Most PPC agencies that help people with Google ads management, will off some kind of free Google ads audit. This is great news for businesses because it enables you to learn two main things.
- Firstly you are going to get a lot of valuable insights from a professions Google ads specialist. This is usually completely free and if you decide not to work with the agency you still have all the valuable information.
- You will get a feel for what it might be like to work with a particular agency. When they perform your free google ads audit, you can evaluate how they work. For example:
- Are they punctual and is the work delivered on time?
- Do you like the person you are dealing with?
- Is the information their audit provides valuable?
- Is the quality of work good? This may reflect what you receive in the future.
So in reality there are 2 things you will achieve with a free google ads audit. The agency will review your account and you can review the agency.
What to expect from a Free Google Ads Audit
The goal of a PPC audit, is to look at your current account in depth at a very granular level.
A good Google ads specialist will be able to analyse every area of your account, to find where improvement could be made. They will then write a report, or perform a telephone consultation to discuss the findings.
Common things that will be reviewed in a free Google ads Audit include:
General account structure
Are your campaigns set up correctly? This will mainly look at the how your campaigns, ad groups and keywords are structured.
Which advertising networks you are using?
The goal here is to identify the type of traffic you are receiving and how it is performing. For example, if you are running search campaigns, are you also running search partners, or display? And how is each performing individually.
Keywords in your account
This will look at things like keyword match types, your search terms report and also negative keywords. The goal here is to find wasted budget. It is extremely common for this to be a major area of leakage in existing campaigns. Simply tidying up keywords and excluding less relevant traffic can often have a huge impact on an accounts performance.
Ads and ad copy
Here the Google ads specialist will be looking at the quality of ads and how many you are currently running. The goal here is to find opportunities to make improvements, as well as identify poorly performing ads.
Ad Extensions
Google offer advertisers a variety of different ad extensions. Some of these can have a dramatic impact on things like your ads click through rate and conversion rates. Here the audit will look at which extensions you are currently using. As well as performance and any extensions you should be using, but currently aren’t.
Device bidding
By default Google ads campaigns will run on all devices (computer, tablets & mobile) and you will be bidding the same on each device type. However, it is highly likely your devices are performing differently. During the free PPC audit, the Google ads specialist will be looking at how different bid adjustments would help your campaigns at the device level.
Conversion tracking
Google offer many ways you can track your campaigns performance. It is also relatively easy to set up. However, the majority of advertisers are not tracking correctly. In some cases tracking will not be set up at all. In other cases the advertiser won’t be tracking everything they should, to get a full picture of the campaigns performance.
Account settings
There are many different account settings that can affect the performance of your Google ads campaign. This part of a free Google ads audit will look at the finer details of an account and see if there are any small tweaks that can be made to improve performance.
Landing pages
A good Google ads audit shouldn’t end in your account. Where you are sending the traffic you buy is also extremely important. Even the best campaign in the world won’t work if you are sending visitors to a poor landing page. This part of your free Google ads audit will look at how well a page is set up for converting traffic. Just because you have a beautiful website, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will convert well.
These are the main things that should be covered in any free Google ads audit. You may also see additional information depending on your business.
Should You Get a Free Google Ads Audit?
The main point to remember here, is you should be receiving a lot of value from this kind of free PPC review. If an audit is done correctly it should uncover the majority, if not all mistakes in your account.
This process can be extremely valuable to you as a business. Even if you don’t end up working with the company who performs the free review, you will still learn a huge amount about your campaigns and their current performance. For this reason a free Google ads audit is one of the best things you can do to improve your current campaigns.
If you would like to receive a free Google ads audit from the team here at CPS Media then please enter your details in the quick form below and one of our professional Google ads specialists will be in touch shortly.