PPC audit

A PPC audit or analysis of PPC account settings and management will help you discover locations in your accounts that have room for improvement, whether in the form of cost savings, reallocating budgets or missed opportunities, and boosting campaign performance.

Why do PPC audit?
To put it simply, no campaign is perfect and there is always a mistake, omission or opportunity. The aim of the PPC audit is:

control of technical settings, detection of possible errors arising during long-term administration,
control of implementation of new functions of PPC systems,
jumping out of the cycle of daily campaign routines and looking outside, ideally with different eyes,
Finding opportunities to increase relevance and save costs
Finding opportunities to increase reach and performance
Revalidate campaign goals
Revalidate campaign limitations for historical reasons that may no longer be up-to-date (eg excluded words for worse PNOs last year when the conversion rate was half)
Check the effectiveness of your time spent working with campaigns.
When to audit
It is good to do a regular PPC audit to some extent, say, once a year, a complete audit, on a quarterly basis of campaign elements. Even if you are otherwise satisfied with the performance. You should also think about auditing when:

Performance issue – when campaigns don’t work as you wish, even though the goal is real or even results get worse (under otherwise the same conditions)
the season is coming – the audit as part of the preparation for the season is ideal, at the same time making sure that everything is OK and ready,
When not to audit
Conversely, when is the best time to audit? Downright bad time is never, but if you just (recently) changed completely changed your strategy, campaign structure or agency, it’s a bit of a waste of time – campaigns are busy working right now, maybe some mistakes have been made you will come anyway. Let the change sit first.

A PPC audit (especially if you order it externally and pay) is also unnecessary when deciding to change supplier (agency). The new vendor will still go through the campaigns and set up or revise them all. It would be unnecessarily duplicated work. If you are not satisfied with the agency, either discuss it directly with it, suggest suggestions for improvement (or convincingly convince you that campaigns are at their maximum) or ask a new one. However, you do not need a PPC audit as a basis for terminating cooperation with the agency.

Finally, if you do not have the capacity or budget needed for follow-up (campaign expansion and enhancement), then PPC audit will also be meaningless (but you should make sure you get out of this situation soon).

How PPC audit can be done
There are plenty of options, and they are all a little better than saying that it can’t be better and do nothing.

PPC audit tool – tools that automatically check your campaigns and eventually say you have 63%. Of course, he will also tell you something, but beware that it is a tool, so he can only check a few technical settings and that is purely quantitative (do you have at least 3 texts in your report?). They do not cope with quality (do your texts make sense and will they be effective?) Or strategy at all. Despite the fact that they will deduct points even where the PPC specialist would not take it as a mistake (no, sometimes it is not necessary to have 3 texts in every report).
Self-audit – every PPC campaign manager should check the technical settings from time to time, and look at the campaigns again from scratch, as if they were working on them from scratch. She probably can’t completely free herself from everything she already knows about campaigns and can’t look at it with completely different eyes, but she can come up with some new ideas.
Audit from a colleague – a person who is more likely to be involved in campaigns is less likely to bring a new perspective. It doesn’t necessarily matter if his PPC knowledge is lower (you don’t pay for a colleague, so it’s ok). You can even ask a colleague from a PPC company that doesn’t even look at some particular things (texts, arguments, keyword themes, etc.).
External PPC Specialist / Agency – a specialist who understands PPC very well but is not influenced either by the way you choose to build your campaigns or by your technical practices. He has a different approach that can greatly complement yours and at the same time he can look at campaigns in a different way. It will “find” you the most, but at the same time it will be the highest load.
The chapter itself is free PPC audits. These are usually offered by agencies, often as hand-made audits. It’s free, so it’s not going to be an audit in hours of work, it’s often stencil-like, superficial. Why not, you’ll learn a little too. But keep in mind that nothing is free. You may be able to deal with the subsequent offer of services, but it is also about data and you may not want to exchange it for one page with 10 general tips.

External audit – how to order and what to expect
With an external vendor, it’s good to know if your campaign is managing your direct competition. Ideally, in such a case, you should refuse to perform the audit for a conflict of interest.

Audit makes no sense to do it behind the back of the current campaign manager, but on the other hand, in conjunction with it (among other things, because the audit is doing a little bad if the campaigns under your hands change significantly). As I wrote above, you order an audit to help campaigns (and yourself or the vendor).

When ordering from an agency, check who specifically does the audit. You want strategic recommendations, solve problems or questions you are wondering about in your current experience, to discover things that you have missed. Anyone will find some mistakes, but if you pay for it, you need a really experienced PPC specialist. You do not need a junior who has received an audit template to which he will add some numbers from the account.

The output should show the problems and reserves found and suggestions for their solution. It should be prioritized and point out the most essential. Also agree on the scope of the “sauce” around the recommendations. There must be some explanation, but rather you won’t want to read a 50-page document that explains what the Quality Score is in long paragraphs.

What the PPC audit should do
The audit should focus on anything where you are missing money or opportunity. Of course, it depends on how complex and detailed the audit you decide to do, because in 2 hours you can manage only a basic view of the account.

What to verify:

measuring settings – if everything is measured and measured correctly,
Keyword coverage – Unlocking the potential of your keywords and completely covering your buying cycle
Targeting relevance – Targeting the right people and budget loss on irrelevant keywords and segments
Price optimization – the right bidding strategy and performance corresponding to the pricing of individual targeting,
Visibility, budget allocation and performance reserve
Advertising texts – relevance, use of extensions, argumentation
Revision of set campaign goals
Campaign structure
Recency of information and promoted product offerings
account efficiency.