1. Benefits Of APaid
Search Audit
Hosted by Hanapin Marketing
& Sam Owen
07.25.12

2. Overview
• Benefits
• Knowing When To Audit
• Account Review Best Practices
• Advanced Assessment Areas
• Discoveries & Fixes

3. Benefits – Your Account
• Increase Conversions / ROI
• Improve Quality Score
• Cut Wasteful Spend
• Revise Account Strategies

4. Benefits – You & Your Team
• Reinforce analytical skills
• Create short- & long-term action plans
• Helpful in agency settings – win business by showing them
mistakes you’ve identified that you could fix
• In house – produce reports to show to higher-ups
• Get a second opinion if you can!

5. When Should You Audit?
• First priority = any accounts which are in trouble
– Defining trouble: How green are you?
• Green account = projected within 5% of goal or beating goal
• Yellow account = projected within 15% of goal
• Red account = projected worse than 15% of goal
• Know your priorities!
– Potential for growth
• To stay sharp or to have fun 

6. Top Audit Errors
• Timeframe too small
• Being disrespectful
• Not having a clear picture of goals
• Looking only at AdWords

7. Let’s Audit!

8. Settings
• Bidding options – CPC/CPA/Auto/Enhanced CPC?
– Strategy?
• Optimized for ROI or ROAS?
– Day Parting / Bid Adjustments?
• Delivery – To search partner or not to search partner, that is the
question!
• Device Type
– Keep mobile and desktop separate
– Does the account have a good multi-screen strategy?
• Ad rotation
• Ad scheduling
– All days or just weekends?
– Bid increases for lunchtimes?
– Dimensions tab

9. Settings (cont…)
• Search/Display separate
• Display separated out by targeting type
– ICM
– Topic
– Keyword
– Placements
• Geo-Targeting & Language
• Start dates!

10. Campaigns
• Are budgets allocated logically?
– Divert the majority of your budget (75%+) to your
stronger campaigns, and use the rest on
experiments & discovery
• Campaigns organized?
– Make sense why that campaign is separate from
another?
– Naming structure coherent across account?

11. Match Types
• Do you have an intelligible keyword match
strategy?
– Majority of keywords exact and phrase
– Broad match keywords used more sparingly
• Too much = no control, too little = no experimenting
• Run search query reports, spin out new keywords, add
negatives.
• One way to judge is…

12. Lin-Rodnitzky Ratio
• Formula devised by David Rodnitzky and Will Lin to measure
the efficiency of any PPC campaign
• L/R Ratio = CPA of all search queries
• CPA of all queries with 1+ conversion
• Under 1.5 = Account is too conservative or brand heavy
• Over 2.0 = Account is too aggressive
• The sweet spot = 1.51 to 1.99

13. Quality Score
• AdCenter historic QS report
• Monthly QS download
– Month on month change
• Explain rise in CPCs / drop in traffic?
• Hover over the keyword speech bubble:

14. KPI Threshold
• How many campaigns / ad groups / keywords
are hitting goals? How many aren’t?
– Staying within CPA?
– Spending too much?
– Not getting enough leads?
• Your KPIs set the tone of your audit!

15. Ad Groups
• Number of keywords per ad group?
– Ideally 10-20, but try to stay under 100
– Too many?
• Break out further
– Too few?
• Keyword research + expansion
• Too granular? Hundreds of ad groups can be just as
unmanageable as hundreds of keywords.

16. Keywords
• Run a search query report
– Negative matching
– Spin off popular queries
• Google Keyword Tool
– New opportunities
• Bids
– Set too high?Too low?
– Impression Share

17. Ads
• Correct grammar, punctuation, spelling
• Factually correct
– Replace out of date ads
– Look out for expired offers
• Running ad tests
– Time to conclude / start new tests?
– Try testing out different landing pages – straight to cart vs.
information page.
• Rotation settings
• Ad Preview Tool
– Look at competitors ads
• Be different from those ranking above you &copy good ads ranking
below you!

18. Extensions
• Sitelinks
• Location extensions
– Google places
• Call extensions
– Remember to check ROAS or CPA!
• Social
• Product
• Mobile App

19. Display Network
• Check out your automatic placements
– Exclude poor performers
– Add strong performers to managed placements
and bid them up
• Image ad issues!
– Wrong sizes, spelling mistakes, image quality?
– Moving gifs or just static?

20. Remarketing
• Do you have it running?
• Mix of text and image ads
• Target different users differently
– Set up different audiences for different site
abandonment stages

21. Cross Channel Comparison
• AdWordsvsAdCenter
– Keyword / campaign numbers
– Upload AdWords campaigns into AdCenter
Desktop
– Be vigilant!
• Older ads left running etc.

22. Competitors!
• Bidding strategy
• Shape of marketplace
• AdWords Auction Insights
• Keyword research – Spyfu, iSpionage

23. Analytics and all that jazz…
Reports to Run Things to Keep in Mind
• Conversions – is there a • Goal of landing pages?
large discrepancy with Immediate conversions or
AdWords goals? more interaction?
• Bounce rate • Compare paid traffic to
• Time on site organic
• Pages visited • Is tracking in place
• Site search properly?
• Multi channel funnels

24. AdCenter Auditing
• It’s not AdWords!
– Audit separately
– Different KWs will perform differently = different
bid strategy
– Split out search partner only campaigns

25. Conversion Rate Auditing
• CRO is the Yin to PPC’s Yang(see image)
• Does the page look clean & informative?
• Is it obvious where to click to buy or sign up?
• Usability testing
– Do a test conversion!
– Set up multi channel funnels to see where people are
bailing

26. Present Findings
• Internal / External
• What did you find?
– Red flags
– Optimization ideas
– Expansion opportunities
• Be positive w/ clients
– What can you do to make things great
– Don’t trash current efforts

27. Recap
• Take time to audit
• Go through an account logically and in order of importance
• Look at all aspects of your account, from AdWords to
Analytics to landing pages.

28. Q&A

29. August Webinar
Top PPC Myths Busted!
Wednesday, August 23

30. Thank You
Further Reading:
• http://www.ppchero.com/nurturing-ppc-accounts/
• http://www.ppchero.com/the-ppc-audit-rewards-for-a-critical-eye/
• http://www.aimclearblog.com/2012/06/06/57-amazing-ways-to-
audit-ppc-campaigns-like-a-pro-straight-from-smx-advanced/