Last Updated on 2020-12-28 by ppcguybklyn
As a specialist working in a marketing agency that helps clients operate their PPC ad accounts, before accepting new clients, auditing their account and proposing solutions to improve account performance have become a must. Even if you are not working in an agency, the concept of account audit can also be applied to operating your own company or even your personal advertising account. Today’s article will sort out the simplest and most effective way to audit accounts based on my own experience.
Advantages of account audit
Before introducing the account audit process, we must first discuss the advantages of the account audit and why we do this. The biggest advantage of an account audit is that we can audit advertising accounts from a more comprehensive and macro perspective. If it’s our own advertising account and it’s been running for a period of time, sometimes we tend to focus too much on a few more important advertising campaigns, and it is hard for us to see the full picture of the account’s performance. Being able to review the overall performance from the perspective of the entire account may be a way to help the account grow. If you are willing to spend money, you can also ask the marketing agency to help with the account audit, and let another person provide professional advice from an objective perspective in a timely manner, which is very helpful for the progress of the account.
For agencies, account audit is a very good tool for establishing relationships with potential clients. If there are ways to formulate tailor-made sophisticated solutions for different account conditions, then the probability of taking over this client is very high. So if you want to work in an agency, having an excellent account audit ability is a bonus point.
After discussing the advantages of the account audit, we can begin to talk about the account audit process.
Step 1: Understand the advertising goals
As mentioned earlier, the account audit must be taken from a relatively macro perspective. Therefore, before measuring the performance of an account, the most important thing is to know the goal we want to achieve with PPC advertising and the role of each advertising campaign in order to achieve the goal. For example, if we are operating an e-commerce website, and want to use keyword advertising to get more sales, then our advertising goal is to maximize the amount of website purchases. The advertising campaigns in our account are designed to focus on maximizing conversions and conversion value.
Therefore, during the account audit, the first thing we do is to confirm what the advertising goal of the account is, whether the advertising campaigns the account is based on this goal and whether the performance indicators related to the advertising goal are available.
Step 2: Check the conversion settings
After confirming the advertising goals, we will then check whether our account is recording advertising performance correctly. If you have spent time and money on paid search advertising, but the account tells us the wrong information, it is easy to waste budget on unnecessary places. Therefore, it is very important to check the conversion settings of the account when checking new customers or discovering that the performance of the advertising account is not good.
There are several ways to set up Google Ads conversion tracking. I won’t go into details in this article. No matter what method is used, you must check the following things:
- Is the conversion tracking code correctly installed on the conversion page
- Whether the wrong conversion value is recorded
- Whether to double count conversions
If you find the above problems, you should re-check your conversion settings and make corresponding adjustments to make sure that the advertising account has correct conversion tracking.
Step 3: Check the performance related to advertising goals
After the conversion setting is ok, our next step is to check the performance related to the goals of our account. For an introduction to various performance indicators, please refer to myprevious article. In general, if the account is conversion-oriented, then it is necessary to check the conversion rate, conversion cost, and ROAS. If the account is traffic or exposure-oriented, then it is necessary to check the click-through rate, exposure weight, CPM, and so on.
When checking performance indicators, in addition to referring to the past performance of the account, you can also refer to the benchmark of the industry to which the advertising account belongs to see how the average performance of other similar accounts is, and then use these data to judge whether the current account’s performance is good or bad. , And use it to figure out how to make the account more progressive.
Step 4: Check the campaign structure
After knowing the performance of the current advertising account, we should take a step further to check the reasons for the current account performance. We need to check the active structure settings of the entire advertising account. The so-called advertising campaign structure refers to the principles and logic of establishing advertising campaigns and keyword classification. When checking, we must make sure to do the following:
- Categorized by product and service
The most basic principle of advertising campaigns is to divide our keywords and ads into different advertising campaigns according to different products or services, so that we can design special advertising copy for different products and services, and use The same bidding strategy and logic.
- Different match types should be separated
In order to facilitate the management, generally when setting up a campaign or ad group, the keywords of different matching types are separated as much as possible. If the keywords of different matching types are mixed together, in addition to more difficult to control the search terms we want to target, it will also be more difficult to determine which matching types are the most beneficial to our account.
- Diversified advertising campaign functions
Within the scope of budget permission, we should diversify our advertising campaign functions as much as possible. For example, some campaigns are designed to attract conversions, some campaigns are designed to attract more exposure and traffic, and some campaigns are responsible for raising audiences’ awareness of our brand. Even if it is a conversion-oriented account, there can still be various types of advertising campaigns to reach out to potential consumers and use these traffic to convert them into income.
Step 5: Check the ad copy
The last step of the account audit is to check our ad copy or the composition of the ad. For how to write a good keyword ad copy, please refer tothis article.When checking, we mainly look at the following three things:
- Whether the copywriting matches the brand image
This is the most important check in this step. If the advertisement does not match the brand image, even if it attracts clicks, it is difficult to have further conversion actions, which will result in a waste of advertising budget.
- Are the copy character limits being utilized?
Advertising copywriting must try to push the number of characters to the limit, otherwise, it means wasting the opportunity to show more website features and information, which will affect the performance of the advertisement.
- Whether to use responsive search ads
Responsive search ads can save a lot of trouble in copywriting. As long as the headline and narrative are set, the system will deliver the ads to the audience in a rotating manner, so you don’t have to try a variety of different ad combinations. Therefore, if this type of advertisement is not set in the search advertising campaign, it is usually added to increase the efficiency of the advertisement.
Conclusion
The purpose of the advertising account audit is to start from the general direction, check whether our advertising campaigns can achieve our preset goals, and plan feasible optimization plans based on the findings in the audit. The audit process introduced in this article is a relatively simplified version, but it covers most of the areas that are likely to cause problems when operating an advertising account. In fact, there are more details to pay attention to when operating an account, but just grasp a similar principle will definitely be able to find out where the ad account should be improved and make the account performance even better.
