What is in a PPC Audit in 2025?

We do a lot of PPC audits for prospective clients here at Genie. We often see a pattern of why the account is not achieving a desired outcome which we categorise into 4 main buckets

1. First - a clear lack of understanding of how PPC campaigns should be set up to achieve optimum results
2. Second - a strong reluctance to work with AI and adopt smart features like Performance Max or smart bidding
3. Third - the account is in a good shape but there is a clear lack of strategic direction with a strong focus on immediate sales at a high return on ad spend, or ROAS
4. Last but not least - an account health check. Many brands out there are doing a great job with their PPC activity and they simply want to make sure they still have their finger on the pulse

So, how do we approach it here at Genie?

First, we need to understand a brand's overall business strategy and the role of each channel they are running within their marketing mix. There are many ways to run a paid search account, but the key principle is always to ensure best practices are in place and that your account structure ladders up to your overall objective.

A discovery call to understand a brand’s business goals and current challenges is crucial for us as this will help formulate our approach.

Then, start the audit and let’s be honest here, we’re not talking about spotting a typo in an ad. We’re all humans, mistakes happen. This is a quick fix and it shouldn’t be the reason why a brand would want to move away from an agency.

At Genie, we look at 4 key pillars

• Measurement
• Account Structure
• Use of AI
• Best practices

So first, Measurement which seems to be a key challenge for a lot of brands. Ensuring you track accurate and privacy safe data is key to success. What we look for are things like 

• Do you track the right conversion actions? In most cases that would be conversions and conversion value, but Micro Conversions like added to basket and sign ups can be just as important to demonstrate the value of your mid to upper funnel campaigns
• Have you got consent mode and enhanced conversions all set up? These are essentials to ensure you’re not only tracking users in a privacy-safe manner, but for those that opted-out, you’re still able to account for those precious conversions

Then we look at the Google Ads account structure. I talked about the initial discovery call being crucial to understand a business strategy and it’s at this point where we look at whether the account is set up to support those objectives.

Take ‘driving incremental growth’ as the main objective. We would be looking at how much of your overall budget goes into branded search queries versus non-branded queries. In simple terms, are you talking to your existing customers or are you utilising Google Ads as a new customer acquisition tool. If your ROAS is strong, and in many cases above 5, it’s most likely the former.

And this is where we would question the reliance over your brand campaigns and discuss the need to shift your marketing spend up the funnel to drive new and relevant users to your website. So the marketing funnel conversation is inevitable at this point and our role is to demonstrate how a strong account structure will help your brand be visible within that consideration set before a user decides to make a purchase.

This is where Performance Max and the use of AI come into play

Our view is very much about being AI-led as opposed to AI-controlled. But what does that even mean? Ultimately, Google is able to analyse billions of signals and touchpoints before placing an ad in front of a user at the right time. There’s simply no point trying to compete against that, after all why would you? Instead, leverage Google’s AI solutions, whether it’s Pmax, Smart Bidding or Demand Gen, and feed the tool with the right input. Segment your campaigns in a way that makes sense for your business; whether that is based on margins, bestsellers, or seasonality; import your customer data, and work on the right messaging.

As for Pmax, the biggest pitfall that I see is when the campaign is set to a max conversion value bidding strategy with a high ROAS target, say 1,000%. All we’re doing here is engaging with users searching for your brand name, often confirmed by looking under the Insights report. There is no space for incremental growth and the answer is running standard shopping to grab those branded conversions and use Pmax to drive new customer acquisition.

*Note - Google released a new update on October 2024 on the relationship between Pmax and standard shopping when both campaign types are eligible to enter the auction.

Finally best practices are still a must-have - are you making full use of ad copy space? Do you have broad match keywords in place with strong negative keywords lists? Do you import customer match lists? Do you have feed optimisations in place? All of which would form part of our recommendations and onboarding process.

Times have changed and so has the role of Paid Search. 

The role of the audit is of course to surface those missing best practices but for us it goes beyond that. It’s about demonstrating the role of the channel within your wider marketing mix. Having said that, ensure your best practices are on and keep up with all the upcoming PPC changes.