You’re AdWords certified, you read ebooks, and you subscribe to AdWords blogs— so, why are your campaigns still draining your budget with little to no success? In times like these, an AdWords audit is just what your account needs to pull it out of its slump and set it in the right direction.
When considering an AdWords audit, don’t be fooled by the self-proclaimed “experts” looking to scare you into paying for their services. An audit is meant to help you by identifying the critical issues causing your campaigns to suffer and providing solutions to empower your business— not leave your pockets empty. You’ll know you’re talking to an expert you can trust with these four honest ways an AdWords audit can save your business.
1. Expose Your Pain Points:
Pain Points are a given in any AdWords campaign, but what sets apart businesses with successful campaigns are they view pain points as opportunities to capitalize on and find solutions for.
An AdWords audit, in your best interest, focuses on addressing and understanding your pain points. Once you identify the problem, you can stop wasting time and money waiting for magic to happen, and you can focus on finding solutions to support your initial goals.
Let’s say, your campaigns performed well when they initially launched, but after time, performance diminished, as well as your advertising budget. In an audit performed by an honest expert, you may find a major factor of poor campaign performance is caused by neglecting your account. While you were busy juggling responsibilities, the thought of actively making changes and optimizations to your campaigns wasn’t at the top of your list, and performance suffered. In this hypothetical situation, it’s clear the key pain point is time, and an audit may help you realize the best solution is to work with a PPC management company.
A simple discussion with an experience AdWords expert can unveil and break down your biggest obstacles in AdWords to create a clear pathway to success.
2. Identify Areas Of Wasted Spend:
AdWords is an intricate platform to navigate and manage, and without the proper knowledge, it’s easy for advertising dollars to disappear right under your nose. A trustworthy AdWords expert will thoroughly examine any potential areas of wasted spend, and walk you through their findings no matter how good or bad the results.
This local storage company used primarily one keyword match type and spent over $80 on completely irrelevent clicks.
Common causes of wasted spend you may find in an audit are:
- No conversion tracking/ incorrectly setup conversion tracking:
- Without conversion tracking, you have no proof of what works well within your campaigns. This results in spending money with no intention. In order to use your budget efficiently, you need performance data to make realistic decisions on where your budget will work best.
- Poor account structure:
- A lack of structure within your account is a major cause of irrelevant traffic and unwanted clicks. An audit will illustrate the need for a granular structure within your account. A common issue found in audits are accounts with one campaign, one ad group, and a collection of keywords targeting every service the business offers. This results in extremely broad targeting, so when you’re ad does show up for a search query, what you’re advertising might not fit the searchers original intent.
- No match type variation:
- Limiting your keywords to one match type is also a big contributor to irrelevant traffic and wasted clicks. Include a variety of match types to test performance and make changes along the way, rather than go all-in on one match type and burn through your budget with no indication of what works. Check out our breakdown of Google’s keyword match types to see which ones will work best for your campaigns.
- No device optimization:
- Optimizing device bids is a common practice that gets overlooked and in turn, can be a big budget waster. For example, you may notice you’re spending money on clicks coming from mobile, but the landing pages your ads are linked to aren’t optimized for mobile and as a result, aren’t converting. An audit puts this kind of waste you may have never noticed into perspective to help you make smarter decisions with your budget.
- Irrelevant landing pages linked to ads:
- Your budget can take you far, especially when your ads guide a user directly to a landing page on your site that fulfills what they are looking for. A common mistake found in audits is when businesses use one generic ad to market all of its products and/or services. The great thing about AdWords is people are actively searching for your products and/or services, so if you can provide a direct route to what searchers are looking for, your chance of success is much higher.
3. Realign Business Goals With Your Campaigns:
After building and launching a campaign, there’s a good chance that the next time you look at your campaigns, you’ll have forgotten the initial goal you set out to achieve.
An audit will help you take a few steps back to identify why you turned to AdWords for your business and how your current campaign setup is contributing to that goal— or not. One on one with an expert, you can discuss the best strategies within AdWords to accomplish goals revolving around your business.
Without a strong understanding of the AdWords platform, it can be difficult to build and structure campaigns that will effectively contribute to the growth of your business. An expert can help you get back on track with insight on how to optimize your campaigns to best serve and meet your business goals.
4. Highlight New Opportunities in Your Digital Marketing Campaign:
Now, there’s more to an audit than your AdWords campaigns. Your audit is a resource, and you can use it to gain insight on your digital marketing strategy as a whole. AdWords is just one element in a much larger operation, so it can be beneficial to hear an outside opinion from someone who has seen it all.
During your audit, you may find a couple of high search volume keywords in AdWords that aren’t mentioned in any of the content on your website. An honest expert would see this as an opportunity to strengthen your website’s organic ranking with SEO. They might suggest building out a couple new pages on your website that target those keywords to increase unpaid traffic from Google.
At the end of the day, an AdWords audit is all about finding ways to help your business succeed, so don’t feel overwhelmed with what’s revealed about your campaigns. A successful AdWords campaign takes time and expertise, and a true expert will have you and your business’ best interest at heart and be there to push your business to the peak of its success.
