CHAPTER 4

Paid Advertising (PPC) Audit

Here’s an exciting fact about conducting a pay-per-click (PPC) audit: It’s the single fastest and easiest way to enhance your marketing performance. PPC is hyper-measurable, and any changes you make occur immediately, so you can see the effects in real time. 

HOW TO AUDIT PPC CAMPAIGNS

To conduct your PPC audit, segment your data by variables such as audience, creative, location, or device (though there are others, too). Your goal is to find the best and worst of each category. In other words, which drive performance and which drag it down? Then, you can analyze the differences between the best and worst performers. After you’ve extracted the trends, recommend solutions that will drive better numbers across the board. 

*Note: In this ebook we run through PPC audits for AdWords and Facebook Ads, but the process is the same for LinkedIn Ads, Twitter Ads, Outbrain, Quora Ads, and any other PPC platform. 

GOOGLE ADWORDS

Select a time period and KPIs

Select a date range that will show enough data for you to be able to analyze them. 3 months is often enough but feel free to use a longer time period if you need more data. Look at your full marketing funnel for this period — from impression through conversion — as well as the cost and revenue metrics - click Modify Columns in the dropdown menu.

We recommend adding the following KPIs: 

Impressions 

Clicks 

CTR 

Cost 

Average CPM 

These metrics will provide an early view into a campaign’s efficiency and profitability. You can also save these columns to reuse later. 

Segment by day of week 

Now you can discover which weekdays see the best performance. Addressing any differences between days can lead to immediate performance gains. To identify the winners and the laggards select the Ad schedule tab, then Day from the top menu (in the new AdWords version).

Segment by hour of day

You can drill down even further by identifying how much your cost per action is at certain times of the day. To do this, select the Hour tab. 

Modify your bids accordingly to decrease the amount you’re paying during non-peak times. To do so, head over to Ad Schedule tab, and change your numbers. 

Segment by location

Another easy PPC win is to check performance by location. To do so, select the Locations tab from the menu on the left. 

Segment by device 

As we said earlier, mobile performance is hugely important. However, you want to know how you’re performing across all devices. To view your Adwords campaign performance on desktop, tablet, and mobile, select Device from the menu on the left. 

Segment by landing page

To view how your custom landing pages are performing go to the Landing pages tab.  

Segment by search query 

Get a high-level view of which search queries are driving performance by opening Google AdWords and clicking on the Dimensions tab toward the top of the page, then filtering your search from there. 

Analyze competitors’ PPC activity

Using a tool like SpyFu allows you to see what your competitors are doing PPC-wise. To check how their ad budget was like in the past months or years: 

STEP 1

Go to the “PPC Research” tab and select “Competitors”.

STEP 2

Enter your domain in the top search bar.

STEP 3

Choose which companies you’d like to compare yourself against.

STEP 4

See how much they’re spending now and how that has been changing over time.

Next, go to the “PPC Keywords” tab and enter your competitor’s domain in the top search bar. 

*NOTE: If you’re looking for inspiration for your ad copy, you can steal your competitors’ ideas by seeing exactly how their most successful ads look like and how long they’ve been running. 

To do that, go to the “Ad History” tab. On the right hand side you can see the “Top Ads” section, meaning - ads that have been running the longest (so most likely the most successful ones).

FACEBOOK ADS 

Similarly to the AdWords audit, you’ll want to navigate through your Facebook Ads campaigns - breaking them into interesting segments and looking for performance deltas (big ups or big downs).

Here’s a few additional Facebook-specific breakdowns to include: 

Campaign overview

Check what volumes of traffic and conversion your campaigns are driving to your site and how much on average a conversion costs you.

Ad sets 

Which of your target audiences perform best? Are your ad set budgets adjusted to match their performance? 

In the example above we can see that the cost per conversion is very high (for a one-time purchase of under $100). There are too many ad sets in the campaign, which doesn’t allow Facebook to optimize them properly.

Ads

• How many ads are there in your ad sets? Test several different ads to know what type of imagery and messaging resonates best with a given audience and then scale the most effective ones. 

• Isn’t their frequency too high? This will cause banner blindness and your prices to go up. What’s the maximum frequency? It really depends but you should keep an eye on your campaigns’ performance as they approach 5. If the CPC starts to increase too rapidly, then it’s a sign for a creative refresh. 

• Are all ads UTM-tagged? In order to track your campaigns in GA, you have to tag all your URLs. If you’ve never done this before, you can use Google’s URL builder.