Are sales slow? Are you getting the results you anticipated with PPC? Do you have someone who optimizes your PPC ad budget daily?
If you answered YES to the first question and NO to the last two, you may be restricting your online sales potential. Consider obtaining a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) audit and take the opportunity to see exactly how your paid search program campaigns can work smarter.
An audit is a great way to get started identifying the key components of your PPC campaigns. Here are the 5 questions you should ask when running an SEM audit:
- How’s my account performing? Savvy ad performance is based upon a combination of factors but the most critical ones are: relevancy, quality, competition, and spend. You’ll need to get a breakdown of the ad algorithm to better understand how your search impression share, ad position, keywords, competitive activities, and branded keywords work together.
- Am I working with the right search engines? There’s no doubt that Google is the leader in search. However, ignoring the smaller search engines can be a lost opportunity.
- Would a stronger mobile strategy help? With nearly half of all users shopping on mobile devices, advertising specifically to mobile users is critical to your strategy. Factors such as matching mobile user intent with mobile optimized content, and using bid modifiers and geographic modifiers are often overlooked and can be costly to your business.
- How is my ad copy effecting my performance? To ensure a strong ROI for your ad campaigns, your ad copy is critical. It needs to be keyword friendly and compelling and, most importantly, should result in click throughs to your website.
- How’s my user experience? Users control the Internet as far as what they see and how frequently. Your SEM performance is directly related to interactions that visitors to your site have with your website. Identify areas where you can improve the user experience to improve your ad presence and reduce your costs.
A SEM (PPC) audit is a great way to be sure that you are optimizing your accounts to their full potential. Depending on your monthly spend, some SEM agencies will do this for free. We recommend that you work with a certified search specialist to help navigate you through the audit process and help you build a clear, concise, and actionable course of action.
If interested in learning more about the SEM audit or if you have questions, please contact us at [email protected].
