different strategies and then repeating those that work, you will begin to see the results of your agile marketing endeavors.