E-commerce PPC Audit: The Complete Checklist

Google Shopping ads make up around 76.4% of retail search ad spend. Result? They generate 85.3% of all clicks on Adwords campaigns or Google Shopping campaigns, according to the latest update.

If you are an e-commerce business owner and want to evaluate factors such as click-through rate, conversion rate, and cost per acquisition, a PPC audit is the right way to go.

Auditing helps you improve campaign effectiveness, maximize ROI, and let you know what is working well and what needs improvement.

Before digging further, let’s shed light on a PPC audit and why it is important for your business.

What Is a PPC Audit?

A PPC audit examines the effectiveness, expenses, and results of your ad campaigns, ad groups, and individual ads. It lets you evaluate your paid advertising strategy’s short- and long-term performance.

Furthermore, PPC campaigns often run on platforms like Google ads, Bing ads, or social media advertising platforms like Facebook ads or LinkedIn ads.

Why Is a Google Ads Campaign Audit Essential?

According to the ROI street result, 80% of businesses using Google Ads say they see a positive impact on their overall marketing ROI.

Google ads campaign audit is essential because:

• It allows you to assess the effectiveness of your advertising efforts,
• Identifies areas of improvement and maximizes your ROI.

Moreover, the audit offers vital insights into ad performance, including

• Campaign keywords,
• targeting, and
• creativity.

As a result, regular audits help optimize Google Ads campaigns for relevancy, reach, and conversion, driving more qualified traffic to websites or landing pages.

Furthermore, for the audience, it ensures ads are relevant to their interests, enhancing the user experience and boosting engagement.

Related: What Are the Must-Know Google Ads Terms?

When Should You Audit Your Google Ads Account?

You should regularly audit your Google Ads account to ensure optimal performance and maximum ROI.

Conducting routine audits facilitates the identification of areas for enhancement and the necessary modifications to your targeting strategy, keywords, and campaigns.

Moreover, maintaining regular audit practices can help you optimize your

• Advertisements for conversions,
• reach, and
• relevancy

In other words, it means qualified traffic to your website or landing pages.

Regular audits, quarterly or monthly, can yield a comprehensive evaluation of the campaign’s success indicators, ad quality ratings, keyword relevancy, and audience targeting criteria.

Moreover, according to the industry standard, audits are recommended at least every 3-6 months.

What Does the PPC Audit Include? The Complete Checklist

A thorough PPC audit covers every detail to ensure your pay-per-click marketing campaigns run as smoothly and effectively as possible.

A comprehensive overview of the usual components of a PPC audit is provided below:

Audit PPC Account Structure

This section explains the thorough review of your PPC account, highlighting areas negatively affecting your PPC performance. Due to the review, you can expect in a clear action plan for how to boost the results as fast as possible.

According to the workstream, after conducting PPC audits and putting best practices into effect, clients saw an average 23% increase in clicks and a 12% increase in conversions in 2023.

Here are the steps that you can follow to audit the PPC account structure.

• Review Campaign Settings: Verify location targeting, language settings, ad scheduling, and network targeting to help the users for their relevance and easing use. Moreover, check ad rotation settings to ensure fair testing of ad variations.
• Analyze Ad Group Structure: Utilize Google Ads Scripts or third-party tools like Optmyzr or WordStream to automate the analysis of ad group themes.

Perform Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis entails evaluating rivals’ strengths and weaknesses to shape business strategy.

You can easily gain insights into performing competitor analysis with these steps.

1. Analyze Competitor Keywords: Use keyword research tools such as SEMrush or Google Keyword Planner to identify the keywords that competitors are targeting in their SEO and PPC campaigns. By doing so, you can get the exact keywords for your site, which helps users find your page easily.
2. Track Website Changes: Track factors like product updates, pricing changes, or new content additions to the competition’s page. This can give you the exact changes you need to make to your website.
3. Benchmark Performance Metrics: Compare your own performance metrics (e.g., website traffic, conversion rates, social media engagement) against competitors using tools like Google Analytics, Socialbakers, or Sprout Social.

Identify Negative Keywords

Identifying negative keywords in pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns such as Google Ads is an important step, as it helps you refine your targeting and ensure your ads are shown to the most relevant audience.

HubSpot found that optimized negative keyword lists can improve click-through rates (CTRs) by up to 15%. 

Follow these steps to Identify Negative Keywords.

• Utilize Google Analytics: Integrate Google Ads with Google Analytics for detailed user behavior data.
• Analyze search terms causing high bounce rates or low time on site, indicating poor relevancy.
• Integrate with CRM Data: Integrate the PPC platform with the CRM system for extra customer data. Use it to pinpoint keywords that won’t resonate with your audience.
• Use tools like Zapier or native connectors provided by your PPC platform and CRM system to link them together.

Check Ad Relevancy

Include relevant keywords in your ad copy to increase visibility for relevant searches. Also, regularly check ad relevancy and adjust as necessary to effectively reach and engage your target audience.

Uncover the process of checking ad relevancy using these steps.

• Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI): Implement DKI in your ad copy to dynamically insert relevant keywords from the user’s search query. This can help improve ad relevance and click-through rates.
• Audience Targeting: Utilize audience targeting to reach specific segments of your target audience with tailored ad messaging, improving relevancy for users with relevant interests and demographics.

Audit Landing Pages

The section systematically reviews and evaluates web pages’ effectiveness, relevance, and performance. This process helps identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement to optimize conversion rates and the user experience.

For auditing landing pages, make sure to follow these steps-

• Check Loading Speed: Test landing page loading speed with tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix. Optimize images, scripts, and elements for faster loading.
• A/B Testing: Conduct an A/B testing to compare landing page versions and identify elements that positively impact conversion rates.

However, the process determines which design, messaging, or layout changes improve performance, informing future optimization strategies.

Set Ad Extensions

Ad extensions include features such as additional links to specific pages on your website, phone numbers, location information, or additional text describing your products or services.

• Navigate to Ad Extensions Management: Access ad extensions in the platform’s interface, usually under the “Ads & Extensions” tab in Google Ads.
• Choose Extension Type: Select the type of ad extension you want to set up, such as site link extensions, callout extensions, or location extensions.

Look Over Quality Score

Quality Score is a metric used by platforms like Google Ads to evaluate the quality and relevance of your ads to ensure a positive user experience for searchers.

Implement these steps to look over the quality score.

• Export Quality Score Data: You can export the quality score for your keywords from an advertising platform’s interface, such as Google or Microsoft advertisements.
• Utilize Scripts or APIs: For more effective campaign administration, use the scripts or APIs your advertising platform offers to automate Quality Score optimization and monitoring duties.
• Identify Low-Quality Score Keywords: Use tools to identify low-quality score keywords or third-party tools such as Semrush, SpyFu, and WordStream. 

Determine Budget

• Set Contingency Funds: Place the contingency funds apart and plan for actual prices or modifications in situations. This ensures you have the flexibility to evolve to unforeseen challenges or possibilities.
• Assess Market Conditions- Consider market conditions, enterprise developments, competitive landscape, and external factors that can affect the fulfillment and rate-effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

Test Ad Scheduling

• Google Ads Drafts & Experiments: This function allows you to cut up site visitors among specific scheduling settings and evaluate performance directly inside the platform.
• Custom Analytics Dashboards: Create custom analytics dashboards using tools like Google Data Studio or Tableau to visualize ad performance statistics segmented by extraordinary scheduling parameters.

This helps evaluate and get insights into the effect of ad scheduling on the overall performance of the marketing campaign.

Related: How to Optimize Your Google Search Ads for eCommerce

Review Bid Strategy

• Google Ads Auction Insights: This tool provides data on your ad performance compared to competitors, allowing you to assess competitiveness in auctions and adjust bid strategy accordingly.
• Google Ads Experiments: This function allows you to break up site visitors between exceptional bidding techniques or adjustments within the identical campaign to examine performance without delay.

Evaluate Conversion Tracking

• Google Tag Assistant: This helps validate the setup of diverse Google tags, including Google Ads conversion monitoring, by checking for implementation errors and imparting diagnostic information.
• Google Analytics Debugger: A Chrome extension that permits you to debug and troubleshoot Google Analytics implementations, such as conversion tracking setups. It shows tracking occasions, errors, and records despatched to Google Analytics inside the browser console.

Do Performance Analysis

• Google Tag Manager (GTM): Use GTM to set up and manipulate numerous tags, including tracking codes, to your website without needing to adjust the site’s code directly.
• Facebook Pixel Helper: This can assist you in debugging and validating your Facebook Pixel implementations on websites. Moreover, it provides real-time feedback, allowing you to identify and resolve any issues with your pixel setup promptly.

Conclusion

Conducting a comprehensive PPC audit is crucial for any e-commerce business seeking to enhance the effectiveness of its advertising efforts and maximize return on investment (ROI).

Thoroughly examining various aspects of pay-per-click campaigns, such as account structure, competitor analysis, keyword relevancy, landing pages, ad extensions, quality score, budget allocation, ad scheduling, bid strategy, conversion tracking, and performance analysis, enables businesses to pinpoint areas for improvement and implement optimization strategies effectively.