Stop The PPC Blood Loss

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Is Your PPC advertising bleeding cash? Here are three plasters to stem the bleeding!

Even if you have an enormous budget for PPC campaigns, losing money due to negligence is just plain silly. If you happen to be a small business with less than substantial marketing budget, losing money is simply not an option so how can we stop this gaping wound before we bleed ourselves to death?

Here are three biggest, yet pretty obvious mistakes everyone makes at one point or another and quick ways to fix them.

1.     Set it all on broad match and they will come.

One thing springs to mind, when I think of setting up way to many and too generic phrases to broad-match. Some time ago, when a Dutch girl posted a video invitation to her 16th birthday party on Facebook and forgot to make it private. 4000 people showed up in a small town, which has a population of 18,000.  Police had to intervene.

There is no PPC police yet, so if you find yourself open to a broad match error and due to not to setting your campaign up properly, you will find yourself paying a significant PPC bill for the marketing party you didn’t actually benefit from.

One of our clients sells chocolates online. The final straw, before outsourcing his PPC management to Targeted Media was his chocolate story.  He once had an idea of putting “chocolate” on broad match, to increase traffic to his site. The plan wasn’t thought through thoroughly. He started ranking for .. Chocolate Labradors. A lot of people were disappointed to find out the only thing that comes in chocolate color on his website were the calorie filled bars.

Ironically even though they were looking for brown dogs, they still clicked his advert that clearly promoted chocolates but when they arrived on site they didn’t convert at all.

Remember: setting too many (or worse: all) keywords to broad match can have a devastating impact on your PPC account. It will downgrade your rating since you are not necessarily aiming for your target market (especially if you sell something very generic, like books, and set “books” on broad match).

Setting a keyword to a broad match type opens the door for Google to show your ad anytime anyone searches for anything that contains your keyword – or more importantly/worryingly anything that Google feel is relevant to your keyword!!.  So don’t open the door to unwanted guests. Your Google Adwords account is the equivalent of your online marketing house. The best parties are the ones you can control without getting the police involved.

 How not to get it out of hand?

Broad match is not all evil, and it’s great when used sporadically (just like good parties ;)

It’s beneficial to conduct keyword research, and expand your audience, but to avoid going bankrupt:

-        Bid lower for broad match terms – this is not a laser sharp, targeted traffic, so don’t pay a premium for it.

-        Keep a close eye on your search query reports to identify new keywords (add them as modified broad match, phrase or exact in new more targeted AdGroups) and any negative keywords that you might have missed, use those negatives to refine your broad, modified broad and phrase match AdGroups/Campaigns!

-        Ideally place in a broad match campaign so that you can control the spend more effectively and also stop broad match keywords ‘stealing’ budget from your more targeted AdGroups.

-        Set a conservative budget for your broad match campaigns so that they can’t spend more than you are willing.

 

2. Negative Keywords are the icing on the cake.

One in five small businesses do not use a single negative keyword. Using negative keywords is a no brainer to people who use it, and a distraction for people who never thought about them. It’s not hard, it’s not complex. Don’t be lazy! increase the number of negative keywords to reduce unecessary AdWords spend. Seriously. Do it.

The best performing PPC accounts are the ones that bring relevant traffic, so if you see your search queries repeatedly brings tons of irrelevant traffic that doesn’t get monetized, add those search terms to your negative keywords.

You can generally predict the most common negative keywords for your business. If you are selling furniture, but do not make it to measure, use “custom made” and “handmade” as your negatives. If you are selling brand new cars only, set “used” or “secondhand” as a negative keyword. If you are running a professional cleaning business but do not offer maid service for private clients, add “maid” to the list of your negative keywords. Selling houses, but not providing houses for rent service? “Rent” and “Rental” are ideal negative keywords.

Again: keep your eye on your search query reports to find the most common negatives for your business. Chances are, you will find some negative keywords that are good fits across multiple ad groups or campaigns so you can either put negative keywords in at Adgroup or Campaign level.

This is just the beginning. Don’t limit yourself to just one! Explore negative keywords, but like with everything: don’t go overboard.

 

3.     Adwords Express: No Thank You!

Have you ever asked a shop assistant: “Does my bum look big in this?” Did they ever say it does? Highly unlikely. This is because they are there to make money.

What do you think is going to happen if you let Google build and manage your Google Adwords account to then spend money with Google? It’s going to cost you.

If this blog post was titled: “One Piece Of Advice To Reduce Bleeding Your Adwords Budget Out”, I would say: stay away from Adwords Express. If you are not familiar with this program, it’s “Free” (I have added quotation marks here as in this case it’s a hugely over exaggerated oxymoron) account management service by yours truly the Google themselves.

If something sounds too good to be truth, it probably is and in this case it definitely is. Free account built and management doesn’t run free in nature. You are not that lucky. Adwords express campaigns tend to be poorly constructed and are subject to next to no maintenance. On top of that Google only provides “read only” access to participants. When reviewing the setup, you will most likely find keywords that are not directly relevant to your business or weak negatives, but you do not have the option to edit the campaign.

Over the years we have had the ‘privilege’ of seeing many accounts built by Google, and we have never been impressed by one yet, one client had a Google AdWords “Optimiser” build a campaign for them just to see what they would do, they agreed to run some adgroups, from it, our favourite was for the DAB Digital Radios, where choice keywords such as “Internet Radio” were located, needless to say it converted at around 3 times the cost of our existing Digital Radio AdGroup and a fraction of the volume.

If you are not sure where you are wasting money in AdWords then getting a free Adwords account health check from an experienced agency is a great place to start.

Drop us a line today for no obligation free advice on the state of your account. You can only fix the problem if you know the cause. Let us find it.

 

Shane Robinson
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