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Optimize SEM performance with an SEM audit

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has become an essential part of any digital marketing strategy, especially for businesses looking for cost-effective ways to reach their target audience on a global scale. However, many advertisers and marketers fall short of their goals because they don’t have a solid SEM strategy. Indaru reviews your existing search engine marketing accounts to help improve your results.

What is an SEM & why does your business need it?

An SEM audit is a comprehensive review of your paid search campaigns to identify opportunities and optimize performance. The audit includes an in-depth analysis of your keyword portfolios, advertising content, landing pages and conversion data. It also assesses your overall SEM strategy and makes recommendations for improvement.

Detailed analysis of your SEM campaigns can help your business identify specific opportunities to improve ROI of your investment.

Overall, an SEM analysis can help correct aspects of your campaigns that aren’t working more, eliminating unnecessary expenses and maximizing the performance of each campaign.

SEM audit checklist

If you are at a point where your conversions are declining, your CTR has stagnated or your ad spend is exceeding revenue, it’s time for some in-depth PPC audits. This is an intensive process where we evaluate various aspects of your search engine marketing strategy to identify areas where we can improve.

1. Account structure

When performing an SEM audit, a common issue that can arise is a poorly structured ad account. This can be due to several factors, but usually occurs when an account is created without a clear strategy in mind. Without a logical structure, it can be difficult to effectively manage an account, resulting in wasted ad spend and missed opportunities to capture leads or sales.

There are a few key signs that you may have a poorly structured ad account:

  • Duplicate keywords: you will be competing with yourself in this case and the return on investment will be less
  • No clear naming convention to clearly identify the product or strategy covered by each group of ads or campaign
  • Too many keywords: If you have hundreds of keywords in an ad group, it’s very difficult to know what works and what does not work.

These errors can result in a high volume of low quality traffic, low CTR, low conversion rates and little to no ROI of your campaigns.

2. Account configuration

Google Ads offers a great variety of settings to help you optimize your campaigns. These settings can be complex, and it can be difficult to know which ones to use. For example, you can choose bid modifications for different devices, an ad schedule, ad rotations, language targeting and a host of other settings.

Our SEM audit can help you identify which settings are most important for your campaigns, and how to use them to your advantage.

3. Optimization routines

An important aspect to review is your campaign optimization routines. To assess this, we’ll assess how often you make changes to your campaigns, what changes you make, and how you determine if those updates were successful.

For example, Google’s system-generated recommendations can sometimes hurt your campaign instead of helping it, instead of making manual adjustments based on your own information.

For example, Google may recommend that you add certain keywords, change your bid strategy, or increase your budget. However, in our experience, it’s best to make these types of adjustments yourself because you understand your budget and keywords better than the AI.

3. Optimization routines

An important aspect to review is your campaign optimization routines. To assess this, we’ll assess how often you make changes to your campaigns, what changes you make, and how you determine if those updates were successful.

For example, Google’s system-generated recommendations can sometimes hurt your campaign instead of helping it, instead of making manual adjustments based on your own information.

For example, Google may recommend that you add certain keywords, change your bid strategy, or increase your budget. However, in our experience, it’s best to make these types of adjustments yourself because you understand your budget and keywords better than the AI.

4. KPI analysis

Analyze the evolution of each KPI and check if the KPIs you are measuring are the right ones to help you achieve the goals of your business.

5. Keyword review

When we review your keywords, we consider for example the following:

  • Brand performance versus off-brand performance
  • Match Types
  • Concentration of investments
  • Max. paid
  • Long-tail searches
  • Keywords without impressions
  • The use of negative keywords

6. Ad copies

We will then perform a thorough review of your ads. We will evaluate all aspects of ads, including copy, landing pages, ad strength, appeal action….

7. Extensions

Google Ads encourages ad extensions that provide the user with relevant information about your product or service. We’ll look into whether your business is underutilizing this useful feature. For example, you can enable location extensions for your stores/offices and call extensions to make it easy for potential customers to contact you.

8. Landing pages

Your landing page experience is one of the most important factors in the success or failure of your campaign. Your landing page is the first impression potential customers will have of your business, so you need to make sure it’s up to snuff, so you don’t lose any leads. We will look at the performance of the different landing pages used.

9. Quality level

The quality score of your ad campaign can have a big impact on your results. A high score means your ads are relevant to your target audience and likely to be clicked. Google will prioritize ads with high quality scores by showing them more prominently. To improve your Quality Score, you need to have relevant ads and a great landing page experience.

10. Audiences

None of this matters if your audience targeting is wrong. If you’re experiencing a low CTR and low conversion rate, your targeting is probably off. We will analyze your audience targeting by looking at the breadth/narrowness of your audience, interest targeting, market segments, demographic targeting and how these compare to your existing customer data. This way we can identify areas where we can improve the effectiveness of your audience targeting strategies.

Why choose Indaru
as your SEM consultant

As experienced search engine advertising consultants, we are well positioned to provide recommendations to dramatically improve your campaign’s performance and ROI. Our team has a working knowledge of the latest developments in paid advertising such as Performance Max and Hagakure Campaigns for Google Ad customers.

We have worked with large companies where multiple agencies have worked on ad accounts over the years resulting in complex and messy structures and settings. We are experts at making sense of the mess and as unbiased outsiders we have no affiliation with any agency.