5 Helpful Mid-Year Paid Search Audits To Perform
It’s necessary for your paid search performance to keep up with continuously changing consumer needs and search trends. Effective means for doing this are paid search audits. Paid search audits allow businesses to engage in comprehensive evaluations of their online marketing strategies.
Areas of concern include paid search advertising, PPC, CPC, and CPM. Conducting these audits have a range of benefits. Carefully identifying strengths and weaknesses of marketing practices is one of them. Critiquing and improving weak spots give businesses more power to adequately adapt to changes in search trends. Conversion rate optimization becomes more profound as a result.
Performing paid search audits in the middle of the year evenly divides time spent on executing marketing strategies and revamping practices. If you find that your paid search goals aren’t being met in the year’s first half, you can make changes during the second half to achieve them. Overall, it’s a fair means for giving your business enough time and space reach paid search milestones. Learn five practical ways you can do this!
Device Bid Modifiers
Conduct paid search audits to understand how well your ads perform on different devices. Review outcomes on a campaign basis for both Google and Bing. This practice is becoming increasingly important as mobile usage continues to grow. More consumers are turning to mobile-optimized websites to read content and make purchases on smartphones, tablets, and other handheld devices.
Therefore, it’s ideal for marketers to create bid modifiers for effective ad placement on mobile devices. Make sure your device bid modifiers are appropriate for the given campaign’s strategy. For example, it might be best for a campaign with a goal of improving brand awareness to have a high mobile bid modifier. Don’t be afraid to include negative mobile or tablet modifiers as well. If performance is lacking in these areas it makes sense to cut back and allocate these dollars somewhere else.
GEO Bid Modifiers
Continue your audits with a focus on the geographical (GEO) location of your ad performance. Again, aim for outcomes based on Google and Bing. Create GEO bid modifiers to adapt to changing paid search trends of your target audience, tied to their respective locations.
Maybe you find that your campaigns focus on too many GEOs, making it hard to keep up with them all. Focus on the top-performing campaign GEOs instead. Maybe you don’t have enough GEOs. Consider layering in additional ones. Do you target the United States as a whole? If you do, include all 50 states and review your performance in a month to see if you can optimize towards certain GEOs.
Search Partner Analysis
Perform a search partner analysis to comprehend the scope of your reach in Google and Bing results. It’s helpful to compare CPA of Google search results to CPA of Google search partners. Determine which of the two fare better in lead generation and conversion rates.
Maybe you find that impressions, clicks, newsletter registrations, and sales occur more often with search than search partners. Consider turning off search partners to focus your dollars on the stronger performing search results. Have you had search partners off all year? It might be time to give them another shot. Turn them back on to reevaluate your performance and gain additional auditing data.
Demographics in Search
This tip is very similar to the first two audits. Take a look at your demographics to evaluate paid search data tied to age and gender. You can effectively tailor your online marketing strategies to the right group of people using this data. Create bid modifiers to collect performance data in this area if you don’t have them. It is important to note that you need to have at least a 0% bid modifier in place in order for you to gather any data at all. That’s right, even though you aren’t bidding up or down you need that 0% modifier there to gather data.
It’s important to factor in CTR and CVR, too. Figuring out CTR for targeted demographics can indicate which demographics are interested in your brand. Connecting this with CVR can help you discern ways to enhance conversion rate optimization and grow sales.
Top-performing Keywords
This classic audit sometimes gets overlooked. Take time to evaluate which keywords have performed well in the past. Are they good enough to use for today’s search trends? You may need to optimize them with the addition or subtraction of certain words. This is largely linked with your target demographics and GEOs more than the other areas.
If your top-performing keywords are lower than position one, consider boosting your bids. Do the same for your bids if your keywords fall below the first page of search results. Make sure your top-performing keywords are live on Google and Bing.
Properly utilizing audits is the key to making the most out of your paid search experience. Our paid search services include account audits for Google AdWords and Bing Ads. We can help you discover new opportunities for conversion rate optimization through these platforms. Read this blog post to learn more about CRO: See How to Convert: Top 10 CRO Tips.
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