The Easy Ecommerce PPC Audit: Uncover Growth Opportunities

If you’re an ecommerce business, PPC is one of the most important tools in your sales and marketing toolbox.

96% of ecommerce brands use PPC to drive traffic to their listings, and PPC clicks have a 50% higher conversion rate than organic search. PPC is a hugely effective way to generate ecommerce revenue – if you plan your campaigns effectively and stay ahead of your many competitors in the area.

That’s why it’s so important to make sure your paid online ads are performing as well as they possibly can, optimize any underperforming campaigns, and eliminate wasted spend. It’s a competitive space, and every penny counts.

Conducting an ecommerce PPC audit gives you the base of knowledge to do this. Here’s what you need to know, and what you should be looking for.

What is an eCommerce PPC Audit?

If you’re an ecommerce business, a PPC audit allows you to evaluate the performance of one of your most important channels for revenue growth – paid online advertising.

If you’ve partnered with an ecommerce PPC agency, an audit is a vital first step in gauging your current ad performance and identifying opportunities for improvement. But you can complete one in-house too, provided you have the time and resources available to really dig into your PPC campaigns for useful insights.

During a PPC audit, you’ll take a deep dive into your paid ad strategy – your ad targeting, ad copy, bidding strategies, campaign segmentation and landing pages – to identify any issues that may be negatively impacting campaign performance and figure out how to address them.

Ecommerce PPC Audits: Why are They so Important?

Let’s be honest: no-one hears the word ‘audit’ and jumps for joy. They’re fiddly, time consuming, and, unless you’re a real nerd about PPC like us, aren’t exactly a thrill a minute.

So, why do one?

For ecommerce businesses, PPC campaigns have the potential to drive huge amounts of revenue – that’s why even small ecom businesses tend to budget up to $10,000 per month for paid online ad campaigns. A well-executed PPC campaign gives you the visibility needed to clinch sales from hundreds, if not thousands, of competitors in your niche.

You want to make sure that you’re seeing the biggest return you can from your PPC spend. An audit helps you:

Identify key improvement areas and optimize performance. This allows you to lower CPCs, increase conversion rate, and achieve a better ROI on your campaigns
Check whether your campaigns are primed for the latest trends and updates in PPC advertising – paid search is a fast-moving world, and keeping slightly ahead of the curve offers many advantages
Take a look at key PPC management workflows and processes to see whether these could be more efficient – what scope is there for automation, for example, and how many hours of low-value, repetitive work could this save?

5 Key Areas to Review in an eCommerce PPC Audit

‘Improve PPC performance’ is a pretty broad goal. To get the best results possible from your audit (and to make the task feel a bit less imposing), it’s worth breaking things down into separate, smaller areas in which to make improvements.

Here are five areas to focus on for an easy ecommerce PPC audit, with some starting questions:

1. Overall objectives

Are you clear about your goals for each platform and each campaign?
Are your PPC campaigns clearly aligned with overall business goals?
Do you have clear, realistic, and thoroughly researched KPIs and targets in place to monitor campaign success?
Does your bid strategy align with your current goals, or does it need realigning? For example, if your goals have shifted from brand awareness to conversions and sales, have you shifted from CPM to smart bidding?

2. Account setup

Are your campaigns and ad groups clearly named and labeled, with appropriate labels attached for filtering?
Are campaigns split in ways that are logical, or is there a mix of different targeting, themes and products/services jumbled under one campaign?
Are campaigns split into brand/non brand themes?
Does each campaign have its own, separately managed budget? (‘Shared budget’ is an option in Google Ads, but this frequently under or overestimates, with negative effects on ROAS)
Are you using assets (for example, sitelinks, images, contact info, promotions, and callouts) to encourage conversions and make your ad more visible?

3. Keyword targeting

Are you targeting long-tail keywords with high purchase intent alongside broader keywords that offer visibility?
Are you including primary keywords in your display URL, paths, ad copy, and descriptions as a matter of habit?
Are you using negative keywords to exclude irrelevant search terms and increase ROAS?
How’s your keyword quality score looking? Aim for a score of 7 for strong keyword relevance and an optimized CPC

4. Underperformance and wasted spend

Which areas take up the highest spend for the lowest return?
Which ads attract the highest click through rate but the lowest conversions?
Are your underperforming keywords let down by poor campaign design, or are they simply not the right keywords for your products?
Have you checked for outdated scripts or rules that could undermine your current campaign?

5. Ad copy and landing pages

Is your ad copy compelling, up-to-date, and typo free?
Are your landing pages optimized for conversions? For example, are there clear CTAs, does the page load quickly, are product images clearly displayed?
Is there scope to A/B test landing page variants to improve performance even more? If so, which pages should be a priority for testing?

Our Complete PPC Audit Checklist

Ready to take a deep dive into your PPC campaign, carry out a full audit, and start taking measures that will seriously improve campaign performance?

Check out our Ultimate PPC Audit Checklist for absolutely everything you need to know.

PPC Audits for eCommerce Businesses: 3 Top Tips

Connect Your Sales Platform to Google Ads for More Insights

During your audit, you should make sure your conversion goals map directly onto events that are relevant to you, as an ecommerce business. Your top three priorities should be:

‘Add to cart’ events
Completed purchases
Specific product page views (campaign specific)

Connect your sales platform (for example Shopify) to track these goals and get more insight into your ad performance. You can get a more accurate ROAS, identify where you’re driving the most sales revenue, and start optimizing areas of your campaign that aren’t performing as well.

Make Sure Your Smart Bidding Targets Make Sense for All Products in Your Campaign

Smart bidding is a fantastic tool – but bear in mind that as an ecommerce business, your campaigns will typically contain a much broader range of products than others’. This means that the targets you specify for smart bidding need to make sense for all products in the campaign.

For example, when carrying out your audit, make sure any target ROAS goals are realistic for the range of order values in your campaign, and for individual product margins. If these metrics vary too much to reconcile, it’s a good sign that you should split into separate campaigns to allow the algorithm to bid more efficiently.

Match Types

Broad match keywords allow your ads to appear for a wide range of search query variations related to your specified keyword, such as synonyms, related searches, and misspellings.

Whilst they are cheaper, they offer the least control over which searches your ads appear under. This has caused many PPC marketers to overlook them in the past, for not offering the targeting needed for an effective campaign.

However, with advances in smart bidding and Google’s algorithm (which chooses where to display broad match keywords based on a user’s previous search activities, your landing page content, and other keywords in your ad group), broad match ads are quickly becoming an effective, low cost way to generate sales.

In fact, broad match ads generally outperform phrase and exact match keywords when advertising at scale. And, as ecommerce businesses are generally at-scale advertisers, that’s very good news indeed.

It’s worth running a comparison of keyword match type performance to see if broad match keywords could offer lower CPC whilst keeping conversions high, particularly for your brand campaigns.

If so, you could test further by replacing all keywords with broad match variants and letting smart bidding do its thing.

Get Expert Support for Your eCommerce PPC Strategy

Without a strong in-house team dedicated to PPC and PPC only, you’re likely missing out on opportunities to seriously level up your paid advertising game.

For less than the price of one full-time PPC specialist, you could onboard an agency like Velocity, whose entire team is dedicated to driving PPC revenue. And, your business benefits from this expertise immediately – no drawn out search for the perfect in-house hire.

Read how we increased the yearly business revenues of this vintage retailer by 25%

…or get in touch for a chat.