There’s a big temptation that PPC managers need to stay away from, especially when first building an account. The temptation is assumption. (And yes, we all know what happens when….) If you assume, you can waste a lot of time building out a campaign that you will just have to spend MORE time fixing later.
If you have a PPC account, as you read this you are paying for wasted clicks. Visitors that aren’t really interested in what you offer are coming to your website and you’re paying for them. Isn’t that frustrating to know? The bad news is that the nature of PPC won’t enable you to ever totally eliminate this from happening.
What’s the best keyword research tool out there? Google’s? WordTracker? Keyword Discovery? Actually, none of them. The best keyword research tool is a broad match keyword in a PPC account.
Analytics tools have left us swimming in data about company websites and if you’re not careful, you can waste a lot of time analyzing it and end up not very far from where you started. This is because this data tells us what happened, but it leaves out the most important information. Why it happened.
If you don’t have data to back up why something is happening, the door is left open to opinions; and the one who wins isn’t necessarily the right one, but usually the highest paid one. This can cost lots of money. No matter how you slice and dice the data, you can’t answer the why question yourself without imparting your own biases into the answers.
Have you ever gone into your PPC account, found a keyword that isn’t showing conversion numbers that are up to par and then make the decision to delete it? If so, you may have cost yourself some business because of what is called “conversion attribution.”
What determines if your PPC visitors stay and engage with your website?
Well, if there’s one thing we know about humans, its that they love to be comfortable. Ironically, we spend a lot of time, money and energy trying to make sure that’s the case. That’s why immediately after my wife got her dream home, she started talking about more vacations. And it’s why 11 am on Sunday morning is the most segregated time of the week.
One of the most important things you can do to get all that you can out of your PPC campaigns is to practice granular ad group organization. This does not mean you leave out 1-2 word phrases because we know they carry a lot of needed volume and conversions. So, what do we do with them? Put them in their own campaigns where you can better control them. Then, pull 3-word phrases that perform well enough to have their own ad groups and create them as you optimize your account.
A good metric will answer business questions and supply you with actionable ideas that recommend you at least experiment with doing more or less of something.
If you are spending your whole PPC budget on what works, you are falling behind. Almost every author or speaker on the subject will tell you that as soon as they are ready to publish their book or deliver their presentation, the information has changed. This industry, like most of the world, is moving fast.
If it is an appropriate time of the day for your ads to show, you never want them to be shut off because your account has hit its budget. If this is happening, you are not spending your money as wisely as you could be.
PPC account management isn’t something you just want to dive into head first and hope for the best, just like you don’t want to sit down at a poker table with professionals and hope for the best. In both cases, you can do OK as an amateur, but you may come to realize that you are either slowly losing money or not maximizing the chance you have to make it.
PPC visitors pretty much tell you where they’re at in the shopping funnel by what they type into the search box. If they type in a general phrase like “refrigerators,” they most likely don’t know what brand, size, or color they are looking for. They are looking for answers to these questions. Therefore, your ad and landing page should be like the Lowe’s guy and have all the information they need.
A common mistake I seen made when reviewing PPC campaigns is the failure to match keywords with their correct landing pages. Why does this happen? Probably because people are taught that their ad groups need to contain keywords that have similar words in them. What? Isn’t that right? Well…yes…and no.
It is true to an extent; but only to the extent that each of the keywords that you are grouping as similar should be landing on the same landing page. Ad groups should be organized not only for keywords, but also for landing pages.
when organizing your ad groups, ask the following two questions of your keywords:
1. Are the people using all of these search queries looking for exactly the same thing?
2. Should all of the people searching on these terms land on the same landing page? Or is there a better option available?