My friends at the Rimm-Kaufman Group posted a festive blog post yesterday called Avoiding Search Hobgoblins that is a good primer for reviewing results of your established search engine marketing program.
The audit should begin with gathering keyword data/results and then analyzing those results, breaking out branded keywords from non-branded keywords. Bids, ad copy and destination URLs should also be analyzed.
It’s a good read if you have an established search engine marketing program or if you have an underperforming campaign and want to know where to start to improve it. I certainly advocate analyzing your program’s performance at least once per year. During your yearly audit, you can not only identify big issues that need to be fixed—you can uncover new opportunities for program growth and profitability.
