Paid Search Audit Checklist – 11 Steps to Grow an Account

Overwhelmed with the endless PPC audit checklists in the internet universe? It is helpful to narrow in on opportunities that are specific to your goal. This is a great checklist to quickly see where there are opportunities to grow an account.

Before diving in, it is important to establish acceptable criteria for growth within your PPC account. It is easy to increase click volume within an account, but it is difficult to scale profitably. You should determine a maximum CPA or minimum ROAS that you will accept to increase your conversions. For example, let’s take a B2B account that currently has a $60 CPA, but is comfortable growing as long as the growth is at a $100 or lower CPA. This account has room to grow, and we would be able to use that $100 CPA target as a threshold for evaluation.

Settings & Existing Initiatives Adjustments

1. Search Partners

Double-check if search partners are enabled in your campaigns. Especially in top performing campaigns, search partners can be a great way to increase the volume in your campaigns, often at cheaper CPCs.

2. Devices

Many advertisers are skeptical of non-computer devices like mobile and tablets and shut them off completely; however, with mobile making up nearly 50% of all internet traffic, you could be losing out a lot of potential customers.

Double check your device settings. Are there devices being 100% excluded? Are there opportunities to remove unwarranted negative bid adjustments? Test out additional devices and let the data do the talking.

3. Location Settings

Can your product be shipped to Canada? Are you a B2B software company whose product can be used in any English-speaking country? Try expanding your location settings! Adding in additional countries where your product can be sold is a quick way to dramatically increase potential search traffic on your core terms.

4. Languages

Many advertisers get confused about the location settings in Google Ads. The language setting does not change the language that your keyword or ads are in, rather it refers to the language setting of the user’s browser. Adding in similar language can also increase your potential search volume. In fact, a recent Google study showed a 5.7% uplift in search traffic on US-targeted campaigns that added Spanish as a language.

5. Adjusting Bid Strategies

Automated bidding is also a great way to dramatically scale your account more efficiently than any of us could manually. Google’s automated bidding algorithm has gotten exponentially smarter in the past few years. In addition to freeing up time, we have seen performance improvements of up to 200% through the proper use of smart bidding.

Maximize conversions and maximize conversion value are two great automated bidding strategies that typically are a great fit for growth-focused accounts. These bid strategies focus on maximizing conversions or revenue within your daily spend targets. In general, maximize conversions is a good fit for growth focused B2B clients, and maximize conversion value for growth focused ecommerce clients. Check out this in depth guide for more information about choosing the best automated bid strategy for your account.

If you are using manual bidding, double-check your keyword level bids. Increase your bids on your over-performing keywords that have low impression share to help increase traffic.

6. Impression Share for Exact Match Keywords

Take a look at your impression share for the exact match keywords in your account. If this metric is below 90%, you have the opportunity to secure more traffic from that campaign.

There shouldn’t be a gray area on this one. If you want to show at all on a specific keyword, you should want to show all the time. Generally, look to max out highly relevant exact match keywords before looking to expand into new keyword sets.

New Initiatives

Now that you have maxed out on setting changes and your existing keywords have strong impression shares, let’s move into ideas to bring in net new traffic.

7. Remarketing

Hopefully this is an obvious one that you can skip over. If you aren’t remarketing to site visitors who haven’t converted already, get on it!

8. New Keywords

It is easy to think you are already bidding on all the relevant potential keywords, especially in a mature account. But take a step back! Think about brand new keywords that will expand your search volume. Are you bidding on any competitor terms? Are you covering your entire product inventory or offering? Think about different words or phrases that also accurately describe your product. Additionally, consider adding more general root keywords of existing keywords.

9. Broad match keywords

Seasoned digital marketing veterans might squirm at the suggestion, but Google’s broad match has made some major improvements over the years. Through agency-wide testing, we have found that broad match paired with automated bidding is an amazing growth opportunity in many accounts.

Interested in testing broad match? Check out this blog post to check if your account is a good fit and best practices for set up.

10. Dynamic Search Ads Campaigns (DSA)

Google’s DSA campaigns are a great way to scale spend and expand without having to add hundreds of new keywords. Dynamic search ads are different from traditional keyword-based search campaigns because they trigger ads based on the searcher’s query and content of your website, rather than keywords. DSA campaigns will pick the most relevant landing page automatically and also auto generate your ad headline and display URL.

Since it is virtually impossible to ensure full keyword coverage for every search possible, DSA campaigns are a great way to fill in the gaps. Refer to this blog post to learn how to set up a DSA campaign. DSA campaigns are great for ecommerce, but can also be useful for B2B and other types of campaigns, as well.

11. Display

Many performance-based PPC account managers might be skeptical about adding display efforts to their account. While there are good reasons for that, it should still be considered if growth is your goal.

Start out hyper-targeted and expand from there. One audience type that Metric Theory has seen strong prospecting performance in display is custom intent audiences. This audience type allows you to target users based on their search term history. This is a great way to reach a highly targeted audience that is in the market for your products on the display network.

This audit checklist is sure to find you some new opportunities within your account. Curious about the additional growth that Metric Theory could accomplish for your account? Reach out to our team!