How to Conduct a PPC Audit: 12 Easy Steps

Effective landing pages and well-structured Google Ads campaigns often fail without a proper PPC audit checklist.

A person who looks healthy might suffer from an undetected early cancer despite working out, eating healthy, and getting proper sleep. Without regular health checkups and reading medical reports, it is challenging to confirm one’s health status.

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ads work similarly.

Regardless of the type of PPC ads (Google Ads, Meta Ads, or Microsoft Ads) you are running, performing a PPC audit, like a medical test, helps diagnose poor ad performance and identify overlooked factors that are hurting your ROI, such as wasted ad spend, poor ad relevance, or a message mismatch.

A recent WordStream research study revealed that mismanagement of PPC ads results in an estimated 26% wastage of ad budgets in ecommerce businesses. It goes without saying that PPC auditing is particularly critical in the ecommerce industry, where paid advertising is crucial for immediate sales and measurable ROI.

This comprehensive guide will help you learn what exactly a PPC audit is and how you can achieve it in 12 easy steps to amplify the efficiency of your paid advertisements.

What is a PPC Audit?

A PPC Audit is a process that involves a comprehensive analysis and examination of PPC ad campaigns, from reviewing keywords and budget allocation to landing pages and conversion tracking, as well as identifying performance gaps, wasted ad spend, and the overall effectiveness of the account structure.

Simply put, a PPC audit is a diagnostic analysis of your ads to determine whether they are cost-efficient, data-driven, and optimized as intended. No matter which platform you run PPC ads on (Google Ads, Meta Ads, or Microsoft Ads), these are some metrics you essentially need to keep track of:

• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Conversion rate
• Quality score
• Return on ad spend

The ultimate goal for a PPC strategy for e-commerce brands is straightforward – ensure that every ad dollar spent is measurable and use that knowledge to boost your ROI. A robust PPC auditing strategy must complement a successful PPC strategy.

The benefits make this combined strategy irresistible:

• Early detection of sources wasting your ad budget, like broad match keywords, leading to irrelevant clicks.
• An enhanced post-click experience and increased conversions can be achieved through accurate ad and landing page relevance and message matching.
• Identification of an underperforming bidding strategy or a group of ad groups and keywords.

These findings enable you to iterate and optimize your PPC ads, thereby enhancing the scalability of your campaigns.

Why you should conduct a PPC audit

We know that with all those numbers and intimidating analytical figures, PPC auditing may seem like a daunting task. As an ecommerce marketing company, we have encountered numerous brands and companies that assume an initial, meticulous implementation of a strategy in PPC campaigns, along with an account audit, is sufficient. However, this mindset is gravely inaccurate. A successful marketing strategy involves regular PPC audits.

Regular PPC audits are crucial in the e-commerce industry, where organizations often run multiple campaigns simultaneously. When you run ad campaigns, shopping ads, and responsive search ads simultaneously, running tabs on every single section of an ad is a challenging task. Without a proper structure for audits, you will ultimately lose track of what is working and what is draining the health of your paid advertising campaigns.

However, a WordStream research study shows that structured and frequent audits can yield ROAS 30% higher than those who don’t.

If that result in itself is not convincing enough, below are more reasons why PPC audits matter:

• Maintain goal alignment: It is common for campaigns to shift faster than the strategy upon which they were initially built. An audit ensures that your PPC efforts continue to serve your core objectives, be it growing sales, increasing AOV, or improving ROAS.
• Recover wasted ad spend: The average Google Ads account loses 25-35% of its budget due to irrelevant search terms, low-quality placements, incorrect conversion tracking, or structural problems. Auditing helps stop that drain.
• Keep up with algorithm updates: Google’s algorithmic updates are unpredictable, but auditing ensures your PPC performance stays at the top of its game. It helps spot changes in the algorithm and identify best practices early on, which you can then implement to optimize your existing campaigns accordingly.
• Enhance ad performance: Updating outdated ad copy, creating a clear blueprint of when to use different bidding strategies, and reviewing campaign settings will allow you to measure campaign effectiveness and boost performance.
• Competitive Intelligence: Google Analytics can serve as a powerful PPC audit tool to observe and examine how your campaigns compare to those of your competitors. This diagnosis, in turn, helps identify opportunity gaps to improve your ad ranking and visibility.
• Performance Visibility and Audience Insights: A PPC audit report provides a detailed overview of how your ads perform over a specific time. You can leverage this report to not only identify keywords, campaigns, and landing pages that perform well, but also find the ads and messages resonating the best with your target audience.

A thorough PPC audit (including Google Ads audit, Meta Ads audit, or Bing Ads audit) helps streamline your campaigns and ensure you achieve profitable growth over irrelevant traffic.

12 Simple Steps to Do a PPC Audit

Healthcare PPC (even niches like Ophthalmology PPC), e-commerce PPC, or Real Estate PPC – regardless of the industry your business operates in, regular PPC audits are essential for the long-term success of ad campaigns.

WYTLABS, a top-tier eCommerce PPC management agency, suggests that these 12 simple steps to perform a PPC audit can significantly elevate the efficiency and performance of your paid advertisements.

Step 1: Define the Goal of Your PPC Audit

If you are running a business, you already know that you cannot expect growth and success without first defining your goals. A successful PPC audit works the same way. Before you start digging into your Google Analytics dashboard, you need to determine precisely what you are looking for.

For e-commerce businesses, typical Google Ads audit goals can look like:

• Improving conversions
• Lowering CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)
• Reducing the loss in ad budgets

These goals can be achieved by aligning ad messaging, adding relevant keywords and removing irrelevant search terms, and monitoring underperforming ad groups and campaigns.

Now, we will guide you through a simple action plan to define the goals of your PPC campaigns:

1. Brainstorm and note the core objectives of your account audit. The goal can be anything from improving ROAS to increasing conversions.
2. List out the metrics that define the success of your PPC campaigns.
3. As an e-commerce business, you are most likely to be dealing with multiple ads at once. Ensure that you have a priority list. Some ad groups, such as those for seasonal products, require more focus than others.
4. Maintain a PPC audit checklist to keep track of your goals and compare it with the audit report for clarity and accountability.

Step 2: Review Account Structure

How do you expect your PPC campaigns to work if you and your team don’t have a clear understanding of your account structure?

A systematic organization of ad groups and ad campaigns plays a more crucial role in successful PPC audits than you can imagine.

Say, you ran your PPC ads for a week, and you finally sit down to review your campaign performance with a cup of coffee. But you can’t even distinguish the purpose or contents of the ad groups. The worst part? It is more than just a messy account structure.

This mistake leads to keyword cannibalization, inaccurate reporting, and missed opportunities. You would quickly be left with a budget that only got spent (don’t know where because you don’t have an account structure) with little to no returns.

There is no one-size-fits-all. However, a top ecommerce PPC management agency, WYTLABS, advises that e-commerce businesses must ideally structure campaigns into categories separated by business models, keyword type, or product lines that look something like below:

• Ad Group Structures: Separate ad groups by different campaign objectives, such as brand campaigns versus non-branded campaigns, or by themes like ‘men’s clothing’ versus ‘women’s clothing.’
• Keyword Match Types: While you can certainly place broad match, exact match, and phrase match keywords in the same ad group, at some point, it becomes difficult to determine which keyword is driving performance. Moreover, a broad match keyword might cannibalize the audience your exact keyword could potentially capture.
• Naming Conventions: For your convenience, it is best advised to follow a consistent naming structure for easier auditing.

Here is a basic checklist you can follow:

• Verify and confirm that the ad group aligns with your ad copy.
• Ensure unrelated products are not placed in the same ad group.
• Always review your list of negative keywords and add terms that drain your ad budget, such as ‘free,’ ‘cheap,’ etc.

A simple implementation of this checklist goes a long way in simplifying PPC performance tracking.

Step 3: Check Campaign Settings

We understand, we truly do. The entire PPC audit process can be tedious, and the urge to skim through your Google Ads dashboard is magnetic. However, a single mistake in your settings can quickly deplete your ad budget.

Campaign-level settings serve as the control panel for critical performance factors in your ads. These settings can be categorized into location, language, bidding strategies, ad scheduling, and device targeting.

So, how can we optimize the campaign settings to work in your favor? Let’s dig in.

• Language settings: First, make sure the language you choose to target matches that of your website and landing pages, as well as your target audience.
• Location settings: A few key points you need to keep in mind.
  • Ensure your geographic target aligns with your shipping and service areas. Similarly, make sure you’ve only included the intended regions to avoid wasting any budget on unrelated locations.
  • Allocate different budgets for each location based on its performance.
  • Assess your goals and wisely choose between presence-based vs. interest-based targeting.
• Bidding Strategies: Our team at WYTLABS recommends automated bidding (Target ROAS or Maximize Conversions) for e-commerce businesses when tracking is reliable.
  However, it is still recommended to review your goals and be meticulous in deciding between manual bidding, smart bidding, and automated bidding.
  Once decided, ensure the campaigns reflect the same.
• Ad Scheduling: You are missing out on a significant portion of conversions if you haven’t been tracking the optimal hours when your ad performance peaks. Determine your peak hours and increase your bids for those hours. For most e-commerce brands, weekends and holidays experience a significant surge in traffic.
• Device targeting: Failing to optimize Google Ads for device targeting is a common mistake. While it is certainly a critical step, this mistake is particularly severe for e-commerce companies and brands, regardless of the industry in which your business operates.
  A recent SEOSandwich study revealed that 65% of e-commerce Google Ads traffic comes from mobile devices.
  What does this mean for you? You need to meticulously assess the performance of your bidding strategies on mobile devices and adjust your bids accordingly.

Auditing your campaign settings at least twice a month can help save your ROI from critical damage.

Step 4: Analyze Keyword Performance

Heavy traffic is not always good traffic. In fact, if your Google Ads sees a sudden surge in traffic, you might want to sit and perform an emergency audit. You would notice your Google Ads are either performing exceptionally well or failing miserably.

In most cases, this comes down to your keywords. Irrelevant keywords can consume your entire budget, leaving your high-performing keywords with only crumbs.

But don’t worry. We will guide you on how you can efficiently track your keywords.

• We strongly advise against overusing broad match keywords, as they often bring irrelevant traffic. Phrase match and exact match keywords must always be your top priorities. This setup also helps improve ad relevancy.
• Conduct regular audits to identify and eliminate high-spend keywords that fail to generate conversions, both in terms of quality and quantity.
• Remove duplicate keywords that might clash and lead to cannibalization.
• Create and maintain a negative keyword list.
• Always be on the lookout for new keyword ideas. Additionally, an audit of your search terms can help you spot high-intent phrases that you can add to your campaigns within both existing and new ad groups.

For most of these tasks, your Search Terms Report is your companion. Please review and examine it thoroughly, identifying the relevant keywords and adding any irrelevant ones to your negative keyword list.

Auditing your search terms reports and keyword lists can help you save up to 30%.

Step 5: Check your Ad Copy and Ad Creatives

You may have heard that first impressions can leave a lasting impression. They truly do.

Ad copy (which is the first thing your target audience views) has the potential to make or break a deal. Therefore, it is essential to pay close attention to this area to maintain control over your click-through rates, conversion rates, and quality scores.

You can view it as a form of art that requires perfectly synchronizing your brand messaging with the value proposition while also creating a sense of urgency. This alignment works like magic to get you that click.

Highlighting Effective Ad Copy Practices:

• The language and tone of the copy must be clear, concise, and compelling.
• Utilize high-intent keywords to align with search terms and enhance relevance.
• Add strong CTAs, such as “Book A Call” or “Order Today,” to trigger user action, and utilize offers and promotions like “Free Delivery” or “30% Off” to add a sense of urgency to take that action.
• Organically place social reviews and proofs to garner your audience’s trust.
• Regularly A/B test to identify which ad copy works best with your target audience.

Using Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) enables the Google algorithm to test various copy combinations and display the most relevant variation for each search term.

There are certain things you need to note when auditing Responsive Search Ads (RSAs):

• You must use a minimum of 3 headline variations and two descriptions, with a maximum limit of 15 and 4, respectively. You cannot publish your ads without the minimum requirements.
  Add as many ad variations as you can.
• Headlines and descriptions are the best places to convey your key selling point.
• Ideally, include your brand name in the headline.
• Promote offers, discounts, and value propositions in your descriptions. (For example, “Free shipping” and “30% off today” are the texts that would go here.)
• You definitely do not want your audience to see the advertisement for one thing and then have the resulting landing page show something else. Always cross-check the alignment. Always.
• Google is stringent when it comes to its policies. Make sure your ad does not include misleading claims, expired deals, or disapproved creatives.
• Building on the previous point, you also need to be cautious of accidentally retaining expired deals. Regularly refresh and update your ads with the latest seasonal discounts and offers available.

While Google ad extensions are optional, you can leverage them to link and take your audience to other popular products/services in your business that might interest them. Structured snippets are also an efficient method of showcasing your product ranges.

Alternatively, you can use callout extensions to highlight more benefits you provide, such as 24/7 support or free delivery.

Ad copies directly impact CTR, ad relevance, and Quality Score, so regular and rigorous auditing helps ensure you are on the right track.

Step 6: Examine Landing Pages

Imagine ordering a blue backpack you absolutely love, only to open the package and find it with broken zippers or, worse, one that is fluorescent orange. The disappointment it causes is similar to that of visitors who click on good ad copy only to be directed to a landing page that fails to deliver on its promise.

A poor landing page experience can quickly turn conversion rates into a disaster, which ultimately affects your Quality Score as well.

So, here is an audit checklist for your landing pages:

• Page Load Speed: The first thing you need to consider is the time it takes for your landing page to load. You can check the same on Google PageSpeed Insights.

Several medical studies reveal that people now have a significantly lower attention span. This is a crucial finding for e-commerce brands, as website loading is also considerably affected. More than half of the internet users abandon a landing page that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

The increase in bounce rate kills both your conversion rates and quality scores.

• Device Optimization: Most online sales happen through mobile devices. For this reason, your landing pages need to be optimized and made mobile responsive. Use layouts that support easy navigation.
• Message Match: What your ad copy offers must be reflected in your landing page. Any deviation from this standard is a failure in communication, and visitors will instantly lose trust in your business.
  For example, an ad that offers necklaces should direct your audience to a landing page that showcases necklaces. Not products from a different category (like hoodies or shoes, or even earrings) or from a different section of your website (About Us or Home).
• Trust Factors: With numerous scams in the market, it’s essential to ensure that your landing page displays clear signs of a credible business. You can add reviews, security badges, and return policies to earn your visitors’ trust.
• Conversion Elements: Lastly, verify that all essential buttons and links function properly. Review the functionality of forms and add-to-cart buttons, remove all expired coupon offers, and simplify your visitors’ journey from exploring your products to checking out.
  These steps have a direct impact on conversion rates.

In addition to this checklist, you can also perform A/B testing on different landing pages with variations in the page copy, UX designs, and CTAs to spot the best-performing

Step 7: Audit Conversion Tracking

Conversion tracking is a core component of auditing PPC campaigns and optimizing ads for improved performance. You need conversion tags for website purchases, newsletter signups, app downloads, phone calls, and contact forms, among others.

Without a proper setup of conversion tracking codes, you will never know how to tie your ads, products, and clicks back to your sales.

Google Tag Assistant is a PPC audit tool that helps monitor the correct installation and debugging of conversion tracking issues. Additionally, connecting your Google Ads account with Google Analytics 4 (GA4) enables more profound analysis of conversion tracking and enhanced audience segmentation for more effective remarketing strategies.

Google Ads remarketing tags help collect and give a comprehensive overview of audience data. Using this information, you can further optimize your ads for ROI growth.

Quick PPC audit checklist for Conversion Tracking:

• Verify conversion tags.
• Check the GA4-Google Ads account integration.
• Include both conversion count and transaction amount value in purchase conversions.
• Align conversion types with appropriate values.
• Select the correct Count type, which is typically ‘One’ for single actions, such as sign-ups, and ‘Every’ for recurring purchases.
• Ensure there are no duplicate tags. To do this, add the purchase data and send unique transaction IDs to your Google Ads account. Google Ads considers all conversions as one.

With proper conversion tracking, follow informed decisions, efficient optimizations, and measurable ROI.

Step 8: Analyze Audience Targeting

• Think of accurate audience targeting as a direct connection to potential customers.An ideal PPC audit here involves clearly defining your audience and a meticulous remarketing strategy.Our team at WYTLABSrecommends this checklist:
  • Audience segments: A thorough review of your audience segments begins with the confirmation of which audience segment you are using:
    • As part of your retention efforts, use customer match segments to target existing customers.
    • Remarketing lists are used to target an audience segment that has already visited your website but has not yet taken the desired end-goal action. Remarketing lists are the most likely to convert.
      Build separate remarketing audience segments based on the user’s last action, such as viewing the product or adding it to the cart. Also, use this strategy to market to old customers.
      Additionally, you can utilize dynamic remarketing to display the exact product a visitor last viewed, effectively doubling conversion rates.
    • Lookalike or similar audiences help target people who share similar characteristics and user behavior with your repeat buyers.
    • Utilize demographic audience segments to target individuals based on their location, gender, age, household income, or parental status.
    • In-house market segments aim at users who have been actively researching a product in your niche.
  • Audience overlap: Audience overlap between campaigns is generally safe; however, you may still need to adjust your bidding strategy for each based on your goals and performance.
  • Remarketing Optimization and Ad Fatigue: Nothing is more frustrating than an ad that won’t go away. Utilize frequency gaps to prevent ad fatigue. You might also want to use sequencing remarketing to show a different message to your audience each time it appears.
  • Bid Adjustment: By now, you should already be aware that bid adjustments should be a regular part of your PPC audits. Every change in goal and every analysis of a performance report requires you to check through your bids and make appropriate changes to get the best result out of your ad campaigns.

  Step 9: Explore Network Performance

  Search Network, Display Network, and Shopping Network are vastly different, particularly when it comes to e-commerce.

  You can expect high-intent traffic and high conversions, which come with a higher CPC with search networks, while you can expect display networks to reach a broader audience and derive lower conversion rates and lower CPCs. Utilize the two for sales-focused campaigns and brand awareness, respectively.

  On the other hand, shopping networks are integral to product ads.

  You may or may not enable Search Partners. If enabled, expect unpredictable traffic quality. Examine your data and optimize bids accordingly.

  Apart from this, you can also choose between Google Shopping (generic search campaigns in Google’s shopping section) and Performance Max (AI-driven ads across the entirety of Google’s inventory).

  While most businesses report higher ROAS with Performance Max, we still recommend choosing only what best fits your strategy.

  Step 10: Check Quality Score and Impression Rate

  The three main elements that impact your Quality Score and Impression Rate are

  1. Expected CTR
  2. Ad Relevance
  3. Landing Page Experience

  A higher Quality Score works like a domino. It lowers your CPC, boosts your ad ranking, improves conversion rates, and ultimately triggers ROI growth. Moreover, it also enhances your SEO ranking. Not only that, in the long term, a high Quality Score also elevates your organic traffic.

  So, what steps can you take to work your Quality Score up the ladder?

  • A quick fix for a poor CTR is to improve your ad copy. Improve clarity in your headlines and descriptions by using a couple of relevant keywords to match search intent, and add relevant ad extensions.
  • Ad Relevance drastically improves when creating ad groups that are both tightly themed and contain relevant keywords only.
  • Quick page loading, message matching, and easy-to-navigate, straightforward UX designs are key factors that contribute to a pleasant landing page experience.
  • Diagnose your keyword list daily. Filter your keywords. Keep track of the ones that bring you revenue and throw out the ones that only drain your budget.
  • Review your Impression Share analyses.

  A higher Lost IS (budget) loss, meaning lost to budget, generally signals the need to increase your bids or adjust allocations across ad groups.
  Similarly, losing IS (rank) or losing to “rank” requires your attention to improving the Quality Score.

  Once you are done auditing, don’t just leave it at that.

  Monitor daily, make immediate changes as you review performance, and expect a gradual improvement in the quality score over the next three weeks to a month.

  Step 11: Budget Allocation and Pacing

  What could be worse than losing potential clients only because you starved your high-performing keywords and campaigns?

  As such, we suggest creating a PPC audit checklist that looks something like the one below:

  • Check budget distribution. Thoroughly review the allocation, distribution, and bidding across branded and non-branded campaigns and different product categories.
  • Spot each of the campaigns, products, and keywords bringing the highest conversions, ROAS, and ROIs. These winners are the most profitable and deserve higher budgets.
  • Pause ad groups and campaigns that do not bring any valuable outcomes.
  • Remove low-quality keywords and, if applicable, add to the negative keyword list.
  • Review and update bidding strategies (Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Conversions, or Enhanced CPC).
  • Assess the pacing of your budget. Factors such as competitiveness and demand may impact your budget spend and pacing (daily budget allocation).

  For instance, in a highly competitive market like clothing, a lower bid can harm your ad performance and lead to underpacing, where your daily budget is not fully utilized.

  In the same way, higher demand may also eat up your budget sooner, and the consequence is your ad spends more than your determined daily budget (overpacing).

  Again, analyze your ad and campaign performance to find the perfect balance.

  This step of auditing is, however, best suited when you have sufficient data to make an informed decision. This means that, after 3-6 months of running your PPC ads, you need to sit down and carefully audit your campaign performance.

  Step 12: Document Findings & Create an Optimization Plan

  The end goal of a successful audit is to optimize and improve your PPC ads.

  Let’s face it. It is a LOT of information, a lot of numbers. Without proper documentation, you would only be chasing tails.

  A well-organized documentation of key findings becomes an action plan for optimization and a blueprint for driving revenue growth. You can follow a simple framework to achieve that.

  • Document Findings and Tracking
    No matter which platform your PPC account is in, Google Ads, Meta, or Bing, you need to make a note of every little discovery. You do not want to miss out on every little finding across:
    • Fluctuations in key metrics (CTR, CPC, Quality Scores, Page load speed, bounce rates) about campaigns, keywords, landing pages, and every single component that makes an ad.
    • Wasted budget and the where, how, and what involved.
    • Overall campaign performance overview.

  Additionally, make note of suggestions to improve weak areas.

  • Apply the ICE Framework
    A framework substantially simplifies the entire process.
    Frameworks, such as the ICE, will enable you to understand the status of your campaigns and the steps to take forward concisely. It is beneficial in prioritizing tasks.

  With ICE, you can rate:

  • Impact: How much impact does a suggested change have on the ROI?
  • Confidence: Rate your confidence level on how certain you are that this change will work.
  • Easy: Rate the ease of implementation.

  An overview of the ratings can help you create a realistic timeline and push forward with your action plan.

  • Team Communication:
    You can use a sheet or table across Excel, Notion, or any tool of your choice, and pick a team communication channel to assign responsibilities, convey the reasoning behind changes, report progress, and share performance results. Clear communication removes blockers and places every single person involved on the same page.

  With a proper audit schedule, documenting findings, and implementing changes with a clear action plan, you can ensure that you identify and address issues early, optimize your ads, and continuously improve your ROI.

  Conclusion

  A comprehensive audit of your PPC ads is the key to successful lead generation and customer acquisition through ads that actually work. Without this process, it is like drawing a piece of art with your eyes closed. It’s guesswork, and for PPC ads that can quickly drain real dollars, you cannot ignore it.

  By following the steps we discussed in this guide, creating an audit checklist, and documenting your findings, you will see improved performance and revenue growth within just weeks of implementation.

  Apart from that, you can always connect with any ecommerce PPC management agency, like WYTLABS, which can assist you with PPC audits, understand your unique needs, strategize, and implement a PPC marketing plan personalized just for you.

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