Want to reach your online marketing goals? Then you need to be consistently updating and auditing your pay-per-click campaigns. I meet with many business owners that have a bad taste for PPC marketing because they’ve previously just created a campaign, set it to run, and never reviewed the account to improve performance. This leads them to have little to no conversions and ultimately quit PPC marketing all together.

Auditing your pay-per-click campaigns is beneficial for a number of reasons. Such as to improve your account performance, lower your cost per clicks, increase your click through rates and your conversions. So what does it mean to audit your per-per-click campaign? It varies depending on your marketing goals, and who you ask, but I would start with these three main audits that can be performed to ensure your campaigns are operating optimally.

Account Structure & Organization Audit

I consider this the most important PPC audit you can perform. The purpose of an account structure and organization audit is to review and ensure you are targeting the right locations, the right users, and the right keywords. With this audit you check for duplicate keywords, ad text variations, and keyword match types. When auditing your account for organization, you should immediately fix any and all duplicate keywords and inappropriate match types. The longer you wait to fix incorrect keywords and match types, the more opportunities you’re very likely missing out on.

Campaign Settings Audit

After you’ve wrapped up the account structure & organization audit, I’d suggest a campaign settings audit. This audit is performed to specifically check your ad rotations, your shared budgets, and determine the appropriate bid modifiers.

Ad Audit

With an ad audit your focus is on the ad text or copy. Identifying which ad variations are under-performing and which are driving positive returns. When you determine which ads are under-performing you can begin to optimize your ads based upon the top performing ad variations.

Are PPC audits time consuming? Yes, but necessary if you want your campaigns to run effectively and drive the highest ROI possible for your spend. Audits also require data to appropriately determine top performers from poor performing ads. You don’t have to perform these audits week in and week out, but I’d suggest once a month if you want to ensure you are running the most effective PPC campaign possible for your business.