Audit of Google and Facebook ads: what you need to pay attention to

Is your advertising starting to show poor results over time or becoming completely ineffective? This is a sign that you need to contact an expert who will audit your running advertising campaigns. 

An advertising audit is a comprehensive analysis of your advertising settings and results to find points of growth. The purpose of such an audit is to eliminate existing problems, optimize the advertising budget, and increase the effectiveness of advertising. 

Let’s talk more about what is included in an ad audit with our PPC specialists.

What are the reasons to conduct an audit?

The Solve Marketing team is approached for an audit of advertising campaigns when:

1. Advertising does not work as desired. There are no or not enough leads.
2. Leads are not targeted or too expensive.
3. There is no established communication with the contractor, but you want to check their work.
4. Clients have already set up advertising on their own and need an expert opinion.
5. You want to scale the advertising results, but you can’t do it yourself.

How does audit of advertising campaigns help businesses achieve their goals?

It is important to understand that the audit of advertising campaigns is only a part of marketing analysis. It is one of the components of a marketing strategy. Solve Marketing comprehensively provides recommendations within the marketing strategy to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your company’s marketing activities. 

Usually, the audit of advertising campaigns includes the analysis of previously launched campaigns in Google and Meta. But there are different business needs and peculiarities when it is worth analyzing other paid channels to attract customers. For example, advertising on social networks such as Telegram, Tik Tok, Linked In, etc. Below we will share information about the main advertising tools — Google and Meta.

Google Ads

The points for checking advertising campaigns in Google Ads can be divided into 3 main ones: analysis of search, shopping, and CMN (contextual media network) campaigns.

Search campaign analysis includes:

1. Analysis of search queries

This step will help you clean up the semantic core from irrelevant keys and supplement it with phrases and word combinations that are popular with your users.

2. Cross-mining

It is used less and less due to the improvement of automatic strategies. However, if your ad groups are very different in terms of content, it is worth using this option.

3. Analysis of semantics and suspension of ineffective keywords

This analysis allows you to disable keywords that have impressions but no clicks (they worsen the overall CTR of the campaign, which can lead to an increase in the CPC).

And also, keywords with low CTR. For search campaigns, a low CTR is anything less than 5%. But there are exceptions to this. Because there are high-frequency keywords that drive a lot of traffic to the site and convert more often.

Such keywords often have a CTR below 5%, but you shouldn’t pay attention to this because they convert leads.

And the last are keywords that have a very high cost per conversion. For example, the average cost per conversion in our campaign is 200 UAH. There are keywords that can convert only once in 3 months and the cost of this conversion is more than 1,000 UAH.

4. Analysis of ads

During this analysis, you can check the number of clicks and impressions for ads and keywords. If necessary, you can stop those that perform worse and create an additional ad based on the best one.

5. Analysis of campaign results

In case of unsatisfactory results, make a decision to change the strategy or customize the existing strategy (change the target price per conversion or change the target profitability).

6. Adjusting bids by age, gender, audience, device, day of the week, and city

It’s simple. For example, if men convert cheaper from mobile devices than women, we increase the adjustment in favor of men.

Analyzing sales campaigns includes the following steps:

1. Check the delivery of products.

If there are products that “eat up” your money and do not bring conversions, then you need to remove these products from the campaign (so that you can show other products in the campaign). After that, you should add the deleted products to a new campaign with different settings or delete them altogether (ad budget saving mode).

2. Analyze the results of the campaign.

In case of unsatisfactory results, a decision is made to change the strategy settings. Usually, if a campaign has been running for a long time, it is based on strategies related to conversions. Most often, this is the target profitability that needs to be adjusted. If you increase the target profitability, reduce the target. This way, your ads will be shown to fewer users. If the profitability decreases, on the contrary, you should expand the target. By the way, reducing the profitability of retail companies during sales (for example, Black Friday) is a working life hack. This way, you can reach not only your target audience but also new users. It works 8 out of 10 times.

3. Analyze ad placements.

The Performance Max campaign type is increasingly being used instead of standard shopping campaigns. This means that your ads will be shown not only in shopping results, but also on partner sites such as Google. Therefore, you should analyze such sites and exclude them from the display if you realize that your target audience will not be on these sites.

Analysis of Display Network and video ads

Setting up Display Network campaigns involves creating multiple display ads to show the most relevant content to the target audience.

Here we can influence the placement of ads (YouTube channels or websites).

Therefore, it is necessary to:

• analyze this report and remove non-target sites/channels/apps;
• analyze and test different creatives;
• test bidding strategies.

And remember the words of Statham: “If something works, we don’t touch it”.

Facebook Ads

What you should pay attention to when auditing your Meta Ads account

The most important thing is the structure of advertising campaigns, ad groups, and their names. These are the criteria that will help you to understand the level of advertising set up by a specialist.

The name of an ad campaign should include:

• ToFu stage of the sales funnel (work with a cold audience);
• MoFu retargeting (work with a warm audience that has already interacted with us);
• BoFu retargeting (working with a warm audience that has already bought our product);
• The name of the advertising goal used for optimization, “purchases”, “leads”, “traffic”, etc.

Additionally, it can include the name of the audience based on which it is collected in the campaign — “Interests”, “Look like” and the launch date.

Example of a campaign name — 13.11 / ToFu / Leads / Look like

The name of the ad group should contain a description of the settings and the audience that is used. An example of an ad group name is UA/M, F 25-44/Small and medium enterprises.

Next, you audit existing ad campaigns for the entire account or for a selected period. For example, the last three months.

The name of the ad group should contain a description of the settings and the audience that is used. An example of an ad group name is UA/M, F 25-44/Small and medium enterprises.

Next, you audit existing ad campaigns for the entire account or for a selected period. For example, the last three months.

Key aspects of budget optimization analysis in Meta Ads

1. Plan and set your ad budgets so that your ad campaign or ad group receives enough targeted actions to optimize, approximately 50 targeted actions in 7 days.
2. Optimize your costs for better results by acting on your ad campaign budgets.
3. Monitor the cost of the results obtained and their compliance with the established KPIs (key performance indicators).
4. Consider the cost of application, the cost of qualified application, the cost of sale, etc. depending on the tasks in the project.

Audience analysis:

1. pay attention to the geographic location, gender, age, and interests used to create advertising campaigns;
2. in active campaigns, review the breakdown by region of ad serving, gender, and age. Based on this, you can draw conclusions about which audience segments are producing the best results and in which regions your ads are hardly shown. You can also see which segments the algorithm prioritized;
3. check on the basis of which data the “Look like” audience was created and whether the segmentation by value of this audience is maintained;
4. see what data was used to create the audience for retargeting.

When auditing the placement of advertising, check:

1. places (locations) of advertising placement;
2. the correspondence of the banner sizes to their placements;
3. the placements that bring us the best results in existing campaigns by breaking them down by placements.

Conclusion

Advertising audit and optimization is an ongoing process that leads to improved promotional performance, compliance with key KPIs, and increased ROI of marketing campaigns. 

Remember that the market is constantly changing, so it’s important to keep your advertising strategy up to date. Analyze data, learn from mistakes, and experiment — these are the key components of a successful advertising campaign.

Fill out the form on the website and get a free consultation with a Solve Marketing marketer.

Dictionary of definitions from Solve Marketing

1. CMN (contextual media network) is an advertisement in the media network of Google’s partner sites, where contextual adaptive and banner advertising messages are placed. The CMN differs from search advertising in that it will be displayed to users on any of the platforms, but not in the search network. 
2. A semantic core is a list of phrases for an advertising campaign that users interested in a product will be able to see ads for.
3. Cross-minus is the expansion of the list of keywords with additional minus words to prevent them from overlapping and competing.
4. CTR (Click Through Rate) — click-through rate.
5. CTR is the ratio of clicks on a banner or ad to the total number of banner impressions. 
6. Target profitability is the average value of conversion of advertising costs (e.g., revenue) that you want to receive for each unit of funds spent on advertising.
7. KPI (Key Performance Indicator) — key performance indicators. The indicator helps to determine the effectiveness of a landing page (website, advertising campaign, or business in general), assess the status and level of implementation of the marketing strategy.

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