IQS offers a free PPC audit on ten key areas of PPC management using AdWords Performance Grader powered by Wordstream to help AdWords advertisers better understand how well their campaigns are performing according to Google’s PPC best practices. The AdWords Performance Grader uses a proprietary grading algorithm based on more than 60 different factors, including ad spend data, Quality Score, ranking, impressions and other variables.

Your AdWords Performance Grader report includes an overall grade as well as individual grades in ten key areas of pay-per-click management:

1. Wasted Spend - Are you making proper use of negative keywords? Or are you wasting hundreds, even thousands of dollars per month on irrelevant keywords that never convert?
2. Quality Score - Are your campaigns Google-approved? High Quality Scores have a major impact on your ROI, improving your rankings and lowering your costs.
3. Impression Share - How often do your ads appear as a result of relevant search queries? Increased impression share can improve exposure and multiply your lead generation results.
4. Click-Through Rate (CTR) - CTR is a measure of how targeted your ads are. If your CTR is low, you may be losing ground to competing advertisers.
5. Account Activity - To maintain performance, you need to spend active time in your account. How often are you checking under the hood?
6. Long-Tail Keyword Optimization - Are you utilizing longer, more targeted keywords in your campaigns? If not, you’re missing opportunities to grab high-intent, low-cost traffic.
7. Ad Text Optimization - Are you writing enough text ads to get strong performance in terms of impressions, clicks, CTR and ad ranking?
8. Landing Page Optimization - More landing pages usually means more targeted messaging. Do you have more or fewer landing pages than similar advertisers?
9. Mobile Advertising - With mobile traffic growing at 200% each year, it’s crucial to stay on top of mobile PPC best practices like call extensions, sitelinks, and mobile-optimized text ads.
10. PPC Best Practices - Are you adhering to the proven best practices that PPC experts follow to ensure optimal AdWords performance?

You’ll learn how well you’re really doing in each of these important areas, as well as how you could improve your performance, driving more leads and sales at lower costs.

PPC Audit Sample Report

The AdWords Performance Grader is a report that is designed to identify areas of opportunity in your account that could use some fine-tuning. The Grader will compare your AdWords account to other advertisers in your industry and help you assess where you stand relative to your peers.  Looking at lower scoring sections will help you identify areas of opportunity.

At the top of your report, you’ll see an overall grade that will determine where you stand in relation to advertisers in your industry.  Don’t worry, it’s not all bad news! The top three sections highlighted below your overall grade indicate the areas of your account where you rank well amongst your peers.  Kudos to you!

Below your average grade, you will see the breakdown of your overall score in your Report Card.  Sections with lower scores are where you will likely want to focus your efforts for the month.

Let’s break down the sections! Expanded Text Ads

Expanded Text Ads are an exciting new ad format that have shown promising results to date.  Compared to the old, “Standard Text Ads,” Expanded Text Ads allow for increased headline and description character limits.  What does this mean? More space on the search results page and better click through rates!

Need to work on your Expanded Text Ads? IQS will convert your standard text ads to expanded text ads for you!

Text Ad optimization

The Text Ad Optimization section of your report card will let you know where your ad copy stands as compared to peer advertisers in your industry.  When assessing your performance, the most important metric to focus on is the number of text ads per ad group.  Advertisers with larger accounts may have more text ads overall but all advertisers should have at least 2-3 ads per ad group to test out different ad copies to continually optimize your account.

Wondering where to turn next? Once per week, IQS resurfaces your lowest performing ads and will test one new ones for you!

Quality Score Optimization

The Quality Score Optimization section of the report card highlights your impression-weighted Quality Score distribution as compared to your industry benchmark. In the example below, ~1500 impressions are coming from keywords with a Quality Score of 3 and nearly ~1000 are coming from keywords with a Quality Score of 1. Even if your average Quality Score is on the higher you may notice you still have a high volume of impressions coming from lower Quality Score keywords where you can look to improve your account.

Wondering where to turn next? Check out the Manage tab and try sorting your keywords by impressions, notice any low Quality keywords in the pool? Those are the keywords to focus on optimizing first.

Click Through Rate Optimization

Click Through Rate is one of the core components of Quality Score so working to improve this key performance indicator can have positive impact on your Quality Score.  The Click Through Rate Optimization section of the report card highlights your click through rate relative to position and identifies opportunities to improve. Remember that click through rate should be assessed relative to position.

Wondering where to turn next? This section also tracks your click through rate and average position by device.  If you notice that certain devices are suffering from lower positions, try adding incremental device bid modifiers to improve your click through rate on these devices.

Account Activity

The Account Activity section of the report card offers a snapshot of the actions you have taken in your account over the last quarter.  You can also use the drop down to summarize your account activity by month. We find that metric on the report that’s most closely correlated with overall success is Account Activity – which makes sense: the people working to optimize their accounts are the ones doing better!

Long-Tail Keyword Optimization

Adding long-tail keywords to your account can be a strategic way to improve your Quality Score.  By bidding on longer tail terms that are specific to your products and services, you will create a more relevant path for your searchers which will hopefully yield higher Quality Scores.

Wondering where to look next? IQS uses many tactics to find keywords that are proven to work specifically tailored for industrial manufacturing in the B2B/OEM marketplace.

Impression Share Optimization

Your Impression Share is the number of impressions your ads have received divided by the number of impressions your ads were eligible to appear for.  Essentially, your impression share is how big your piece of the search advertising pie is for the keywords you’re bidding on. The Impression Share section of the Grader highlights where you have lost some slices due to budget or Ad Rank (Quality Score x Max CPC bid).

Landing Page Optimization

Creating a relevant experience with a clear path to conversion requires A/B testing.  This section of the Performance Grader, will show you where you stand relative to your peer advertisers in the number of landing pages you are sending traffic to.  Creating and testing compelling landing pages that are specific to the products and services you are offering will help you improve your Quality Score.

Wondering where to look next? Work on creating some new landing pages! Are you focused on lead generation? IQS can create specific Landing Pages for your campaign for this!

Mobile Advertising

The mobile advertising section of the Report Card highlights your presence on mobile devices as compared to your industry benchmark.  You can use this section to identify opportunities to optimize your performance by device.

Wondering where to look next? Navigate to Manage and try segmenting your campaigns by device to see which campaigns need some love.  Make sure your landing pages are mobile friendly and easy to navigate on mobile and tablet devices.

Best Practices Check

The Best Practices Check at the bottom of the Performance Grader does a quick scan to ensure your campaigns are aligned with AdWords Best Practices.  Any components that receive a failing score present an opportunity to optimize!

Wondering where to look next? Navigate to Manage and try segmenting your campaigns by device to see which campaigns need some love.  Make sure your landing pages are mobile friendly and easy to navigate on mobile and tablet devices.

Get your free PPC audit using AdWords Performance Grader powered by Wordstream, today!