What to Check in an Adwords PPC Audit? And How to Manage Adwords?

What to Check in an Adwords PPC Audit? And How to Manage Adwords
If you want to audit an Adwords account for your company or for a client there are some areas, or if you want to manage a currently running account, there are few areas that most people skip , but managing them will increase your accounts efficiency, increase your Quality score and ad rank and decrease your cost per click.

1- Search Terms A Gold Mine

You may have added a long list of keywords to your ad groups (let’s say 1000 keywords for all the campaigns) and you left them running for a couple of weeks, your audience will trigger your ads with different keywords variations (about 100,000 variations). So, do you know where these variations are? And what to do with them? Go to the Keywords tab, selected click “See search terms” and select ALL.

This will show you the actual keywords your Ad is being shown for, their CTR (click through rate) and even conversion rates (if you set the conversions tracking).
This report is highly important because you might think that your conversions are coming from specific keywords, but running this report will show you that actual conversions were coming from more specific variants of their main keywords. Once you identify these keywords you have to either add them to their right ad groups or create new campaigns (or ad groups) for them.

2- How long is your Negative Keywords List?

After you run your report, scan the keyword list it gives you for phrases that don’t match your product or business. Add those keywords as a negative search term for that Ad Group or Campaign.

3- Use Match Type to separate Important Keywords

If you have specific ad groups for brand keywords, competitors, industry related keywords, strategic exact match keywords, etc. you may need to exclude all the targeted keywords in one ad group from the rest ad groups to be able to know precisely how your keywords and ad groups are performing. For example, if you have an ad group for your exact match keywords [buy Samsung S4 online] and [buy iphone 5 online] you will have to add these phrases as negatives to the rest of your ad groups. Or if you have an ad group for your competitors, you will also add them as negatives to the rest of ad groups keywords lists. But be careful with this method because you might add a very important keyword as a negative keyword in a top campaign level without adding it as a positive keyword in the right place. If you are not sure of what you are doing, it is not important to use the above method as it won’t affect your campaigns performance. It is only helpful if you are savvy for accurate data.

4- Use Tightly Themed Ad Groups

When you start a new Ad Group Do Not Overload it with Keywords! This is a major mistake that many people make. You need to keep your Ad Groups very targeted.

• Digital Cameras
• DSLR Cameras
• Compact Cameras
• Telescopic Cameras

Those should be 3 unique Ad Groups. Resist the urge to pile them into one Ad Group because they are all cameras.

5- Play with the Quality Score rules:

If you do not have Quality Score enabled, click on the Keywords tab and select Columns. Make sure the Quality Score is checked. Try to get 7/10 and above for all your keywords. Try to improve any score lower than a 7 and anything lower than a 5 is a serious issue.
Usually Quality Scores can be improved simply by doing a better job of grouping your keywords and writing ads with the specific keyword appearing in the ad at least twice.
If you are doing that and still getting a low score it could be that your CTR is too low or your landing page needs to be more relevant for that keyword. As a last resort simply delete the problem keyword. This is much easier to do if it is a low traffic keyword to begin with.
Sometimes Google will give you a low Quality Score for seemingly no reason at all. You may think you are doing just about everything right and still get a lower Quality Score. In these cases you may want to use a high Quality Score broad match or phrase match keyword combined with a HUGE list of negative terms to get Google to mainly only show your ad for the keyword you’re having issues with. Hopefully you will not have to go to that extreme.

7- Split Testing

You need to be split testing ads against one another. Every Ad Group you have should be running at least two variations of an ad at all times in an effort to find a better performing ad.
However, after you have been split testing ads for a while you will find it harder and harder to beat your best ad. This is where split testing can actually hurt you because 50% of your clicks will be going to an underperforming ad.
The solution is to duplicate your best ad 3 times (or more) and run it against 1 copy of your new ad. This will keep your CTR steady while you test. You can play with the mix to get a percentage you are comfortable with.
Remember to go into your campaign settings and set your ads to rotate more evenly so you can get an accurate split test.

Source: 10 Details Tips for managing Adwords campaigns