ppc

Search marketing neglect happens due to many but the majority are from two ways. 1) Campaign is to big for resources, 2) Lack of PPC knowledge.  No matter what skill level you are or how much resources you have invested in your search marketing you can always optimize your PPC campaigns.  Let me talk to you about some of the easy mistakes that happen that make your money fly out into the paid search networks hands.

1. Bad Tracking: Garbage in / garbage out!  Yes, the pre canned reports that the networks have are good and give you enough information to confuse you but are you tracking return on ad spend (ROAS) and life time value (LTV) profiles?. You should be because without those metrics as a base to your budget your going to hurt and not even know it.
2. Google Content Network Running: If you have read my blog at all you know I am not a big fan of the content networks but I am open to test and that is exactly what you should be doing with this contextual advertising.  
3. Match types: Exact match is great establishing your campaigns, solidifying your Quality Scores, and getting highly relevant traffic and leads. high and therefore being able to afford high positions less expensively. However, you still need some phrase and broad match listings to catch the searches that the exact match listings will miss. Often one can learn from the broad match listings the keywords that deserve their own ad groups.
4. Keyword research: You can not stop your keyword research because terms come and go and what is “hot” today might not be for another few years or gone after the trend. Think of the term “silly bands”, you know those dumb rubber bands that you kids drive you nuts over?  Where was that terms 6-12 months ago? If your a retail site you should have jumped all over that term and business.Keyword research never stops. While there’s a point of diminishing marginal returns on adding additional exact match keywords to a campaign, most businesses change over time and seasonal businesses or ones where products are constantly being added to the site require even more vigilance.
5. Proper ad group structure with ad testing: This one is a killer.  It makes me cringe to see ad groups bloated with hundreds of keywords within them with 1-2 ads as it drags the entire ad group Quality Score down which in turn brings down the entire account Quality Score. Google is the benchmark for your ad campaign structure so do yourself a favor an keep your ad groups laser sharp with only keyword terms similar to the ad group, limit the size of of your ad group keywords to no more that 25 phrases per ad group and keep the ad text highly targeted and test those ads. The problem with a bloated ad group is that the keyword phrases look similar in meaning and often the ad copy no longer includes the optimal phrases that were searched on. Search scent is strong, and searchers look for ads that are an obvious match. Ad testing is crucial, if not vital, to increasing your Quality Score as the most important factor in Quality Score is CTR and you can’t increase that unless you your testing ads.
6. Managing your bids at the ad  group level: Yes, each keyword phrase is in its own auction, and bidding decisions should therefore be made on a keyword based level. Google will default you to the ad group level but who says what Google does is always right.
7. Landing page testing from an ad group/keyword level: Companies are proud that they are bidding on keywords and they will tell you around how many they are bidding on. “Yeah, we manage around 20,000 keywords”. Then I ask them how many landing pages do you use? “A few”, they say.  There is no excuse not to be  doing some sort of landing page optimization now with free tools like Google Website Optimizer.  If you are not performing conversion path optimization (keyword to ad text, to landing page) you throwing many of your marketing dollars away.
8. Bidding on your name or company name: Your ranked #1 in the natural search for your name or comany name so why pay for it?  It will help your natual click through and you will have highly targeted paid traffic that will convert at a high ROI.
9. Letting the search engines decide: The tools that the search engines provide are nice and work well but they are there for emergency purposes and for the masses that are just dipping their toe into the paid search world. Use them carefully on the bidding side as spearing as possible.

Tagged as: ad groups, content networks, landing page, life time value, match type, paid search marketing, ppc, quality score

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