Smell that?

It’s your PPC campaigns burning precious marketing dollars.

Hear that?

It’s your competitors laughing at your landing pages.

Fact: 76% of PPC budgets are wasted.

Even worse, the companies throwing their money down the drain aren’t even aware of it.

See, running PPC campaigns on platforms like Facebook and Google is table stakes these days.

Almost every business is doing it.

But that doesn’t mean every business is doing it well.

Enter the PPC audit.

A PPC audit can be the difference maker between winning Q4 and killing it in 2019, or getting more of the same.

And if you’re like most businesses, that’s a whole lot more of “good enough”.

What’s a PPC audit?

A PPC audit is an inspection of your PPC campaigns with the goal of fixing what’s broken, amplifying what’s working, and ensuring you have a consistent framework for improvement.

That’s a mouthful.

Let’s try that again:

A PPC audit takes your “good enough” or “holy sh*t we need help” campaigns and turns them into ROI pumping machines.

Here are 5 alarming signs you need a PPC audit.

1. The person managing your campaign is a generalist – or a junior specialist.

This applies whether your campaigns are being managed in-house or you’re outsourcing to an agency/third party.

There’s a growing problem in the industry which is a by-product of all the amazing content that’s freely available; it’s causing overconfidence bias on a massive scale which is hurting companies.

Your campaigns should be managed by a seasoned PPC specialist. Not someone who also does content marketing, manages the company Twitter account, or any of a thousand other marketing “things”.

The challenge here is that experienced PPC specialists are expensive. So if you don’t have a huge budget, and you’re using an agency, there is a very real chance your campaign is being run by a junior to gain learning experience.

The worst case of this that I’ve personally witnessed is an agency that had a free intern running a client’s campaign.

They were charging the client real money every month. But they had a student running the campaign to give them something to do.

Seriously.

2. You don’t know (with any real certainty) if the person managing your campaign is doing a good job.

Are your campaigns running as best they can?

If you aren’t immediately able to say yes, you need an audit.

Listen, maybe you’re a marketing manager or a business owner. Chances are you have a ton of plates spinning and it’s exactly why you’re relying on someone to manage the campaigns – and to do so effectively.

If you don’t have the expertise to be able to tell if they’re doing their job, you should be looking to an objective third party (read: external PPC professional) to come in and audit your campaigns.

The best case is that you gain some insight into more effective campaign management, along with some fleshed out processes.

The worst case is that you need to fire whoever is currently running your campaigns.

3. You don’t know the ROI of your campaigns.

With so much data and so many different metrics available, it’s pretty easy to put together some BS report that makes even the worst campaigns look like winners.

This is why you should be judging your campaigns by a single KPI which translates to real dollars for your organization.

If you don’t know the type of ROI you’re getting from your campaigns – it’s time for an audit.

4. You aren’t aggressively split testing ads and conversion funnels.

Consistently (and correctly) split testing is the backbone of continuously improving your PPC campaigns.

You shouldn’t just be testing your ad creative, but should also be looking to improve your conversion funnel.

You should have a prioritized list of tests to run after your current test has reached statistical significance.

There is always room for improvement.

Unfortunately, most companies are not consistently split testing.

They don’t understand that test velocity leads to big wins.

Or worse, whoever is running the campaign doesn’t have the CRO (conversion rate optimization) chops to run informed tests – or they’re just coasting.

Time for an audit.

5. You aren’t sure how/when to adjust bids.

Not sure how or when to set a bid adjustment?

Do you know what day parting is?

How about checking your campaign performance segmented by device?

Do you understand what over-optimization is?

If you answered no to most or all of those questions, then you need an audit.

Key Takeaway

A professional PPC audit can be the difference maker which takes you from being just another participant to being the big dog in your industry.

I’ve personally witnessed PPC campaigns become the key growth engines for entire organizations after executing the recommendations from an audit.

Without a PPC audit, you really don’t know the true potential of your campaigns.

What To Do Next

1. Don’t get just any PPC audit. Get a 4D PPC Audit.

2. Contact me if you want to massively improve your campaign results (results guaranteed).