It’s always interesting to take a look inside an existing paid search account for the first time. If you know what to look for it’s easy to get a pretty quick sense for the depth and quality of the existing campaigns.

When we review an account, we want to take a look at the campaigns and ad groups, keywords, creative (text ads), bids, and the landing pages.

Here’s what we want to look for in each:

• Campaigns and Ad-Groups
  • Is there a logical structure that can organize the account into reasonable and meaningful groups and sub-groups?
  • Are the keywords in the ad-groups properly sorted according to this structure?
• Keywords
  • Are the keywords of appropriate quality, quantity, and diversity?
  • Are match-types set reasonably?
• Creative
  • Are the existing text ads diverse and well written?
  • How wide is the CTR range that the existing ads are achieving?
  • How do these ads compare to those being run by competitors for similar keywords?
  • Does the history suggest that there has been a lot of creative testing?
• Bids
  • What are the average positions of the keywords in the different ad-groups? Within any ad-group are the positions within a tight or widely distributed range?
  • What is the average cost per order, or ROAS within and between the ad-groups?
  • What is the ROI being achieved at the ad-group and keyword levels. What’s the range of ROI within any ad-group?
• Landing Pages
  • How diverse is the set of landing pages being used across the ad-groups and keywords?
  • How well do the landing pages match the conceptual organization of the ad-groups?

The goal is to understand (and later improve) the alignment of keywords, text-ads, and landing pages and then properly value each grouping. Messy organizations, incomplete keywords, poorly written ads, inappropriate landing pages, or illogical bids are all opportunities for improvement.

We often do quick reviews of accounts for prospects, to gain an understanding of the level of existing management and provide some insights as to the potential for improvement and some examples of how we’d approach the opportunity.

But sitting down to review an account after we’ve taken over management is quite different. Now we need more than just a sense of potential, we need to create an actual task list.

In the next post we’ll talk about the first step of our review for onlynaturalpet.com, as we examine the organizational structure of their accounts and make our first changes since taking over account management.

This post is part of a case-study series on the Commerce360 management of paid search campaigns for onlynaturalpets.com. For your convenience, we’re keeping a list of all posts in the series.