The 10 Most Common Ways to Waste a Lot of Money on PPC
September 30th, 2008 by Joy BrazelleOver the past few years working with many clients to understand how effective their pay-per-click campaigns are (and often figure out how to get them to perform better), I have compiled my top 10 list of ways that many marketers blow their budgets on PPC.
1. Ignoring Match Type Options – When you just purchase key phrases, without applying any match type, you inherit the ‘broad match’ settings which means that your ad shows up on the results page when any of the words in the phrase are searched on.
This has the two-pronged negative effect of either driving unqualified clicks or driving down your CTR which in turn drives up your CPC.
2. Ignoring Landing Pages – Many marketers feel that creating custom landing pages is just too much work. Instead they send all pay-per-click traffic to their home page. This is tremendously frustrating to those visitors who arrive at your site after just searching on specific words on the search engine. They now have to begin their search again to find what they are looking for on your site. You will see that many leave your site immediately, unwilling to search again.
3. Not Implementing Conversion Tracking Code – I am still amazed at the amount of companies who just won’t add conversion tracking code to their thank you page (the code provided by the search engines or provided by your analytics package). Without this information, you can pretty much guarantee that you are throwing away a large percentage of your pay-per-click budget.
4. Bidding Too Little for Keywords – This may sound strange, but if you don’t pay enough for a keyword you will find yourself at best ‘beneath the fold’ (which is disappointing because many people don’t ever scroll down) or worse, on page 2 or 20 of the results. This is just one more way of driving up your cost per click by driving down your CTR.
5. Using the ‘Set it and Forget it’ Mentality – This may be my biggest pet peeve. Managing successful pay-per-click campaigns is not a one-time task.
Effective marketers pay attention (analyze, modify and improve) campaigns often. Campaigns that are dormant, throw money away uselessly by continuing to spend money on keywords or ads that don’t work and don’t optimize spending on what works best.
6. Ignoring Negative Keywords – Unless your offering is free, thinking about applying negative keywords to your campaign is probably a good idea.
I could be wrong, but the last time I checked Omniture was not a free analytic solution.
7. Ignoring Ad Scheduling – Although it takes a little more work to analyze your campaigns and determine when the conversions are happening, it is well worth it. Armed with the knowledge that your conversions take place Monday – Wednesday between 9 am – 4pm, allows you to modify your campaign so you spend more of your budget when the traffic that you want to attract is online (and pay less for traffic that does not convert).
8. Not Breaking Out Content Targeted Traffic – Okay, I was wrong earlier, this is actually my biggest pet peeve. Unless you create a separate campaign with separate, unique destination URLs for the Content Targeted traffic, it is very difficult (even impossible depending on what analytics package you are using)
to differentiate the search/search network traffic from the content targeted traffic. And, even though you can pay less for the content targeted traffic without breaking it out into its own campaign, you still should take the time to break it out into its own campaign. Because, what you may find is that the traffic may not be as qualified in terms of conversions (sales), but it may generate good leads that just need additional remarketing to eventually convert. (And, you may find data that leads you to create specific Site Targeted campaigns that really perform great).
9. Ignoring Click-Fraud or Invalid Clicks – I know that researching to determine click fraud can be time consuming, and arguing with the search engines can be frustrating and potentially even a dead-end. I am not saying that you should spend all of your time or focus on this, but I do think it is worth paying a
little attention. ClicKTracks has a great Click Fraud report. But, you must know when it is potentially click fraud versus just a poorly performing ad.
10. Ignoring the Quality Score – The quality score is definitely a moving target and it recently has changed again. But, if you understand your quality scores by simply improving your ad or your landing page (or weeding out non-performing keywords), you can dramatically lower your cost per click. And, if you do this across the board for all of your OK or Poor quality keywords, the savings can make a huge difference.
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Great post, Joy.
Your fourth item – bidding Too Little for Keywords – is interesting. Totally counterintuitive, but makes sense when you think about how search engines determine cost per click. Thanks for pointing it out.
Another way to spend too much money on paid search is to have a globally targeted ad rather than a geo targeted ad specific to your intended market. It’s impressive how specific the search engines can target search ads and marketers can use that to their advantage. In fact, the failure to geo target can sometimes look like click fraud in extreme cases. The ClickTracks Click Fraud report (actually, ClickTracks is now part of Lyris HQ) actually lists information for every click associated with a paid search ad so you can see what areas are driving the traffic.
Hey,
Ad Director Solves a lot of these issues.
http://www.webtrends.com/Products/WebTrendsAdDirector.aspx