With spring rapidly approaching, this is a great time for search marketers to start preparing for an annual account audit. What are some of the top areas of focus for spring cleaning your account? Marin's Center of Excellence has created a process for identifying key ways accounts can be improved through structural and performance-based changes.
Step 1: Identify pain points in the account to narrow
your focus
Before you dive into cleaning up your account, identify the main areas where you’d like to focus your time. Chances are you don’t have a lot of bandwidth to dedicate to anything but day to day management tasks -- so to save time, start by asking yourself some questions to help narrow the focus of your audit and cleanup.
Some of these questions might include:
- Where does the account fall short of meeting its goals?
- Does the account have unutilized objects (things like past promotional creatives)?
- Do you regularly perform A/B tests?
- Have you had issues with revenue attribution?
Step 2: Perform an audit
The second step is to perform an audit of your account. You should focus your time on two major areas of opportunity: account structure and performance.
Tip: When performing the account audit, pull data in a format that allows you to make bulk changes. This way, once you’ve identified issues, you can easily take action and save time.
First, take a look at your account structure to make sure it follows search marketing best practices. This’ll make your account easier to navigate and ease day to day management. Second, analyze your account for performance issues that require action. The Center of Excellence recommends looking for the following:
Account Structure
- Duplicate keywords
- Conflicting negatives
- Past promotional creatives
- Missing active keywords/creatives
- Misspelled creatives
- Campaign setting alignment
- URL tracking issues
Performance
- Underperforming objects
- Optimal use of negative keywords
- Quality Score analysis
- Landing page content
- Keywords
- Ad copy
Step 3: Implement changes
The third step is to take corrective action based on insights you discover during the audit.
Be sure to keep track of any changes you make and a record of the audit -- this is essential, since it’ll allow you to effectively measure future performance.
Step 4: Measure
Use your record of changes to measure the impact of your spring cleaning efforts. Compile this information into a visual representation of the improvements to share with your colleagues or clients.
If you’re a Marin customer interested in partnering with the Center of Excellence on an account audit, contact your account representative, who’ll connect you with a Center of Excellence consultant today! Or, if you’re new to Marin, request a demo.
