PPC Audit Service

Our pay-per-click (PPC) audit is your opportunity to revive, refocus, and refine your PPC strategy. By unpicking issues with your current campaigns and providing actionable solutions, we will help you tap into an ongoing stream of ready-to-buy customers and get the best return on your investment possible.

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Inside Your PPC Audit

Every moment you allow your PPC strategy to remain unscrutinised, you could be overspending and missing out on valuable opportunities to turn traffic into sales. The purpose of our PPC audit is to uncover these inefficiencies so that they can be remedied. Through a detailed examination of your ad account, our exhaustive PPC audit report will help to improve your…

PPC Account Structure
PPC Targeting
PPC Conversion Tracking
PPC Bidding Strategy
PPC Budgets
Ad Copy & Landing Pages

Account Structure

Targeting

Conversion Tracking

Bidding Strategy

Budgets

Ad Copy & Landing Pages

Your PPC Audit in More Detail

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Bubbles

Your account structure includes your campaigns, ad groups, and keywords:

  • Campaigns: assessing your account structure starts with your campaigns. Do they reflect your business objectives? Are they segmented and named correctly? In order to effectively monitor performance and make quick adjustments, your account must be well-organised and easy to navigate.
  • Ad Groups: the keywords that make up your ad groups should be tied together by theme, with minimal overlap between similar keywords across groups. Do your ad groups allow you to target a range of queries? Do they factor in search intent? Do you have separate groups for synonyms and variations? These are the sorts of questions we will be asking when analysing your ad groups.
  • Keywords: if you are not targeting the right keywords – those which tap into customers with high purchase intent – your campaign will suffer. We will perform a keyword analysis to assess their suitability (whether you have configured appropriate match types on them) and relevancy (whether they apply to your target audience). We will also inspect your negative keyword list to ensure that you are minimising the chances of your ads showing up for irrelevant queries.

Who are you targeting? And more importantly, why? Our PPC experts will explore the audiences, locations, and devices that you are targeting to find out how you could create a more focused campaign. We will explain how to get the right ads in front of the right customers at the right time.

  • Audience Targeting: given that different customer groups will respond differently to the same ads, you are wasting money when you create ads without potential audiences in mind. Customer groups should be segmented based on their age, interests, and many other variables.
  • Geotargeting: understanding who your audience is may not be enough, especially because similar demographic segments may respond differently based on location. We will ensure that the regions your account has opted into are correct. If you are targeting too large a radius, you could be losing money. We will also review your geo-reports to see, for example, if there is a high-performing area that should be optimised.
  • Device Targeting: just like location, the device being used is another external factor that will affect how someone responds to an ad. We will check to see if you are creating specific ad variations for mobile or tablets and, if not, explain why you should be. For example, a mobile user will view your ad on a smaller screen and probably be on the move. Your device targeting strategy must account for such factors.

Conversion tracking allows you to understand the source of any conversion and thus helps you identify which ads and keywords are most effective. The data you accumulate from your campaign should directly inform the adjustments you make. Unfortunately, however, we often find that businesses are not fully or correctly tracking all conversions.

Whilst they may be tracking one or two conversions, other important engagements that can fuel optimisation and Google’s machine learning algorithms have been neglected. Similarly, eCommerce conversion tracking in Google Analytics is often incorrectly set up with certain things not imported through to Google Ads. Campaigns informed by incorrect or incomplete data will drain your budget. If this is the case, our PPC audit will flag it and detail how to fix it.

We will examine your current strategy to find out how your campaign could be making bids more efficiently. Importantly, we will research and factor in how competitive your market is. Your bidding strategy should ensure that you are securing relevant ad placements, whilst maximising your return on ad spend (ROAS). We will analyse how you are currently balancing your budget across different match types (broad, phrase, exact) and identify room for improvement. 

In our experience, manual bidding is more effective than smart bidding, with the exception of Performance Max campaigns. This is a newly-introduced campaign type which runs across ALL possible Google networks and uses smart bidding. Our PPC experts have seen fantastic results from these campaigns and can help you achieve them too.

One of the central concerns of our PPC audit is to determine how you could be spending your budget more effectively. Are you wasting your budget on irrelevant queries or poor-performing products? Or are you simply not putting enough money into your campaign? This starts with understanding where and when your PPC budget is being spent in the first place. We will review the relationship between your bidding strategy and your budget. In turn, we will identify areas of potential wastage and supply money-saving solutions.

Advertisers need to select suitable campaign types to meet their business objectives, and this is often linked to budget. For example, an eCommerce advertiser that wants to run upper funnel and lower funnel campaigns would need to consider advertising across all networks: Search, Shopping networks, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Google App. Conversely, an eCommerce advertiser with a more limited budget may just consider advertising across select Search and Shopping campaigns.

We will assess your ad copy and landing pages, providing recommendations that will lead to a direct increase in clicks and conversions. Weak copy – unpersuasive, vague, and/or wordy – may prevent potential customers from clicking on your ad. Even if your ad copy does generate clicks, it is then up to your landing page to convert this traffic.

A low conversion rate may be the result of a disconnect between your ad copy and your landing page. However, more often than not, it is the landing page experience itself that is letting you down. Good UI/UX (user interface/user experience) is essential to improving conversion rate and – since we specialise in UI/UX design – we will offer our expertise in this field in our report. Bringing targeted traffic to your site can only do so much. You need a high-converting landing page – one that is optimised for users – to truly start profiting from it. We will help you achieve this.

A Fresh Pair of Eyes on Your PPC Account

PPC Team

In essence, our PPC audit is a systematic breakdown of your paid search and/or social strategy so that you can rebuild it better than ever. The actionable recommendations we provide should be the building blocks for a new-and-improved one.

Our PPC audit report will lay out plainly and succinctly how to rectify any issues with your current strategy. This will often involve explaining how to squeeze more traffic and sales out of the top-performing/high ROAS products on your shopping feed. Conversely, we will identify products that are struggling and figure out why they are not getting clicks and/or converting. Is it because of poor product descriptions? Pricing? Low-quality images?

Whether your accounts are being managed by yourself or an agency, your eCommerce PPC strategy will benefit from a fresh pair of eyes. Most ad accounts are pumping money into an inefficient campaign and, thus, overspending without even realising.

The Process

Reach out to Us

01. Reach out to Us
Book a free 30-minute discovery call at a time that suits you to discuss a potential PPC audit. This is also a chance for us to better understand your business goals and provide you with a quote.

Website Review

02. PPC Account Deep-dive
If you take us up on our offer, our PPC experts will examine and dissect the multiple moving parts that make up your ad account. We will analyse your current campaign performance and start problem-solving.

Receive UX Audit

03. Receive Your PPC Audit
Within 7 days, you will receive your in-depth, jargon-free report. We will identify your account’s inefficiencies and provide actionable guidance tailored to your business that will directly improve your PPC performance.

Elaboration

04. Elaboration
We will then offer you a follow-up call with our PPC experts to talk through our insights and recommendations. This is your opportunity to ask any further questions you may have and tap into our paid media expertise.

Frequently Asked Questions About Our PPC Audit Services

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A PPC audit is essential to understanding where your budget is being spent and, thus, understanding how to eliminate potential wastage. Specifically for eCommerce stores, we often find that the products promoted by Google Shopping and/or Amazon Shopping have not been optimised for conversions.

That’s why a PPC audit is so important. It’s not simply about monitoring your PPC performance, it’s about improving it. By highlighting what tweaks must be made for you to do so, our audit report will help you attract and convert customers and boost your ROI.

As you can see in our audit breakdown, a PPC account is comprised of various moving parts. They all require analysis because any one of them could be the reason for your campaigns not performing as well as they should.

Whilst we will use some automated tools, the audit process will predominantly involve our PPC experts manually unpicking your ad account’s performance data. The free audits that many agencies advertise are typically done by automated PPC software. A lot of what we identify is missed by such audits. They also cannot produce unique and tailored solutions that will improve your impressions, click-through rate, and conversion rate.

​​How frequently you audit your PPC account depends on a variety of factors, particularly the size of your account. However, as a rule of thumb, we recommend twice a year. The paid media landscape is in constant flux, and so your account could seriously suffer when left uninspected for a significant period of time. For example, Google is always announcing new ad policies that need to be accounted for.

Following a PPC audit, your PPC account still requires daily attention. You should be monitoring it every day to ensure that nothing is slipping under the radar which could be damaging your performance e.g. there is a problem with the payment process. Equally, bid optimisations should be a weekly occurrence. That’s why we offer ongoing eCommerce PPC services following our PPC audit to maximise your campaign performance.

During a PPC audit, the most common problems we see across our clients’ accounts are:

  • Inaccurate and/or partial conversion tracking.
  • Missing product information on Google Shopping ads.
  • Poor product feed management.
  • Keyword overlap across ad groups.
  • Bad user experience on landing pages.
  • Poorly configured campaign settings.
  • Incomplete and/or inadequate negative keyword list.

And much more…

The price of a PPC audit can range anywhere from £500 to £2,500, depending on the size and complexity of the ad account as well as the agency you choose. Our PPC audits start from just £1,000+VAT! Included in this fee is a one-to-one consultation with one of our PPC specialists.

We are aware that many agencies will offer free PPC audits. As tempting as this prospect may sound, these “audits” are simply sales pitches that will add no value to your business. They may highlight very surface-level issues with your account, but they will not provide tailored solutions to all of its inefficiencies at every level as ours will.

Most PPC audits (that are paid for) take around 2-4 weeks. Meanwhile, our in-depth audit report will be with you in just 7 days. This owes to a mixture of highly intelligent PPC analysis tools and experts who know exactly what they are looking for when manually dissecting your account.

After receiving your PPC audit report, you can opt into our ongoing PPC services and get us to manage your accounts daily and maximise your ROAS.

Schedule a PPC Consultation


Our Other Auditing Services

UI/UX Audits

UX Audit

Our UX audit is all about picking apart your website’s usability and functionality. User experience is intimately linked with conversions, and so we will identify any issues that could be preventing users from engaging with your eCommerce site and clicking that all-important “Complete Purchase” button. We will also explain how to solve these issues.

SEO Audits

SEO Audit

Our SEO audit will assess all aspects of your site’s on-page, off-page, and technical SEO, such as your keywords, backlinks, and page speed. We will identify the SEO issues that are stifling your site’s organic performance and provide solutions to them that are tailored to your industry. Implementing these suggestions is what will move you up the rankings.