Google AdWords and other PPC methods can seem easy and understandable. When months pass and you need an audit done for all your PPC accounts, you may end up doing a biased job that supports your own work as a business or miss out on important deficits and lacking in the campaign which an outsider could have noticed. With that in mind, in this article, let us discuss what PPC account audits are, who should do them and when they should be conducted.
Why Should PPC Accounts Be Audited Regularly?
PPC accounts need to be audited regularly so that you understand and reevaluate the bigger picture in which your PPC campaigns are embedded into. There may be opportunities that you may otherwise miss, or you may be sticking on to campaigns that are no longer useful. A third person’s point of view is always important and crucial for us to understand how PPC accounts are performing.
Most of the times, a company is faced with the question of how often they should perform an audit in order to understand the larger picture. The answer to that question is rather simple. It should be at least 4 times a year. A quarterly analysis helps you to correlate your PPC campaigns with quartile sales data. A year end analysis in the same way will help you to gather a larger picture.
Importance of Third Party PPC Audits
A good third party audit helps you to quickly identify problem areas when your budget does not align with your overall goals. An audit will quickly tell you if that PPC campaign you ran during the festive season was worth the trouble or not. Based on that, you can repeat the campaign next year or choose not to repeat it ever again.
Whether you choose to hire an outsider or get someone from your company to perform the audit, you should ensure that it is not the same person who runs the PPC campaign who also gets to do the PPC audit. The end result will invariably be colored and biased.
Instead, hire a consultant or an agency that can perform the audit from an unbiased and objective perspective. It helps you to get a third party to point out flaws and assess a PPC campaign for what it really is. If you do not wish to share your information with outsiders and do not want a third person audit, you can choose someone from your own company who does not work with the PPC team. The idea is to get an outside professional’s valued opinion regarding your PPC campaign.
Problems with In-house PPC Audits: Lack of Objectivity and Honesty
The problem with in-house audits is that it is easy to postpone dates and be satisfied that everything is going according to the plan, when it actually is not. Self congratulatory audits lead PPC campaigns nowhere and ultimately, it results in a lot of money that is not well spent. The in-house professional who conducts the audit may not make all the suggestions he or she thinks need to be made, because they may believe their suggestions may not followed.
The end result is an audit that is not honest, objective and unbiased. With this in mind, it is always a good idea to hire someone from outside or at least someone who does not work closely with people responsible with PPC accounts. You may save a lot of money by hiring someone from your own company to do the audit, but it just will not help you in the long run.
An audit will tell you how your PPC is actually running and how it ran during specific periods. For this reason alone, it is important to engage your content development and marketing teams when the audit is finally out. It helps them to make better choices and write copy that is more effective, and also choose keywords that are more effective in PPC campaigns. An audit helps you to gain insight that you did not possess earlier and help you to look at things from a new perspective. An honest and unbiased PPC audit can breathe in new life into your PPC campaigns.
