WHY YOU NEED A PPC AUDIT CASE STUDY: 100+ COMPANIES AUDIT THEIR ADWORDS ACCOUNTS

One of the biggest challenges facing many paid search marketers is finding the time (and money) to review their campaigns from a PPC audit perspective. A PPC audit, whether accomplished with the help of a consultant or a software tool, is a deep-dive into your account with the goal of discovering where you can improve. But for most small advertisers, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to effectively manage their paid search efforts — half of advertisers only do ad optimization once per quarter! — never mind trawling through oceans of data to find areas where their PPC advertising is letting them down.

But we believe a PPC audit is one of the most valuable ways you can use your limited time as a marketer, because it shows you exactly:

n What you’re doing right n What you’re doing wrong (i.e., where you have opportunities to reduce costs or improve results) n Which areas of your account need the most help, fastest

In other words, it provides you with a plan of action, so you know where to spend your time moving forward to get the most benefit.

For these reasons, we recently ran a contest (or, if you prefer, an experiment) to prove just how beneficial an audit can be: We invited AdWords advertisers to review their paid search campaigns using WordStream’s AdWords Performance Grader Plus — a fast, free PPC audit tool — to show them how their accounts were working. At the beginning of the experiment, entrants used the AdWords Grader to get a free, instant report on the performance of their AdWords account. After 30 days, they performed another assessment.

The results were remarkable. Read on to see how the participating advertisers were able to improve their accounts in just one month.

IMPACT ON ADWORDS METRICS For many of the contest entrants, getting a free PPC audit was an eye-opening experience. It showed them where they were going wrong, and provided immediate insight into actionable areas in which changes could be made. Let’s take a look.

© 2014, WordStream Inc. All rights reserved. WordStream technologies are protected by pending US patents.

“I was thrilled with the amount of detail provided in this report. It even drilled down into how much effort we’ve put into the campaign over the past month. Overall, the report showed me where we’ve been successful and where we’ve missed the boat completely. I love the idea of optimizing the time we spend on the campaign for maximum ROI. It’s so easy to get lost in PPC — WordStream is a great product.” — Lisa, Green Stay California

Quality ScoreMore than 53% of people who ran the AdWords Performance Grader noted an improvement in their overall Quality Scores after 30 days, and the average gain in Quality Score was 5.4%. The largest gains were made by accounts that had low Quality Scores at the beginning of the test. Overall, our data also indicated that the lower the original Quality Score, the greater the increase tended to be.

© 2014, WordStream Inc. All rights reserved. WordStream technologies are protected by pending US patents.

Quality Score is one of the most, if not the most, important AdWords metrics. Your Quality Score is calculated based on a variety of factors, including your click-through rate (more on that in a minute), the relevance of keywords to their corresponding Ad Groups, the quality of your landing pages and your ad copy. High Quality Scores result in higher ad rankings and lower costs — so you can beat your competitors while also paying less per click. For these reasons, improving your Quality Score should be at the top of your to-do list.

Conversion Volume Of course, for many businesses, a high conversion volume is the Holy Grail of their PPC campaigns. Conversion volumes can be affected by numerous factors, including higher CTRs and Quality Scores. As you can see in the figure below, conversion volume was the runaway winner for many of the businesses that ran the AdWords Performance Grader.

“I was really surprised about the amount of money we could save by adding more negative keywords.” — Cristina, Kapow Events

More than half of advertisers who performed a PPC audit saw an increase in conversion volumes. The most impressive part? The average gain in conversion volumes was 75%! For some businesses, this was double, triple or even greater than their original conversion volume prior to running the second audit.

This dramatic improvement demonstrates that by taking stock of your campaigns’ performance with an audit, you can make small changes that add up to a huge difference.

Click-Through RateOur data shows that, in the 30 days since using the AdWords Grader for the first time, 46% of accounts saw an increase in their click-through rate, with average growth of almost 17%.

© 2014, WordStream Inc. All rights reserved. WordStream technologies are protected by pending US patents.

What exactly constitutes a good CTR varies by industry. Advertisers operating in competitive sectors should aim for a CTR of between 2% and 5%, and businesses in less competitive fields should shoot for a CTR upward of 5%. (If you’re ambitious, learn how you can achieve 3x the average CTR with more advanced techniques.) Your Quality Score is directly affected by your CTR, and for the 46% of AdWords advertisers who saw an increase, this was another excellent reason to conduct a PPC audit.

Grader ScoreOur AdWords Performance Grader evaluates the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns according to 10 criteria. Your overall Grader Score is determined by weighting these factors. For many advertisers, their PPC audit increased their Grader Score considerably.

© 2014, WordStream Inc. All rights reserved. WordStream technologies are protected by pending US patents.

About half of advertisers saw improvements to their Grader Score after 30 days. Overall, the average gain in Grader Score was 30%, indicating that many AdWords accounts had improved across a range of metrics, including Quality Score, CTR, impression share and ad text optimization.

PPC BEST PRACTICES

The data showed us that advertisers weren’t content with merely improving several key AdWords metrics — they took action to improve their adherence to PPC best practices.

“I’m so thrilled to see my new score. I ran WordStream’s grader just a few weeks ago, put in hours of hard work, and my score is now much higher.” — Jillyn, SearchIt Media

In the 30 days after running their first PPC audit, advertisers added:

n 25% more campaignsn 29% more text adsn 109% more ad groupsn 663% more keywordsn 103,410 more negative keywords

Over the course of the test, we observed account performance gains in several areas:

n Multiple text ads per ad group n Use of Ad Extensionsn Network segmentationn Use of negative keywordsn Use of Broad Match Modifiersn Conversion tracking n Language Targeting

IS IT WORTH RUNNING A PPC AUDIT?

Sure, I could tell you that yes, it’s definitely worth using a PPC audit tool to examine the effectiveness of your AdWords account, especially if you suspect your paid search efforts aren’t paying off. However, by looking at this data, you can see exactly how taking a good hard look at your campaigns can benefit your business. Once you begin to delve deeper into the numbers, the question changes from “Is it worth running a PPC audit?” to “Can I afford not to do a PPC audit?”

Every business wants to understand how their PPC advertising budget is working for them. Unfortunately, many smaller operations are struggling with paid search and failing to nail down the basics that could yield real results – forget about leveraging innovations being developed by Google to make AdWords an even more effective platform.

Ready to take your paid search campaigns to the next level? Then use our free AdWords Performance Grader Plus to take control of your PPC and make the changes that could make a big difference to your campaigns.

© 2014, WordStream Inc. All rights reserved. WordStream technologies are protected by pending US patents.

ABOUT WORDSTREAMWordStream Inc. provides search marketing software and services to small and medium-sized businesses that want better results from paid search. WordStream’s easy-to-use PPC Advisor software facilitates more effective PPC campaigns by providing a customized workflow, the 20-Minute PPC Work Week, to help advertisers increase relevance across Google, Bing, and Yahoo and get expert-level results in a fraction of the time. Whether you’re new to search marketing or are an experienced PPC manager, WordStream’s PPC management software and services can provide the boost you need to grow your business and drive better results.

© 2014, WordStream Inc. All rights reserved. WordStream technologies are protected by pending US patents.