Audit of advertising campaigns

Setting up and launching advertising on your own is not an easy task. Often, the allocated budget is wasted without bringing the desired results in the form of new orders. The cost per click turns out to be too high, and it can be difficult to identify the real causes of the problems without the help of a professional.

This is where an advertising campaign audit comes in handy. Unlike regular analytics, it covers a wider range of factors and provides a comprehensive picture of the success of the promotion. Based on the audit findings, a step-by-step plan of adjustments is prepared.

By implementing the suggested improvements, you can achieve a significant increase in advertising ROI — reduce the cost of attracting users, increase sales, and maximize the return on every hryvnia spent on promotion.

Why is an advertising campaign audit necessary?

Advertising campaign audit services are necessary to identify problem areas and even errors that hinder effective promotion, and to develop a plan to eliminate them. This will allow you to find and fix the causes:

• Poor traffic. If you are experiencing low traffic despite active promotion, you definitely need to order an audit. Perhaps the problem lies in incorrect targeting, narrow coverage of the semantic core, or poor choice of platforms.
• Low conversion rates. People visit the website but do not make purchases or perform other desired actions. Perhaps the contractor has driven irrelevant traffic to your site, or the website does not fully respond to user requests. Auditors will evaluate the ease of navigation and the appeal of your offers.
• Inadequate spending of the advertising budget. Often, money disappears before your eyes, and the results are not visible. The reason may lie in incorrect bidding, an overly broad target audience, and many other mistakes. An audit will identify bottlenecks and suggest how to optimize the campaign.
• Low return on investment. If you have traffic and conversions, but your revenue does not exceed your expenses, this is a cause for concern. The reason may be incorrect pricing, unattractive offers, or excessively high customer acquisition costs.
• Doubts about the contractor’s work. If you do not fully understand how funds are being spent and how effectively the marketing agency is working, order an independent audit. This will allow you to objectively assess the current results and understand how adequate they are in comparison with competitors.
• Increased advertising costs. Have you noticed an increase in the price per click or lead? You need to find out the reasons for the increase and find ways to reduce it by optimizing your account settings. A high-quality audit will help stabilize costs without compromising traffic.
• Old settings. If your campaigns haven’t been updated in a while, they may not reflect current market trends and new marketing system capabilities. An audit will show you what improvements will help increase the effectiveness of your promotion right here and now.

What is required to conduct an advertising campaign audit?

Before conducting an audit of your advertising campaign, you will need to provide specialists with access to:

1. Your Google Ads account. With access to your advertiser profile, auditors will be able to analyze all settings—from keywords and ad targeting to ad content.
2. Google Analytics. Analytics will show which channel and advertising tool brings in the most traffic, on which days and at what times activity is highest, and which devices people use to visit the site.
3. Call tracking system (if used). This will allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of campaigns based on the number and quality of calls from potential customers. You will know exactly which advertising messages generate more inquiries and, therefore, perform better.

Why is it better to order an audit of advertising campaigns from AdwService?

• Expert approach. Our audit is not a superficial check, but a comprehensive study, including immersion in the niche and analysis of key competitors. This allows us to identify hidden problems and find non-obvious opportunities for optimization.
• Experience in various niches. Our team has a track record of successful cases in a wide range of areas, from online stores to B2B services. This allows us to effectively tailor the audit to the specifics of your business.
• Individual approach. No universal solutions — only personalized strategies tailored to your goals and objectives. We will study your campaign in detail and offer a step-by-step plan for its improvement.
• Results-oriented approach. Our main goal is not just to identify problems, but to offer effective solutions that will increase your return on investment. We understand that cosmetic changes will have no effect if the tools chosen are not suited to the task at hand or the target audience has been incorrectly identified. That is why we get to the heart of the matter and find opportunities for real improvement.
• Detailed recommendations. Once you decide to order an advertising campaign audit, you are guaranteed to receive a detailed report with clear visualizations. You will have a clear understanding of both the current state of your advertising and potential areas for growth.
• Implementation assistance. We won’t leave you alone with a long list of recommendations. If necessary, our team will take care of all the work involved in implementing changes based on identified areas for improvement. You can delegate the task of improving the effectiveness of your advertising to us and be confident that it will be done to a high standard.

What types of advertising do we audit?

Our expertise covers the following advertising campaign formats:

1. Search. For classic Google search ads, we evaluate campaign structure, keyword relevance, ad quality, and how well landing pages on the website match the ads. Our goal is to help you increase your CTR and number of conversions by ensuring that your ads accurately match user queries and needs.
2. KMS. For advertising on the contextual media network, we will analyze the accuracy of targeting, the quality and formats of the banners used, and audience reach. This will allow us to understand how effectively marketing works to build brand awareness and attract new customers.
3. Google Shopping and Performance Max. Our PPC specialists will evaluate the quality of feeds, the correctness of goal settings, and the overall effectiveness of this advertising format for your business.

What does the advertising campaign audit service include?

When providing advertising campaign audit services, we strive to approach the process as comprehensively as possible. The work involved in a typical audit at our agency can be divided into several stages.

Immersion in the customer’s business

The main task of an auditor from the customer’s point of view is to help them earn more. Therefore, it is not enough to simply point out technical errors. You need to look at them through the prism of business indicators. To accomplish this task, an interview with the client is usually conducted. During the conversation, it is necessary to:

• Clearly define the problems and KPIs that advertising should address.
• Get access to your Google Ads account and Google Analytics system.
• Learn as much as possible about your target audience—their socio-demographic characteristics, interests, and behavior. This data can be obtained from the customer themselves or from reports generated by analytical systems.
• Understand the product range, USP, and features of products/services, as well as understand the sales funnel and behavior scenarios on the website.
• Learn about the customer’s past experience in promoting the website — what difficulties they encountered, what hypotheses they tested, what worked, and what didn’t.

To achieve good results, communication with the customer may continue even after the interview. New questions and ideas arise, and hypotheses are formulated jointly. Defending the results turns into a productive dialogue rather than a one-sided presentation of conclusions.

Advertising strategy assessment

The current marketing strategy is checked for compliance with current business goals and objectives. For example:

• Attracting new customers and increasing sales;
• Entering new geographic markets;
• Increasing brand awareness and improving image;
• Informing the audience about promotions, discounts, and new products;
• Compiling a database of potential buyers for further communication.

During the analysis, you need to make sure that the structure of accounts and campaigns logically corresponds to the selected goals. For example, separate groups should be created to promote different types of goods or services. Ads should be segmented by category, brand, seasonality, and other characteristics.

Analysis of the advertising account structure

Every business has several audience segments and separate offers for each of them. They may vary in price, terms, and landing pages on the website. A common mistake is to combine all these offers into one general campaign.

For more effective work, you need to allocate a separate campaign for each direction. This will allow you to create the most relevant ads for each target group, track the effectiveness of advertising investments, and quickly find areas of growth and areas of inefficient spending.

Competent segmentation will also simplify advertising management and enable more accurate measurement of conversion, visitor acquisition cost, and return on investment. It is always easier to optimize and scale individual narrowly focused campaigns than one general campaign.

Analysis of semantic core and negative keywords

The core of queries is the foundation of search campaigns. It is based on them that your offers are shown to users. A semantic audit allows you to identify the most valuable keywords, weed out ineffective ones, and find new growth points. The specialist pays attention to the following:

• Are all the necessary topics and query groups present, and have any important ones been omitted?
• Are the keywords grouped correctly? Are there any overlaps or “cannibalization” between them?
• Are different types of keyword matching used? Is broad matching overused?
• How well do negative keywords work? Are all clearly irrelevant queries excluded?
• Do the selected keywords correspond to the advertised products and the interests of the target audience?

Evaluation of creatives and advertisements

The higher the relevance and quality of your ads, the more clicks and conversions they will generate at a lower cost per click. They form the user’s first impression of your offer and largely determine their desire to visit your website and learn more about it. To achieve maximum effectiveness, simply writing high-quality, unique text is not enough.

When analyzing the current situation, we check:

1. Use of add-ons. Links, clarifications, promotions—all these options make advertising messages more noticeable and informative. They increase clickability and contribute to an increase in the number of orders on the website.
2. Relevance of landing pages. If an advertisement promotes a specific product or product category, the link should lead directly to the corresponding page. The user should not have to spend time navigating the site. The easier it is for them to find what they are looking for, the higher the likelihood of a purchase.
3. Highlight the advantages. It’s not enough to simply describe the product; you need to explain why it is useful and attractive. Study user requests and pain points, compare your product with solutions from other market players. Identify its strengths and include them in your texts.
4. UTM tags. Without them, it is impossible to collect detailed statistics on advertising performance. Tags must be added to both the main link and all additional links.

Analysis of the rate setting strategy

As a bidding strategy in Google Ads, you can choose between manual or automatic management (for example, “Maximum clicks” or “Target cost per conversion”). As a result of the analysis, you will know exactly what works best.

An audit helps you understand whether you are overpaying for clicks in pursuit of traffic. Or, conversely, perhaps your bids are too low and you are losing potential profit. Adjusting your metrics will allow you to get more targeted actions for the same investment.

Audit of key performance indicators

When assessing performance, we use objective quantitative indicators as a benchmark:

1. CTR (click-through rate). The higher it is, the better the ad copy resonates with the audience. A low CTR is a sign of problems with targeting or ad content.
2. CPC (cost per click). You will find out which queries you spend the most money on and which ones work more effectively. This way, you can reallocate your budget in favor of keywords that generate more conversions at a similar cost per click.
3. ROI (return on investment). This indicator clearly shows whether you are profiting from your marketing activities and to what extent. If your ROI is low, it’s time to start optimizing.
4. CPA (cost per acquisition). Reflects the cost of attracting one visitor who performed a target action on the website. Unlike other indicators, the lower the CPA, the better it is for the advertiser.

Landing page analysis

Many people underestimate the importance of landing pages in the context of advertising effectiveness. But if a user clicks on an ad and ends up on a confusing website that is irrelevant to their search query, there is a high probability that they will leave and never return.

Therefore, during the audit, it is important to carefully analyze landing pages according to a number of criteria:

• Compliance of content with the advertisement;
• A clear and prominent call to action;
• Download speed;
• Uniqueness and usefulness of content;
• Ease of navigation;
• Up-to-date information about the product, prices, and contacts.

If landing pages do not meet these requirements, ad conversion will inevitably decline.

Audit of main competitors

The presence of competition in search results inevitably affects the return on investment of advertising. The price per click is rising, and reach is declining. Well-designed campaigns by competitors can lure away the most promising buyers. That is why it is so important to keep your finger on the pulse and adapt to the market, taking into account the actions of other players.

During the audit, it is important to check:

• Competitors’ positions in search results (especially for market leaders).
• The reach of their advertising—which search queries they promote and where their presence is minimal.
• USP and benefits mentioned and used by market “neighbors.”
• Add-ons used ― quick links, clarifications, promotions, etc.
• The quality and content of landing pages linked to by other advertisers’ ads.
• Visual solutions (images, videos) in advertisements.
• How professionally their ads are written, what extensions are used.

Provision of recommendations

The audit concludes with the preparation of a detailed report listing the issues identified and specific recommendations for addressing them. This document will give you a clear understanding of why current solutions are not delivering the desired results at a high cost.

The report will highlight all errors at the level of the semantic core, overall macrostructure, targeting, and so on. You will see why non-targeted audiences are visiting the site and why conversion rates remain low.

But most importantly, you will have a step-by-step plan for implementing improvements. Practical solutions will be proposed for each problem. Depending on the scope and depth of the study, the final report may be very voluminous and detailed. Don’t be alarmed if it runs to several dozen pages — it just means that there is great potential for growth.

What determines the price of an advertising campaign audit?

Depending on the specific scope of the tasks, the cost of an advertising campaign audit is calculated individually. It is usually influenced by several factors:

• Project scope and number of accounts. The more campaigns and ad groups in Google Ads need to be analyzed, the more time our specialists will need.
• The number and variety of formats used. If you combine search, display advertising, remarketing, and Performance Max, a PPC specialist will need to spend more effort to understand the project.
• Level of competition in the niche. Highly competitive topics with a large number of goods or services will require a deeper dive into the specifics of the business.
• The presence of correctly configured analytics and goals. If analytics systems are already installed and working properly on the website, this will simplify part of the work. If they are not available, we will assist with implementation.

On average, the base price for an audit starts at $300-400. However, it may vary both upward and downward depending on the criteria listed above. We do not offer universal service packages, but rather calculate the price for each specific project.

Before starting work, we will provide you with an accurate estimate with no hidden extra charges, and you will be able to adjust your budget if necessary. To find out how much an audit will cost in your case, send us a request. We will quickly assess the scope of work and offer you the best terms of cooperation. We promise that the price will be reasonable and the result will be beneficial for your business.