When done right, PPC audits can identify inefficiencies in your ad accounts, uncover missed opportunities, and save you money.
And if you neglect them, you may risk wasting precious resources on underperforming campaigns and missing out on valuable opportunities to boost your ROI.
In this article, we’ll tell you why PPC audits are crucial, what mistakes to avoid while conducting them, and more importantly, when and how to do them.
What is a PPC audit anyway?
A PPC audit is a comprehensive review of your PPC campaigns to evaluate their effectiveness and identify areas for improvement. Audits involve analyzing various aspects of your campaigns, such as:
- Account structure
- Keywords
- Ad copy
- Bidding strategies
- Overall performance metrics
“Audits serve as a diagnostic tool, allowing you to get under the hood of your campaigns to assess what is working and what is costing your business money.”
— Mitch Cartwright, Superhero
Just like a doctor examines specific health metrics like blood pressure and cholesterol to identify any concerns, a PPC audit reviews your campaigns and analyzes metrics like impressions, clicks, conversions, and such to identify areas for improvement.
Watch Melissa Mackey of Compound Growth Marketing speak to our Co-Founder & CEO, Frederick Vallaeys on our video podcast, PPC Town Hall, about the importance of maintaining the health of your PPC account by running regular audits.
Why should you conduct a PPC audit?
There are plenty of benefits to a thorough PPC audit. Here are five key benefits, accompanied by useful questions to help you perform a deeper analysis during an audit:
- Discover overlooked performance issues.
- Reduce wasted ad spend.
- Streamline your budget.
- Identify low-quality placements.
- Compare your performance against competitors.
Discover overlooked performance issues.
Amy McClain-Ponder at Beeby Clark+Meyler said it best:
“Even in the day-to-day grind of managing campaigns, performance issues can slip by unnoticed. Audits provide a valuable opportunity to take a step back and assess the bigger picture.”
— Amy McClain-Ponder
She also listed five hidden gems that audits can help you uncover in your campaigns:
- High-performing campaigns with low budgets: Are you under-investing in an effective campaign?
- Low-performing campaigns with high budgets: Are you pouring money into an ineffective campaign?
- Negative keywords blocking valuable traffic: Are you accidentally preventing potential customers from seeing your ads?
- Low-quality placements on YouTube or Display Network: Are your ads appearing in irrelevant places, wasting your budget?
- Campaign setting bottlenecks: Are limitations, like frequency caps, hindering your performance?
Reduce wasted ad spend.
PPC audits act like a watchdog for your campaigns. They can find areas where your budget might be bleeding, such as:
- Disproportionate budget spent on underperforming keywords: Are you bidding on irrelevant keywords that aren’t generating results?
- Missing negative keywords: Are you attracting irrelevant clicks that won’t convert?
- Incorrect location targeting: Are your ads showing in areas irrelevant to your target audience?
“In shopping ads, an audit can figure out if your campaign structure is inefficient. For example, it can identify if you’re mixing brand and non-brand terms, which can hinder your campaign performance and eat up your budget fast.”
— Mitch Cartwright
Chris Murray of Adaptavist adds that audits are an accountability tool that ensures you don’t miss vital details, which can lead to significant wasted spend. He also raised the issue of occasional oversight by PPC marketers.
“The wrong location setting, keyword match type, or exclusion list can result in significant wasted spend over time”.
— Chris Murray
In both cases, human errors are to blame and audits can serve as a crucial safety net, catching these mistakes before they can significantly impact performance.
Streamline your budget.
A PPC audit doesn’t just identify wasteful spending; it also helps you allocate your budget more strategically. Here’s how:
- Uncovering hidden opportunities: Audits can reveal high-performing keywords with low bids, allowing you to invest more in what’s working.
- Prioritizing high-performing campaigns: They can also identify campaigns delivering strong results with lower budgets so that you can allocate more resources to them.
Identify low-quality placements.
Not all ad placements are equal. Some websites or apps might deliver irrelevant traffic or poor user engagement. A proper audit can help you pinpoint these low-quality placements.
To learn more, let’s take a look at the following two instances:
- Analyzing CTRs and conversion rates by placement: Are certain placements generating clicks but not conversions? This could indicate a mismatch between your target audience and the placement’s visitors.
- Investigating website content and audience demographics: Are your ads appearing alongside content that’s irrelevant to your product or service? This could mean the websites’ audiences differ significantly from your ideal customer profile, which, once again, indicates a targeting mismatch.
Compare your performance against competitors.
Audits provide valuable insights into how your campaigns compare against the businesses you’re up against. They can help:
- Analyze average keyword costs and bids: How do your CPCs and bids compare to your competitors? Are you bidding competitively to ensure your ads are seen?
- Evaluate ad copy and landing pages: Are your competitors’ ads and landing pages performing exceptionally well? Can you adopt any best practices to improve your approach?
When should you conduct a PPC audit?
Audits work best when you conduct them regularly and in concert with other business activities. If you conduct them too infrequently, you miss out on the benefits outlined above—and you’ll also have more work to get your campaigns into shape than if you periodically (and properly) maintained them.
Here are some key instances when conducting an audit is particularly beneficial:
- Taking on a new client
- Before building a new campaign
- Starting a new role
- New leadership takes over
- Before peak season
- At regularly scheduled intervals
When taking on a new client
Conducting an audit when taking on a new client allows you to show the potential client the value you bring and check if there’s room for improvement in their account.
Duane Brown of TakeSomeRisk says every time their agency signs a new client, they make a PPC audit a part of the onboarding.
“When we sign a new client, part of our onboarding is doing an audit on Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Merchant Center, and shopping feed. We want to make sure everything is set up to our standards as an agency and that nothing is stopping us from tracking all the conversions possible in the business.”
— Duane Brown, TakeSomeRisk
Amy echoes that guidance as well:
“For every new client we take on, we do an extensive audit of their program. We look at the campaign settings, any mistakes that may have been made in the optimizations or set-up, and how it’s performing. We then make a list for ourselves of restructures and optimizations.”
— Amy McClain-Ponder
Before building a new campaign
It’s important to verify that everything is set up according to your strategy’s specifications before starting a new campaign. An audit helps you tick those boxes.
“Conducting an audit before launching a new campaign makes sure that everything is set up correctly to avoid any issues.”
— Mitch Cartwright
When starting a new role
Starting a new role often involves getting a thorough understanding of your client’s current marketing efforts. This is a great time to conduct an audit as it provides you with a detailed overview of your client’s account, highlighting its strengths and weaknesses, and empowering you to make informed decisions moving forward.
When there’s new leadership on the marketing team or client-side
When new leadership comes in, they may have a different perspective on strategy. An audit can help everyone get on the same page and ensure that campaigns are aligned with the new direction.
Before peak season
For businesses with seasonal peaks, conducting an audit before the busy season helps ensure that all campaigns are optimized to capture the increased traffic and maximize conversions during these critical periods. This is absolutely essential for ecommerce businesses.
Amy further adds that their agency performs peer reviews to ensure everyone’s on the same page.
“We also do peer audits on our paid search team. These aren’t meant to point out the faults of others. It’s very easy for a paid search manager to get [too] into the day-to-day management of campaigns . . . a fresh pair of eyes can be helpful.”
— Amy McClain-Ponder
In other words, schedule peer audits for your paid search team. Fresh perspectives can catch missed opportunities or areas for improvement, even for experienced managers.
At regularly scheduled intervals
Accounts can become outdated over time. That’s why regular audits help ensure things continue to run smoothly. Many experts recommend performing a thorough audit at least once every six months to maintain account hygiene.
How to perform a PPC audit (a 15-step checklist)
It’s important to note that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all checklist for conducting a PPC audit. Each account is unique, with its own set of goals, challenges, and intricacies. However, the following checklist should serve as an excellent starting point. You can customize it to better fit your specific needs and ensure a thorough audit process.
To conduct a thorough PPC audit, follow this 15-step checklist:
- Define your goals and KPIs.
- Set a date range for data analysis.
- Review your campaign structure.
- Analyze targeting settings.
- Verify conversion tracking setup.
- Review and update your ad copy.
- Review keyword performance.
- Optimize ad spend based on keyword performance.
- Identify and add negative keywords.
- Check and analyze your Quality Score.
- Analyze your KPIs.
- Check, analyze, and test ad extensions.
- Conduct competitor analysis.
- Check for outdated scripts or rules.
- Evaluate bids and track ROI.
1. Define your goals and KPIs.
- Clearly define the objectives of your PPC campaign (e.g., lead generation, brand awareness, increased sales).
- Identify relevant KPIs based on your goals (e.g., click-through rate, conversion rate, CPA, ROAS).
2. Set a date range for data analysis.
- Choose a timeframe that allows for meaningful performance analysis. Many experts recommend three months at a minimum.
- To capture seasonal trends or campaign changes, consider analyzing longer periods, say, six months.
3. Review your campaign structure.
- Assess how well your campaign structure aligns with your target audiences (demographics, interests, buying history, etc).
- Check for auto-apply recommendations in your account. Turning them off puts you in more control of your account.
- Check that your ad groups are tightly themed and relevant to specific keyword groups.
- Ensure the ad copy directly addresses the search terms triggering the ad.
4. Analyze targeting settings.
- Verify that your ads appear on the appropriate devices (mobile, desktop, tablet) based on user behavior.
- Ensure your ads are set to reach your intended audience by location (city, state, country).
- Analyze ad scheduling to ensure visibility during peak business hours.
- Monitor whether your ads appear on relevant websites or platforms frequently visited by your target audience.
5. Verify conversion tracking setup.
- Confirm that conversion tracking is set up correctly to measure campaign effectiveness by testing it.
- Identify the actions that contribute most to your goals (e.g., sales, sign-ups, downloads).
6. Review and update your ad copy.
- Look for opportunities to refresh ad copy with high-quality, relevant content.
- Consider A/B testing different ad variations to optimize performance.
- Ensure ad messaging aligns with your customers’ needs and addresses their search intent.
- Use at least one RSA, unless there’s testing between two RSAs. It’s a good idea to run two RSAs in parallel to test a different style/tone, particularly while running an experiment.
- Apply custom UTMs to track the performance of individual pages and tactics.
- Verify that landing page URLs work.
7. Review keyword performance.
- Gather data on impressions, CTR, conversion rates, CPC, and ROI for each keyword.
- Identify high-performing keywords to optimize for better results.
- Adjust or remove underperforming keywords to improve campaign efficiency.
- Regularly review keyword performance to maintain strong campaign effectiveness.
8. Optimize ad spend based on keyword performance.
- Allocate more budget to high-performing keywords that are driving conversions.
- Next, do the opposite: reduce or eliminate spending on keywords with low conversion rates.
9. Identify and add negative keywords.
- Review search terms triggering your ads to identify irrelevant terms. The search terms report is a good place to start here.
- Add negative keywords to prevent your ads from appearing for irrelevant searches.
- Set content suitability for your client.
10. Check and analyze your Quality Score.
- Check how your ad quality compares to competitors using Quality Score.
- Identify campaigns, ad groups, and keywords with low Quality Scores.
11. Analyze your KPIs.
- Evaluate your core KPIs like CTR, conversion rate, CPA, ROAS, and impressions against benchmarks and prior performance.
- Identify areas where you can improve campaign performance based on KPI insights.
- Reallocate budgets based on your findings.
12. Check, analyze, and test ad extensions.
- Use a variety of ad extensions (site link, call, location, structured snippets, app, etc.) to provide diverse user interactions with your ads.
- Ensure your ad extensions are relevant, up-to-date, and optimized for your goals.
- Regularly test different extensions to find the most effective combination.
- Analyze performance data for each extension type to identify their impact on ad results.
13. Conduct competitor analysis.
- Understand your competitors’ strategies by analyzing their keywords, ad copy, and landing page experiences.
- Identify gaps in your strategy based on competitor insights.
- Learn from successful competitor tactics and adapt them to your campaign for improvement.
14. Check for outdated scripts or rules.
- Review scripts and rules previously set up to automate tasks.
- Make sure these automations are still relevant and not hindering your campaign performance.
- Update scripts or rules to maintain smooth ad operation.
15. Evaluate bids and track ROI.
- Evaluate bid amounts to ensure you’re not bidding too high on low-converting keywords or too low on valuable ones.
- Track ROI to understand the value generated from your PPC efforts.
- Ensure your budget is allocated to the most profitable areas of your campaign.
Done with the audit. What comes next?
The real value of a PPC audit comes from implementing the insights you extract from it. Here’s a step-by-step process to turn your audit findings into action:
Step 1: Prioritize improvements with the ICE method.
The ICE method (which stands for impact, confidence, and ease) is a prioritization framework that you can use to evaluate and rank ideas, helping you shortlist the most important ones from a pool of options. Here’s how to use it to prioritize the improvements from your audit.
- (I) Identify impact: Estimate the potential benefit (for example, increased conversions or lower CPC) of each identified improvement.
- (C) Consider confidence: Evaluate your team’s confidence in the success of each change based on market knowledge and past experiences.
- (E) Ease of implementation: Assess the resources and effort required to implement each change.
- Assign scores: Assign scores (based on priority) to each of the identified improvements.
- Calculate the ICE score: Multiply them together for each recommendation. This gives you a single, weighted ICE score.
Generally, higher ICE scores are considered more impactful with a higher chance of success. These should be prioritized for implementation first.
However, a recommendation with a very high impact score might still have a lower overall ICE score due to lower confidence or implementation difficulty. Use your judgment here. A high-impact recommendation with lower confidence might be worth considering if it’s relatively easy to implement and test.
Step 2: Create an action plan.
- Organize your optimizations: Once priorities are set, create a detailed spreadsheet and timeline to manage the implementation process.
- Map out your exact actions: List down all action items, assign deadlines, and allocate responsibilities. Get the necessary approvals from clients or stakeholders for changes such as new copy, landing pages, targeting, and messaging.
Step 3: Implement and track progress.
- Assign tasks: Delegate tasks to team members based on their expertise.
- Monitor performance: Track the impact of changes on key metrics (conversions, CPC, etc).
- Communicate results: Share the positive impact of implemented changes with stakeholders and clients.
Chris says using a project management tool makes it a lot easier to track their audit implementation process.
“We track audits using our work management system, creating actions as either new to-do checklists or, for more complex tasks, separate items. This approach allows us to bring in the right people to address identified issues while ensuring PPC and Account Managers have full visibility into the progress.”
— Chris Murray
Amy, who is an Optmyzr customer, says that our PPC Audit tool helps her with the implementation.
“For our monthly audits, we use a checklist that our team has created to go through the audit. We use Optmyzr’s PPC Audits once a month and work through changes on that list from the most impactful first.”
— Amy McClain-Ponder
Common mistakes while conducting a PPC audit (and how to avoid them)
Context is everything. By properly contextualizing your PPC audit and recommendations, you can avoid these common pitfalls:
Mistake #1: Misunderstanding why you’re conducting the audit
Many brands say their PPC accounts are ‘fine’ after an audit, yet issues remain. This often leads to superficial audits where key issues, such as shopping feed optimization or conversion tracking, are overlooked.
How to fix it: Duane says you should be clear about the audit’s objective.
“You should clearly define the objective of your audit. Whether it’s to identify wasted spend, optimize performance, or uncover new opportunities, having a clear purpose ensures a focused and effective audit. Dig deep into the data to uncover hidden issues and make meaningful improvements based on KPIs and other critical metrics that matter to you.”
— Duane Brown
Know your ‘why’ before you begin. Whether you’re looking to eliminate wasted spend, maximize performance, or uncover new opportunities, a clear objective keeps your audit focused and efficient.
Mistake #2: Misinterpreting the data
Without the right context, metrics can mislead. It’s easy to draw incorrect conclusions if you don’t fully understand the nuances of the metrics you’re reporting on.
For example, just because your campaign has a higher ROAS doesn’t mean it’s profitable.
Here, our CEO, Frederick Vallaeys, explains why:
How to avoid it: Take time to understand the context of the data, including seasonality and market trends. Consider how these factors might influence the numbers you’re seeing. This will help you draw accurate conclusions.
Mistake #3: Relying on limited ad platform data
Ad platforms prioritize their own profit, which means they incentivize spending and increasing budgets. Hence, they may not present the most complete picture of your campaign, potentially overlooking areas to optimize spend or stop unproductive campaigns.
Amy says their agency never relies on Google’s auto-apply recommendations as it encourages inefficient spending—we know a reason why.
How to fix it: Expand your data sources. Integrate information from Google Analytics, your CRM systems, and sales data alongside ad platform data. This approach ensures you’re identifying all relevant performance aspects before deciding on your campaign’s effectiveness.
Mistake #4: Ignoring real-world and macroeconomic conditions
External factors like economic conditions, industry trends, and real-world events can significantly influence campaign performance. Ignoring these can lead to flawed analyses and misguided strategies.
How to fix it: Always consider the broader context when interpreting data. There could be much more outside influence on your campaign performance than you realize.
Mistake #5: Overreliance on one audit template
Every channel and campaign type has unique characteristics that a standard checklist might not cover. An audit checklist that worked for a Performance Max campaign does not work for a shopping campaign, for example. So, using a generic audit template can leave room for improvement.
How to fix it: Develop customized audit templates and a codified checklist that includes best practices and ensures consistency for specific channels and campaigns. This should be a living document that you regularly update to reflect new learnings and changes in the PPC landscape.
Mistake #6: Ignoring performance changes over time
Drastic changes in performance over the past few quarters can provide valuable insights. Understanding why these changes occurred helps you refine your optimization strategies and prevents future issues.
How to fix it: Always consider performance trends and their underlying causes during audits. Add it to your auditing checklists and workflows.
Mistake #7: The ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ mentality
Many new marketers make the mistake of just ticking off boxes for technical settings while setting up a campaign without understanding the implications. For instance, a well-optimized account with the wrong targeting or a weak post-click experience won’t deliver results.
How to fix it: Mitch says you should move beyond tick-boxes and look at each audit individually. He suggests analyzing on a deeper level, asking questions like:
- Post-click experience: Are users landing on relevant pages aligned with their search intent?
- Keyword targeting: Are keywords that are targeting high-intent users actually converting?
- Lead nurturing: For lead-gen campaigns, is there a nurturing process to educate and convert inquiries?
- Ecommerce optimization: Are there missing product details that might prevent purchases (e.g., size charts)?
How Optmyzr helps you run faster, error-free audits
Optmyzr offers a suite of tools to simplify and streamline your PPC audit process.
Here’s our Evangelist, Navah Hopkins, presenting the complete toolkit and strategies you need for a thorough audit.
Now, let’s dive into some of the auditing tools our customers love to use every day:
Audit your accounts with the PPC Account Audit tool.
Imagine extracting every opportunity for improvement and every bit of tactical information about your account and campaigns in a single report. This is precisely what the PPC Account Audit tool offers, and most of our users rely on it to schedule reviews for their clients or to prepare an evaluation of their prospect’s accounts to get them on board.
Related: A list of all available audits for Google Ads
Identify why your PPC performance changed with the PPC Investigator.
This tool appears on our list of most used tools year after year, and we don’t doubt why. With PPC Investigator, you can prepare a full cause chart and root cause analysis to understand performance changes in just minutes.
Check for broken landing pages with the URL Checker.
Imagine having to explain that a quarter of your budget ended up on clicks to a 404 page or an out-of-stock product listing. That’s what the URL Checker can save you from.
With this Optmyzr automation, you can monitor ads, keywords, and site links to detect if they’re driving traffic to broken landing pages. You can also automatically pause them if problems are found with their respective landing pages, and reactivate them once they are fixed.
Identify your high-traffic search queries with Search Terms N-Grams.
The Search Terms N-Grams breaks down search queries into individual words or phrases and shows the top 100 search terms based on the selected metric (impressions, clicks, conversions, etc). You can also click on words and phrases to add them to shared negative lists.
Manage budget allocation like a pro with the Budget Pacing Tool.
This tool helps you pace your budget the way you want by showing you how much you’ve spent relative to what you should have spent at a specific point every month. The best part is that you can visually monitor any overspending or underspending issues and get notified when your budgets are off-track.
Run ads based on weather conditions with the Optimize Campaigns by Weather tool.
Our Optimize Campaigns by Weather tool enables you to target or exclude locations and even pause/enable your campaigns based on the weather conditions of any location you specify, whether they are directly targeted in your campaigns or not.
Communicate your audit findings with our reporting tools.
Comprehensive reporting should always follow your audits. A well-structured report helps you clearly communicate your audit results. So, you need a solution that’s flexible for data analysis and visualization, customizable, and still easy to use.
Optmyzr’s reporting tools empower you to build a PPC audit report that not only looks great but also provides you (and your stakeholders) answers.
Get insights about your industry with PPC Vertical Benchmarks.
This tool serves as a compass, providing nuanced insights into your Google Ads campaign performance relative to your industry peers. You can check how your account’s performance metrics, like average CPC, conversion Rate, CPA, CTR, and ROAS, stack up against your competitors.
Check out PPC Vertical Benchmarks now
The best time to conduct a PPC audit is now.
Audits dig into critical structural elements and identify foundational issues in your accounts, so putting them off can be fatal. Make PPC audits a regularly scheduled task to ensure that you reap the benefits of properly monitoring and optimizing your accounts.
We hope you’ve learned a thing or two about running effective audits in this guide. And if you’re ready to perform an audit right now, try Optmyzr by signing up for a free 14-day trial today.
Thousands of advertisers—from small agencies to big brands—worldwide use Optmyzr’s tools to conduct faster, more accurate audits and manage over $5 billion in ad spend every year.
If you want to know exactly how Optmyzr’s various features help your business, book a consultation call today to talk to one of our experts. You will also get the resources you need to get started and more. Our team is on hand to answer questions and provide all the support we can.
Sign up for a free 14-day free trial today.