How to Audit Your PPC Campaign and Get the Most Out of Your Budget

When you want to get the most exposure for your money during a PPC campaign, it’s important to audit your campaign periodically.

If you want to improve the performance of your PPC ads, you have to take a careful look at where you can make changes in your campaign, what is working for you, and what needs improve.

Your strategy matters in a PPC campaign, and a thorough audit can get you back on track with your campaign goals.

An Audit Will Reveal Unnecessary Spending

You can do an audit on your PPC campaign at any time. If you feel that you are spending more money than expected and you are seeing few results, an audit will help you identify the areas in which you are wasting money.

To begin your audit, choose a date range where you have quantifiable data to sift through. You don’t want to audit only a week after a campaign starts, as you won’t have enough data to work with.

A good date range is 90 days to look for specific problems, but if you are doing an annual audit you will clearly assess the data over the last twelve months.

Look at the Settings on Your PPC Campaign

The default settings on PPC campaign sites such as Adwords are designed to get you the most traffic possible, but not all traffic is created equal.

Each campaign should only target the right demographic. For example, you don’t want to be showing ads for your local pizza shop in Boston to people who are living in California.

You will waste money on clicks if you don’t specifically target the right audience in your campaign.

You can set your local targeting to searchers located in Boston and surrounding areas. You can go a bit further by targeting more granular areas individually to see which areas perform the best.

Logically Organize the Campaign

Your ad groups and each ad within the group should be properly named to keep your campaign organized.

Ads for display and ads for search should be separated, as each of these two ads are different.

How you approach you ad campaign and how you keep it organized will help you keep your goals in focus. Take a hard look at all of your groups and sub groups, consolidating ads wherever possible.

Here’s a list of the 6 most important component:

• Campaigns
• Ad Groups
• Keywords
• Negative Keywords
• Ad Text
• Landing Pages

Here are some ways to structure your ad campaign:

• You can structure your account based on the structure of your website.
• If you are an E-commerce company, then you can structure it by product categories.
• If you are a local pizza parlor like the above example, then you can structure it based on location.

Make Sure Your Ads are Specifically Targeted

Don’t create ads that are too vague, casting a wide net across the internet. Each ad group should target a specific product or service, so that ad copy is both easy to write and relevant.

Each product or service should have assigned keywords to it, and your ads should all reflect the keywords that you have chosen.

As you look through your ad groups you will be able to see which keywords are drawing traffic to your website and which are too vague to be of use to you.

One way to measure the effectiveness of any Adgroup is to setup conversion tracking on your website. Here’s a complete guide by Wordstream on conversion tracking.

Check Your Search Term Report for Negative Keyword Opportunities

You can run a report that lets you know what search terms are used that draw traffic to your site. Make sure that these terms are relevant, as you will have to tweak your content to reflect the appropriate keywords you want used.

If the traffic visiting your site is drawn by the wrong keyword or phrases, then you will need to create a comprehensive negative keyword list.

You can read Benjamin Mangold’s article on the three essential techniques.

Author Biography

Sophorn Chhay

Sophorn is the marketing guy at Trumpia, the most complete SMS software with mass sms messaging, smart targeting and automation. Jumpstart your business by grabbing your free copy of his powerful Mobile Marketing Success Kit. Watch Trumpia’s 5-Minute Demo on how to execute an effective mobile marketing strategy.