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Auditing your PPC accounts on a regular basis is something every company should be doing.  Performing an audit lets you step outside of your normal day-to-day activities within an account to reevaluate the big picture and see where large opportunities may lie.

Normally, when you hear about a company doing a PPC audit, it’s a consultant or an agency auditing an advertiser or occasionally a consultant auditing an agency. However, even if you are in-house managing your account in-house, an audit can give you insight that’s easy to miss because one of the points of an audit is to step away from the small nuances of an account to see larger trends and feature usage.

In today’s column, I’ll tell you why you should regularly perform an audit. In the next column, I’ll give tips for performing an audit.

How Often Should You Perform an Audit?

If you are in-house running accounts in-house, then doing both a quarterly and year-end analysis is a good idea. The quarterly analysis can help you plan out your activities for the next quarter so you are no just maintaining your account, but growing it as well.

If you are an agency, it can be useful to always perform an audit when you are first taking on a client as it can help set your engagement strategy and understand how the account functions. Some agencies require an account go through an audit before they will ever give pricing information to the client so that everyone understands the scope of work.

Once an agency has a client, doing a quarterly analysis might seem like overkill as your job is to stay on top of everything within the account. However, doing quarterly audits followed by deep planning sessions with the client can help strengthen the account and client relationship. Some of the most common complaints advertisers have about their agency are:

1. Too slow
2. Not enough results
3. Poor communication

A quarterly audit can help with points 2 & 3.

Even if you decide not to perform a quarterly audit, you should do an audit before a peak season (Christmas, holidays, summer vacations, etc.) for the account and on an annual basis; which is often when the contract is up for renewal.

An audit should quickly spot areas where your budgets are not in alignment with your overall goals – this is especially useful when heading into peak seasons where you need to ensure your budgets are not constraining your sales.

Who Should Perform the Audit?

Anyone with a high degree of competency within the company can perform an audit. However, the person who does the day-to-day management should not do the audit.

In the world of development, you should never let your developers QA their own code or work. A designer should not be in its own user testing group. The person who does the day-to-day management should not do their own audit.

The reason is perspective.

A day-to-day PPC manager knows how the account is supposed to function and why decisions were made.

An audit should look at the big picture and trends. An audit should examine both data and best practices. An audit should challenge why decisions were made.

Should You Hire a Consultant?

You don’t need to hire a consultant to do an audit. If you are an agency, then your PPC managers can audit each other’s account. If you are in-house with a large team, often you will have different people managing different accounts. In that case, just switch accounts and have each other audit each others account.

As with all decisions, there are pros and cons of using your own team. The pros are:

• No additional costs
• Data doesn’t leave the company
• No lost time in training a 3rd party about your company or business model

The cons are:

• Easy to push off the due date because of other priorities
• Don’t have an outsider’s perspective
• Might not make suggestions because the auditor may feel the work won’t be done
• Personal connections between employees can make it so the audit isn’t as honest as it should be

Of course, there are also pros and cons of using a 3rd party to audit your account. The pros are:

• Is not clouded by personal connections, internal politics, or other internal issues
• Has an outside perspective. Looks at what can be done not what the company could actually do
  • This is a very common reason to hire a consultant if you are trying to win an argument with your superiors. You will use the consultant’s data/findings to make an argument to your boss about budgets for mobile sites, display campaigns, etc.
• Can bring in more expertise than many companies have in-house
• Doesn’t take your employees away from their regular job duties

The cons are:

• Consultants cost money beyond your normal payroll
• You must train them in your company’s business model, account, etc.
• Hiring competent consults is hard. You must do some due diligence, so it takes you more work than handing off the audit internally
• A good consultant will often give you more work that you want – you must be prepared to execute

An audit should spot ad copy trends across the entire account to help give ad copy testing a direction across the account. By being further away from the data; a 3rd party audit should give you an analytical view of the data that is free from preconceived notions of the industry or company.

What Should You Receive from the Audit?

First and foremost you want recommendations from the audit.

The audit will generally be many pages of analysis and best practices. However, all the pretty charts and graphs spread throughout the audit are really only supporting evidence for what you really want: wins (also known as recommendations).

The audit should not just give you a chart of how you are doing. It should contain information and direction for how to make the account better.

If you can’t take the information and do something with it  – then it was not a good audit. So, before sending a current staff member or hiring a consultant to do an audit for you – make sure that they will not just analyze the account – but that you will have a to-do list of items once the audit has been completed.

Wrap-up

If you run your own account; then you are too close to the data and corporate politics to see the big picture.

Your job is the day-to-day management of the account. You make sure the account maintains it current profits and hopefully has a nice and steady growth. You aren’t looking to take big risks, or often suggest big risks to upper management – that’s not your job. Your job is to maintain and grow at an acceptable pace.

Having someone else, a colleague, analyst, or consultant do an audit is necessary. They can suggest the big items, take the big risks, and most importantly – view the account free from preconceived notions of how it should be, and they can focus on what it could be.

Regardless if you are in-house, an agency, or just someone who got stuck managing the account – you can benefit from having your account audited on a regular basis. Just make sure you receive actionable data so that once the audit is complete, you have a path to making the account even more profitable.

If you are looking to have your own account audited; you can also check out our AdWords Audit Packages

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Let’s face it – people just go crazy during the holidays. Your CPCs will increase, but so will your click-through-rates, and your cost per action should even go down even through your CPCs have increased.

It’s an insane time full of people who want to find deals. Marketers are willing to oblige and throw offers and discounts at shoppers. It’s party time for the credit cards.

It’s also a time to break many of your tried and true marketing rules, and your remarketing campaigns are no different. Today, we’ll examine a method for setting up and executing holiday remarketing campaigns.

Collect All the Cookies You Can

I’ve written previously about how to segment your remarketing campaigns so that your ads are always reflective of the visitor’s behavior on your site. While that strategy works throughout the year – either don’t use it, or add this strategy to it during the holiday season.

This is not the time to start overly segmenting your visitors or letting your remarketing cookies expire. If you segment too heavily, then you have locked a consumer into a certain set of ads. During the holidays we aren’t looking for ourselves – we’re shopping for others. Therefore, interests change as often as the Christmas tree lights burnout.

You can either create new lists that are just for the holidays with long cookie durations, or you can increase the length of your current cookies. If you’re the planning type, I’d suggest making new lists so that you do not have to remember how you’ve affected your current lists after the holidays.

Now, put everyone in this list. Yes, everyone. Those who shopped, abandoned their carts, or checked out. You might not even think of this as a remarketing list; but as another type of targeted display advertising.

During the normal year, you might exclude those who converted from seeing your ads immediately after the conversion event. However, if someone checked out on your site and had a good experience, when they need something else (and we all need something else during the holidays), then your ad is a reminder to come back to buy from you yet again.

Set as many cookies as you can to increase your shopper list size.

Create Ads by Holiday Deadlines

Next, create a list of holiday segmentations based upon your offers and limitations. For each time frame, think about your offers and benefits for that timeframe.

For instance:

• Black Friday / Cyber Monday – deep discounts
• From Cyber Monday for two weeks – typical discounts for the holidays
• Two weeks before the Holidays – Free shipping until December 24th
• One week before the holiday – last chance to order for Christmas Eve delivery
• The day before the holiday – forgot to order something? Buy a digital giftcard.
• Post-holiday – After Holiday Sales Special
• etc…

This is a very generic list. Take a look at your marketing efforts, offline material, previous holiday offers, and write something that is much more geared towards your business.

Just remember these two facts:

• The closer it gets to the holiday, the more ‘good enough’ suffices
• During holiday seasons, the benefits should be for the product buyer, not the product user

Submit All Your Ads Now

Once you have your timeframes created, write ads for each timeframe. Then pause the ads and submit them now. By submitting them now they will be approved (Google reviews paused ads) so that you aren’t trying to get ads approved at the last moment.

Put the dates in your calendar for each timeframe. When the date arrives, pause one ad and unpause the next one. If you don’t want to try and remember to pause and unpause ads, you can create a different campaign for each timeframe and use the campaign start and end date feature.

Raise Your Frequency Caps

Lastly, raise your frequency caps. You have to be careful not to creep out your customers; however, during the holiday season, consumers are more accustomed to being bombarded with ads from every direction. Since their credit cards are sitting next to their keyboards, make sure you ad is there the next time they want to type those numbers into someone’s shopping cart.

Put a reminder in your calendar to adjust your frequency cap downwards after the holiday to your typical levels.

Conclusion

The holidays are one of the most stressful times for people. We all want to give the perfect gift. We also want to find that perfect gift on sale. The only way for us to find the perfect gift on sale is to pay more attention to ads and offers during the holidays.

The further the holiday is away, the lower the stress levels; and the more willing we are to look for the perfect gift and deep discounts.

As the holidays approach, the stress levels increase; and the more we want to find ‘good enough’; but we still want it on sale.

Segmentation in your marketing efforts is always essential. However, instead of segmenting your remarketing ads based upon site activity; segment your ads based upon the stress levels associated with a quickly approaching holiday.

The 31st of October has come and gone, the ghouls have had their +midnight fun, but online advertisers are still intent on doing crazily scary things with their pay per click advertising campaigns.

The current online marketing climate and the incredible emphasis placed on online sales in almost every industry must learn to calm down a little or we might find ourselves in a situation where we simply scare our potential customers away. Well-focused, highly-targeted advertising is one thing. Online marketing stalking is quite another.

The many possibilities for lovers of online advertising optimization to explore

Anything which becomes an obsession in life has the potential to be bad and backfire in your face. For example, too much chocolate can lead to lots of spots or an increase in fatty blubber on your body. Too much sun can be seriously dangerous for the long-term health of your skin. Too much partying and not enough sleep can make you age terribly (even if you are having the time of your life).

Online advertising is just the same. Too much targeting and too high a focus on campaign optimization can lead to a loss of potential customers forever. The problem with online advertising at present is that there are so many ways in which to advertise and optimize that the obsessive advertisers out there can’t let things lie.
If an advertiser wants to, he or she can target a potential customer by:

• geographical location
• type of device being used
• type of Internet connection being used
• IP address information
• time of day
• cookies and whether or not a potential customer has already visited the advertiser’s website
• keyword
• employing Google Remarketing techniques
• other retargeting techniques via the Facebook Ad Exchange system, for instance
• image, video or text-based advertisements
• other demographics which might include gender, age or nationality

Let’s look at the differences between being an online advertising high-flyer and a seedy online advertising stalker…

Scary, Stalk-like Online Advertising Strategies

When do we go too far? How does the online advertiser know when to stop even if he or she believes that they are acting in the best interests of the consumer, providing him or her with links and information to the products / services that they are likely to be most interested in?

In general, the best thing to do every now and then is to place ourselves in the shoes of the consumer. We are all consumers at some point in our lives. Most people are daily consumers on some level, therefore we know what it feels like to be irritatingly pursued by advertisers and we know what it feels like to feel like

our life / privacy is being invaded by someone who just wants us to cough up some cash.

So, tip number one to avoid being a stalk-like online advertiser is to play the role of the consumer for half an hour every week and reassess whether or not your advertising approach has become just a little too aggressive.

Tip number two is to set up frequency caps which will control and limit the amount of times a single potential customer will be presented with some kind of advertisement from one of the many campaigns you are using to target your audience.

For instance, you might already have been using keywords, geo-targeting, device targeting and some kind of remarketing campaign to track your potential customer and continue feeding him or her with advertisements about a particular product on offer and perhaps even a product that they had shown interest in via Facebook or another social platform.

If you use frequency caps to limit the number of times that single potential customer will see one of your adverts (let’s say a maximum of three advertisement views via each advertising channel) at least you can be sure that you aren’t going to scare anybody off. You can still play with all the kinds of advertising avenues and optimization choices that you wish to and your potential customer doesn’t need to feel threatened by your avid love of online advertising science.

The Healthy Advertiser

Those advertisers who know when they have or have not yet crossed the line are happy to see a steady rise in traffic and online sales. They are happy to let consumers keep the right to simply say “no” to a product, for whatever reason that might be.

These are the people who in-store DON’T follow you around and ask you if you need help every 15 seconds until you eventually feel so threatened that you run out of the door and never look back. These advertisers are the ones who see ROIs over long periods of time and build businesses that last.

The healthy advertiser has limits. He or she recognizes that even though they could target a potential customer even further, it is probably best to let nature take its course and let the prey walk into its own trap in its own time.

Remember what it is like to feel hunted as a consumer and avoid putting your potential clients through the ordeal. Place limits on your campaigns and keep this real. Advertise your products and services. Don’t force feed them.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Certified Knowledge. If you would like to write for Certified Knowledge, please let us know.

You must test ads to make your paid search account grow and thrive. That fact is no longer debatable – it is just a best practice fact. Ad testing in small accounts is very easy as there are not thousands of ad group or hundreds of thousands of ads to track. However, in large accounts, ad testing is often not done well.

In today’s column, we’ll examine the most common testing techniques and why they are rarely successful, and then address how to test ads across large accounts.

Common Testing Techniques for Large Accounts

One of the most common is to create lots of ads. Turn on ‘optimize for CTR’ or ‘optimize for conversions’ and let Google pick the winners. The problem with this method is that losers are rarely deleted. Even if Google is optimizing your ads, they will show your losers some of the time. This makes your ad serving sub-optimal as just by deleting losers, you can increase the overall account efficiency several points.

Another common testing method is to only test the head terms or the most expensive terms. This makes it so you are spending time testing where you are spending money, but most of your ad groups never get tested so the majority of your keywords never improve.

Test when you feel like it. This is often a workflow problem and just by creating a testing schedule you can improve your ad testing dramatically.

The vast majority of large accounts do not have an easy method to test all of their ads, and the problem is often identification of what needs to be tested.

The Initial Problem: Identifying Test Parameters

When most accounts are new, they are usually attempting to increase a single conversion type: sales, subscriptions, lead generation, etc. As accounts grow, they often end up with multiple conversion types. Each ad group should be driving users to a single type of conversion type. However, the actual conversion type may vary between ad groups. Unless you have an easy way to understand the goal of each ad group, you cannot test ads that are focused around the ad group’s end goal.

In addition, not all keywords are created equal. Some keywords are trying to drive engagement at the top of the buying funnel. Other keywords have their success measured by direct conversions. Some keywords will be brand focused, others will have product names, and yet others will be generic or have other qualifiers attached to them.

Therefore, what we need is a system to easily label ads based upon their end goal, keyword types in the ad group, and other parameters of which you wish to test.

AdWords Labels

AdWords labels makes it very easy to identify the purpose of your ads and ad groups once you know their overall purpose. First, make a list of everything you need to know about your ads so that you can test and determine your winners. These labels will be your end testing segments.

Next, for each ad, you will want to label them appropriately.

An ad might have more than one label. You might have some ads that are: brand, newsletter, high funnel; and other ads that are product, ecommerce, non-brand. The labels should make it easy to segment your ads so you can analyze all brand ads, or only brand ads that have an end goal of an ecommerce checkout. When you consider how you want to read the results and the types of ads you want to compare against each other, the types of labels you will apply becomes easier to think about, create, and manage.

Testing Ads at Scale

Once you have the labels created, then you can use simple pivot tables to analyze the ads. I created a video for a previous column in how to easily test ads across ad groups. While the video was based around analyzing small accounts, the concept of using pivot tables to analyze ads across ad groups also applies to large accounts. You can see the video in this column: Step-by-Step Instructions For Testing Low Volume Ad Copy.

Once you have your labels created and data for the ads, then you can simply analyze how ads are performing for a label type or label combination:

When you use a pivot table to analyze ads, it is best to use very consistent lines within the ads so you can easily analyze them at scale. For this type of ad  creation, I’d recommend using a tool such as the Mass Ad Creator.  These types of tools allow you to easily create tens of thousands of ads that can be easily analyzed by pivot tables.

When you use a pivot table in this manner, you will want to examine the ads that are doing the best so that you can keep them and delete the losers. In addition, you will also want to examine the data at the ad group level. By creating a benchmark of ‘average’ (known as Grand Totals in this chart – the total of all conversions, but the average conversion rate, CPA, and CPI across these ads), you can see the ad groups that are below the account average for a label so you can address the ad testing in those ad groups individually.

Create a Testing Schedule

Since you might have tens of thousands or even millions of ads, you can’t just test ads once a month. You need to create a testing schedule based upon your labels. You can do this in a calendar or project management system.

By creating a testing schedule based upon your labels, you can make sure that you are testing all the types of goals and keywords throughout your account.

Conclusion

Ad testing is fairly easy in small accounts. With mid-sized accounts it can start to get complex, and with large accounts it can become very difficult unless you have a process in place to test, measure, and refine your ads.

By using AdWords labels, pivot tables, and a testing schedule ad testing can be simple even for massive accounts. It does take some organization and discipline to to use this methodology well. However, once you start to regularly test all the ads in your account – your paid search accounts will grow and become much more effective.

A conversion is the most important non-default metric you can track in your PPC accounts. You will always need to identify and assign conversions and their accompanying values to understand whether or not your campaign is hitting the goal you set for it. Often, these conversion goals can be as straightforward as a signup or a purchase, but sometimes it’s just not that simple.

Sometimes you may find yourself working with a site or a client that has a more roundabout conversion or perhaps a site that defies traditional conversion capture. In these cases, you may want to think about using Event Goals through Google Analytics.

Why would you want to use Event Goals?

Not every client or company will have the same resources, so setting up meaningful onsite interaction goals through traditional conversion tracking or Google Analytics goals may not be feasible.

Here are a few examples where tracking Event Goals has been valuable:

1. Some sites may be static, and you won’t necessarily have developers at your disposal to work on your site.

2. You may want to track peripheral goals. For example, it may be useful to know how many people have clicked on your social links.

3. Perhaps other important events happen off the main site. I work with a client whose main goal happens on their main site, but we can only send traffic to a separate domain since development of the main site is too expensive.

4. If plays of a video or use of a calculator or other widget has direct impact on new business, you’ll still want to track this interaction and perhaps even assign a value to the event goal.

5. One client we work with has an ecommerce shop on a domain other than their main site. Their main goal of advertising is not to sell products direct, however this is a value add for the client and something worth tracking. Proving this value is much more easily done when we know which ads and which keywords are driving ecommerce value to the site.

Essentially, you want to track important onsite events in an environment you can control. If you can’t control the development environment, tracking Event Goals may be your best available substitute.

How do you set Google Analytics Event Goals up?

Setting up events in Google Analytics is fairly straightforward and will require that you have access to the website’s source code. You’ll want to categorize your different event triggers so that you can group your events when you set them up as goals. The Google Documentation on setting up events can help you and your development team figure out how to best implement event tracking for your unique circumstance.

I recommend using at least “Category”, “Action” and often times “Label” attributes to help distinguish your new events. There are no predefined naming conventions for the events you create, so it’s important to use naming conventions that will have use for both categorization and for easy understanding of what each event’s purpose is.

For example, your Category might be “social”, your action could be “click” and your labels could exist to define Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and any other applicable network that may be valuable for your business to track. If you’re only goal is to gain clicks to your Twitter, Facebook and Google+ profiles, you could easily make a Category for each social network as well. Keep it as simple as possible.

Once your events are set up on your site, you’ll begin capturing event data. You can see this by visiting the Content report in Google Analytics under the subheading Events. You can set up a goal in Google Analytics shortly after the data capture begins, so I like to expedite the process by going through the website and triggering all goals once the onsite setup is complete. This helps move things forward quickly and allows me to test and troubleshoot which events may not have been implemented correctly. The syntax of the code is very important, so if a comma or quote or space was missed, your goals will not register in Google Analytics properly.

To set up the goal in Analytics, navigate to the Admin, select your chosen profile and head to Goals. Name your goal, select Event as your Goal Type and configure your Goal with attributes like Category, Action, Label and Value. You need only use a single event condition for the Goals to begin tracking.

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