Feature Focus: Skai Audit Keeps Your SEM Accounts Clean & In Line

Skai Audit. In today’s Friday Feature Focus, we present Skai Audit, new functionality of the platform that automatically checks for common account irregularities that could take many, many hours to accomplish manually.

For those of you who don’t do much gardening, pruning is a process of cutting back the clutter. By cutting away dead leaves and branches, the plant can direct all nutrients and growth to the healthy parts, and not waste it on the bad parts.

The same can be said for paid search accounts. By keeping your campaigns set to exactly the right settings, you won’t waste budget or time dealing with mistakes that continue to be detrimental to your marketing success.

Pruning keeps your plants growing and healthy

Auditing your SEM accounts

There are so many little settings in paid search accounts — especially large ones with hundreds or thousands of campaigns with potentially millions of keywords. There’s also added complexity with enterprise-level SEM accounts because there are generally multiple cooks in the kitchen, and unfortunately, it’s very easy for something to be forgotten or accidentally get changed.

But even a little mistake can have drastic consequences.

Take, for example, the rather mundane campaign setting of Delivery Method.

Search marketers can choose Standard, in which campaigns are automatically paused and activated so that your ads can show throughout the day based on a limited budget versus Accelerated, where your ads are shown as often as possible and, if they run out of the daily budget, they get paused for the rest of the day.

When a search marketer is really trying to spend the budget, having a campaign on Standard could potentially slow their ads from showing all of the time. For a brand that’s trying to maximize ad exposure for a limited time—such as during a short-term promotion—having their ads on Standard and not on Accelerated could really hamper results.

Delivery Method is just one of the numerous settings within a paid search account that SEM pros must manage. Auditing is a best practice to periodically go through accounts and ensure that they’re set up as desired to ensure success.

But auditing big accounts is very time-intensive. It could take dozens and dozens of hours to go through large accounts. There’s also the challenge of manual mistakes as it’s easy to miss something small or even accidentally mess up something that was actually already okay.

The biggest issue with auditing is that it takes so much time that often it simply doesn’t get done. Search marketers certainly want to do audits just like how you mean to do a full spring cleaning of your house or apartment, but the reality is that the issue of the day gets prioritized and there just never seems to be a good time for proactive tasks like these.

Skai Audit will do it for you

Skai Audit enables you to easily manage the digital marketing details that make a difference. This automated, end-to-end auditing solution standardizes your activity while at the same time customizing your audits to ensure they’re tailor-made for your business needs.

Some of the benefits of Skai Audit include:

• No more manual checklists: Skai Audit is completely automated, saving you time and eliminating the risk of human error
• Streamline your auditing: The easy workflow guides you through the auditing process end-to-end, from creating and running your audits, to following the recommendations provided in our actionable insight
• Customize your audits: Audit your campaigns according to your own standards and best practices. Our list of checks is completely customizable, ensuring you remain in the driving seat

What settings can be audited?

Skai Audit has been a labor of love between our Product team and our clients.

“We really wanted to get this feature right from the beginning and make sure it was purpose-built for the search marketer in mind,” says Richard Parra, Skai’s Product Growth Manager. “We started by speaking to a lot of our key clients to learn more about auditing and which features they might want Skai Audit to automate. Then we issued a client survey within our platform which over 500 answered! From this data, we were able to learn which auditing tasks were most desired and have prioritized the roadmap accordingly.”

Currently, Skai Audit can be used to track the following settings:

• Your preferred ad delivery (Accelerated or Standard)
• What you want to target (mobile/desktop/tablet/geographical locations)
• Your optimization preference  (these campaigns should be in a Skai Optimization Portfolio)
• Your preferred tracking level (checks to makes sure the selected campaigns/ad groups/keywords are being tracked by Skai)

This is just the beginning. There are many, many more auditing tasks planned over time for Skai Audit.

How does it work?

Skai clients start by choosing which rules they wish to audit.

Skai Audit is set to run every night but eventually will run on-demand at any time of the day.

Once Skai Audit runs, a report is generated that not only delivers a high-level view of how all of the selected campaigns are complying to the auditing rules, but also offers one-click transportation to the Skai main analysis grid with the out-of-compliant elements already filtered. This means that Skai clients can quickly address any of the auditing issues without having to hunt through their accounts.

This simple and easy workflow enables search marketers to both monitor their SEM accounts and make changes in minutes. This saves literally dozens of hours of audit time, but even more valuable, ensures that accounts are set up correctly so that they have the best opportunity to be successful.

What’s next for Skai Audit?

So far, the client adoption and feedback on the first release of Skai Audit has been fantastic and there are still so many more auditing tasks that search marketers would love to add that the ceiling on this feature is sky-high.

“Because we really did our homework with this one, we feel really good about the next set of functionality planned for this feature,” says Parra. “We have a really big update coming out soon that I know our clients will really love.”

Over time, Skai Search clients will be able to automate many more of the common things that they do manually already or—because it simply takes too much time—not at all. Auditing is not something natively offered today by the search engine platforms so it’s just another example of how Skai is helping paid search marketers pass time-consuming, repetitive tasks to their tools to free them up for the really valuable and creative thinking that is best done by humans.

That’s the Skai way!

Interested in seeing Skai Audit in action?

Skai Search clients can already access the first round of Skai Audit functionality within the platform. If you have questions, please reach out to your Skai rep.

For those of you who are not yet Skai Search clients, please contact us or schedule a quick and easy demo to learn more about Skai Audit and the rest of our suite of paid search tools. This marketing automation feature is particularly useful for our Agency and Local clients that need to scale across thousands of campaigns.

Learn More About Skai Search