Find out the best ways to improve your AdWords
This AdWords audit gives you an expert review of the condition of your current account and will highlight the potential for improvements. We provide a live screen share review of your AdWords account, or a written audit report. We also provide a 3 day management trial as an alternative to the live screen share or written audit. (Limited time offer. terms apply).
Using your AdWords account data we back up our recommendations with concrete evidence wherever possible. We highlight the commercial benefit to your company for each change, while covering the relevant technical features and capabilities of the AdWords system.
Account Structure & Objectives
The AdWords review includes both strengths and weaknesses of the current AdWords setup. Measure strategy and tactics based on your target market, industry and budget.
The AdWords audit will roadmap quick wins, as well as medium term improvements for getting a better ROI.
Account organisation makes it easier to build, report, measure and improve your advertising efforts. Organised accounts are easier to understand how well each area is working and carry out the necessary adjustments for improvement.
Advanced optimisation for cost per acquisition goals including bid management, ad testing and campaign experiments are made easier with effective account setup.
The Audit Report contains four areas.
- Account Summary Report- PDFHigh-level metrics of account performance in a visual, easy to understand format.
- Detailed Account Reports- ExcelKeywords Report, Search Terms Report, Ad Copy report and audience reports etc.
- Audit Write Up- Online & PDF. Best practices and specific recommendations for improvement. Short explanatory text and videos define each area, before discussing your precise business context.
- Free non-obligation telephone chat (*UK Only) To cover any questions arising from the audit.
Conversion Tracking shows you what happens after a customer clicks on your ads, whether they purchased your product, signed up for your newsletter or filled in a form to receive more information.
By tracking these actions, known as “conversions”, you’ll know which ads, keywords and campaigns bring you business. This helps you invest more wisely to boost your return on investment (ROI).
Having too little or too many ad groups makes an account harder to optmise and manage.
Assess and score how well keywords (and other targeting) are organised. Are there enough ad groups and are the ad groups themed or following one keyword per ad group strategy?
Mobile conversion rate can vary by industry. Local services can have a higher conversion rate than desktop, while high value e-commerce sales shall have a lower conversion rate on mobile devices. The AdWords mobile channel can have separate bids, ad copy and landing pages.
Ad serving issues occur when more than one keyword shows for the same search term. This creates self-competition and has the same adverse effects as duplicate keywords.
A well organised account helps the correct keyword gets triggered by the closest search term- and therefore ad and landing page. Run keyword diagnostics and assess if granular traffic sculpting negatives should also be applied.
A well organised account with clear naming conversion improves the reporting of account performance at all levels.
Campaign Settings
Report on geographic performance variation by distance, town, city or postcode. Assess opportunities for bidding, ad copy and landing page optimisation.
Ad Extensions can help increase click-through rates and conversion rate. There are various types of ad extensions including site links, callouts, locations, etc. Assess and score setup for potential improvements.
As with ad rotation for split testing, bidding has various options for meeting specific advertising objectives. Profit, increased sales and brand are some of the more popular bidding strategies. Bidding by CPA or ROAS can be very effective for getting the most sales or leads at a certain cost per acquisition. Bidding for the top position, therefore, can be more effective for increased volume and brand awareness. These strategies can be mixed and matched across campaigns depending on metrics like conversion rate.
For the purpose of split testing, it is possible to manually or automatically rotate (serve) ads based on specific advertising goals. Manual optimisation is rotating the ads equally, allowing Google to adjust ad serving based on clicks/CTR or conversion rate is automatic optimisation.
Website behaviour varies by device, sometimes significantly. As a result conversion rate can vary by mobile, desktop and tablet devices. Evaluate device strategy in comparison to advertising objectives and outline changes.
Automated rules are useful for performing repetitive tasks that must be to done frequently, for example, showing certain ads on certain days or at different times of the day. Keyword bidding rules can also use cost per acquisition thresholds and performance targets for making adjustments. For complex rules, automation scripts provide more functionality.
Volume, profitability and conversion rate can vary at different times of the day. Adjust bids to only run at certain times of the day or have different bids based on time of the day performance.
Performance of AdWords shopping campaigns compared to search campaigns.
Automation scripts take the principle of automated rules further with more complex options available. There are over 100 established scripts within the public domain.
Establish primary goal for each campaign such as CPA, ROAS or Brand and review current bidding and budget strategy. Assess and score how spend is allocated by targeting used.
Account Performance
Keywords are words or phrases for targeting your ads with corresponding user search terms. The three most popular search types include:
Transactional Searches: People are looking to complete an action. Well suited for advertisers targeting prospects later in the buying cycle. Transactional keywords with commercial intent can be even more successful.
Informational Searches: Also known as “question words” as they frequently contain “why” “how” and so on. Typically more useful for generating awareness and interest earlier in the buying cycle.
Navigational: People are searching for a website, company or brand name. Bid on your keywords to increase CTR and reinforce your brand by displaying it in the top ad position.
Average keywords per ad group, match types used and performance by type.
Top 1-5% of keywords by spend and conversions. Identify anomalies in CPA & conversion rate for keywords. Check negative keywords, the amount of negative lists and what levels are applied. Added vs not added ratio from search terms report.
Increasing CTR from your best keywords, audiences and ad versions can increase both traffic and conversions.
Increasing your CTR can also increase keyword quality score.
Define ad testing strategy. How many ads are there per group? Are big differences being tested (different promotions, benefits, usp, guarantee)? Outline ad testing approach and results.
Every company has a business offer consisting of unique selling points, features, benefits, guarantees, promotions, calls to action, proof testimonials and qualifications. Even if your competitors are very similar, ad text results show what parts of your business offering and copy appeal to your prospects and customers.
Key metrics such as click-through rate, conversion rate and conversions per impression highlight ways to refine adverts. A/B test results show the best ad text versions while multivariate test results display the performance of ad elements like headlines, descriptions and even wording and phrasing. Understanding the costs and conversions for each ad text and ad part is critical for making sure the most useful parts of your business offering and copy are emphasized.
These are the actual searches entered into Google from people who click on your ads. Identify relevant search terms with high potential to expand your keyword list with separate bids.
Search terms of less relevance to your business can be made negative keywords,increase CTR and reduce wasted spend. Optimum keyword match typecombinations can be identified from the search terms report
What’s the potential of this account? Is it constrained by Budget or Rank?
Top vs Other
Is there potential to increase average position?
Landing pages are important for both quality score and conversion rate. Google uses automated systems and human evaluation to determine landing page relevance. Improvements such as increased time on site can lead to higher quality scores over time.
Landing pages should be relevant to the advert copy by providing more detail about your business offering, features, benefits, guarantees, unique selling points, promotions, service, product, calls to action, locations and proof of service such as qualifications or reviews. A/B tests ads and landing pages consecutively to improve quality score and conversion rate.
Quality Score is an estimate of how relevant your keywords, ads and website landing page are to a person seeing your ad. Higher quality scores typically lead to lower costs and more traffic.
Quality Score can be increased by improving expected CTR, landing page relevance, keyword/ad relevance, geographic performance and device performance.
Chart of quality score for all keywords with impressions
Bonus bonus: Find your QS weighted by
Impressions.
Is the homepage being used too much? Is there a wide spread of pages? What percentage of PPC traffic goes to the home page and conversion rate?
Display Network Audit
What’s the performance of display compared to search? How many targeting channels are used? What’s the goal of these campaigns?
Audience targeting is the ability to show ads to groups of people on the internet based on their shared interests and characteristics. Target people that have never been to your website and retarget past website visitors for up to 540 days.
Audience targeting should not be too wide to meet your advertising goals. Default audiences are often more suited for brand awareness, while advanced combination audiences work better for cost per acquisition goals + growing brand.
How relevant are websites on display compared to the target keywords used on the Search network.
Are Dynamic Ads or static ads used? Are lots of versions being tested? e.g. 10 versions. Can you test lots of ads on the display network? How are text ads performing compared to image ads?
Are there placements that should be excluded? (e.g. AdsenseForMobileApps.com)
Are YouTube campaigns being used? What’s the performance like relative to others? What’s the goal of these campaigns? Are YouTube remarketing lists being built?
Customer Testimonials
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Audit FAQ
We offer written and screen share audits. The screen share audit is covered in more detail on its own page.
To be eligible your company should have used Adwords for over 30 days.
Yes. Both the written and live audit are free and non obligation.
Temporary read only access to your Adwords account and Google Analytics. We provide assistance to this upon booking the audit.
The next step is to signup for monthly management. This is of course 100% optional. Budgetary pricing for monthly management is provided on our services pages,
