by Preparing a spotless PPC campaign is a daunting task.
It takes time, effort and patience in making a campaign that does not carry any mistake.
Many successful PPC managers often fail to pull some campaigns they fail to recognize warning signs in a campaign.
Sometimes manager’s ego also plays an active role to aggravate the situation.
These warning signs are enough to destroy your budget even before you understand them.
Addressing each problem would result in giving you up to 70% revenue or savings every month.
Below is a list of warning signs that should be addressed at earliest to save your campaign and money.
1. Your Adwords Account is not Linked with Google Analytics
When you are linking your Adwords account with the Google Analytics, you are actually opening numerous different windows to check your Adwords account activities.
Analytics lets you know how each and every metric is performing in its own sphere to cumulatively give best results for your ad. Therefore, your AdWords agency must use analytic to gauge the position of traffic and how well it is converting.
It is true that not all campaign hit the right chord. Analytics provides the opportunity to take note of the situations like-
- Is your website performing well?
- Whats bounce rate and Avg time of your website?
- Is the checkout broken?
You or your PPC agency should find the answer to these questions in order to improve performance. Analytics provides the opportunity to look deep inside the account and understand its structure and nature.
It also allows you to understand which services and products are working well so that you can focus your budget there. Similarly, you can put aside budget from areas which not performing as they were expected.
Analytics can tell you in which device your ad is doing well. For example, if your website is converting well into sales in mobiles than desktops then you can do bid adjustment on these devices. It will trigger higher ratio of traffic in these devices.
[bctt tweet=”Do not forget to attach Google Analytics with your AdWords account.” username=”adstriangle”]
2. Poor Lead Quality
Your website is attracting poor quality leads; this situation is an indication of a selection of the wrong keyword. You need to closely monitor your keywords.
This situation is a classic case of keyword mismatch resulted from not considering user intent. You have failed to gauge what your potential customer thinks while searching on the web.
Such processes yield bad quality leads and poor conversion rate including less revenue generation. User intent depends on several factors, such as the specific phase of buying circle and pricing sensitivity.
Change of keywords and concentrating more on ad copy reduces the gap between what you offer and what your user is looking for. It decreases the influx of bad leads to your website.
After this change, if the traffic volume goes down, the number of qualified leads will be up. The visitors arriving in your landing page will be more intended to convert than bouncing back.
[bctt tweet=”It is better to have little amount of qualified leads than plenty of low-quality leads.” username=”adstriangle”]
3. Awful Conversion Rate in PPC
Lack of harmony between your landing pages, website design, and navigation with conversion rate comes out prominent when clicks do not convert into sales anymore.
The mismatch between your ad copy and landing page content creates a big gap between what visitor is looking for and what he gets. AdWords quality score and cost-per-click rate get hard hit when message mismatch takes place.
Suppose, you sell an Indian delicacy called ‘Tandoori’ items. But you actually sell vegetable ‘Tandoori’ items but mostly Tandoori items are non-veg.
So most of the non-veg eater visitors would arrive in your website seeing a misguided message and soon churn.
Again, do not bring a person to your website who is looking for ‘Black suit for men’ while you sell ‘black suit for women’.
The other factors that a bad conversion rate indicates are poor website navigation along with website design that is not up to the mark. Redirect visitors to the page where they will get all the information they were actually looking for.
The absence of strong ‘Call to Action’ will cost you losing definite sales. Elements like clear and comprehensive product image and a competitive pricing keep you floating in the market.
Hassel freeways of contacting a service provider and easy return policy give any company an edge over its competitors.
However, Conversion does not always mean the sale. If your target is getting as much as possible ‘sign up’ from visitors then that is your conversion. Conversion rate being the ultimate goal indicates disarray various metrics in a campaign.
[bctt tweet=”Reach to the customer who is actually looking for you with strong CTA. ” username=”adstriangle”]
4. You Are Confined to Only Text Ads
If your ad agency has confined your ad on to text ads then that is surely a warning sign. Text ads are the small parts of entire AdWords extravaganza.
The other things within AdWords campaign which your agency should look for are Google shopping, RLSA, Gmail advertising, Re-marketing and Dynamic Remarketing.
These AdWords products are technically complex in nature and should enter your advertising domain along with text ads. With time you should not stick to Text Ads which cover a comparatively small area of the arena is a simple ad version.
On the other hand, Dynamic Remarketing is a complex thing and you need to involve a coder to take some input from him.
Hence, you should include these products in the long run and your agency should have an in-house expert to implement these tasks. These elements will put you steps ahead of your competitor.
5. Not Monitoring Billing
Keeping control over billing becomes significant if you have hired or intend to hire a PPC agency. In AdWords at every step, keeping details of your billing is necessary.
It is a crucial area of your PPC practice. As an advertiser, you should set up AdWords account with Google even if you do not handle your AdWords activities yourself.
It is the place where all your billings are managed. Every day, week and month you spend hard earned bucks on advertising. Here you can take decisions about how much and where you need to shift
As an AdWords advertiser if you do not have any control over your spending then it is a clear warning sign.
The reasons behind are quite powerful. Let’s have a look-
Every month you spend a certain amount in the AdWords and from the account, you can see exactly how much you have spent.
If an agency is doing this job for you then they bill a percentage of that to spend every month. So, the bill stands as the evidence of money spent and work completed each month.
At any point, you may decide to switch to a different agency. In that situation, your AdWords account holds all the historical data of your account.
All the records of the conversion rate, click-through rate, keyword performance and costs are invaluable. It will help you to collate data for future account analysis and decision makings.
When campaigns, adverts, and ad groups run for a long time they build authority with Google. It puts a considerable impact on how highly your adverts appear and the how much you pay-per-click.
If somehow you lose your account history, it may take months to regain that authority.
If your agency is creating the account in their name then you are actually draining all your investment in the trash. The agency is actually not doing any help to you.
If you change agency at any point then you will lose all your valuable account related data. The new agency will not have past data to collate account performance. So stop such initiative from your agency at any cost.
Many agencies may use MCC (my client center). MCC is a central dashboard that allows agencies to manage client’s accounts. They can use it until their contract permits them. Here, client’s data is their own property.
Never pay the full advertisement money to the agency, pay it to Google via your AdWords account. Only pay the due management fee to the agency.
[bctt tweet=”Do not lose invaluable account history while switching PPC agency.” username=”adstriangle”]
6. Your Ads are not Updated with Time
The campaigns run in AdWords must go through update after a certain interval.
Google takes note of the fact that how often your ads are going through a change. In Google AdWords, there is an interface that lists the changes carried out in the campaign recently.
If you are paying a big sum to the PPC manager to manage your account then have the right to see regular updates in your campaigns.
Updating is a crucial factor. Your manager must do testing of ads to see which ads are working well. If you see it from the customer’s viewpoint then they feel tired to the same ad again and again.
It monotony forces them to explore your competitors’ ads. So, not updating campaigns affects the response to your ads negatively.
In big campaigns, you can use several optimizations in terms of aspects like targeting, cost and creating more small ad groups.
In short, regular updating of campaigns is necessary but that change must accompany optimization at different levels. These changes can only be included by testing ads from different angles for different needs.
[bctt tweet=”Updating, as well as testing of Ads, is necessary. ” username=”adstriangle”]
7. Your Account is Messed Up
Of all warning signs, disorganized or a messed up account tops the chart. The majority of PPC account managers struggle with AdWords clutter.
Identifying these clusters in a PPC account is a vital step toward its cure. Read following points to know about them-
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Excessive Keywords
Take a close look, if your Ad groups are stuffed with more than 30 keywords. If yes then your campaign is facing serious relevancy issue.
Examine your data in detail, you will find that not all keywords are supporting your ad in attracting traffic.
Most of them are lying ineffective. Your primary responsibility is, your ad copy should match with your keywords.
Furthermore, when the keyword list becomes lengthy the chances of their getting properly matched gets reduced. This disorder makes pay-per-click ineffective.
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Irrelevant Grouping of Ads
This situation gives rise to another type of irrelevancy that goes hand in hand with keyword overstuffing. The foundation pillars of an ad campaign lie in the ad groups.
They must be knitted well in line with the main theme. When different ad groups are not created keeping the central theme in mind and do not follow the keyword’s semantics, things become chaotic.
It results in an utter mismatch of ad copy and landing page. The relevancy of the campaign receives the hard hit and garners poor leads and low conversion rate.
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Large numbers of an Ad campaign and /or Ad Groups
Are you a retailer who has the market share all over the world. If not then stop running thousands of Ad groups and ad campaigns.
You really do not need so much of them. It unnecessarily stretches your budget far. Most of the Ad groups do not even generate fruitful traffic, impression, and revenue.
These junks clutter the entire thing and should be removed as soon as possible.
[bctt tweet=”Take cognizance of irrelevancy at different levels of your campaign.” username=”adstriangle”]
8. Low Click-through-Rate
According to PPC Hero, you need average 2% click-through-rate in search network. Meaning that for every 100 impressions you must receive 2 clicks.
Moreover, when your campaign receives poor click through rate it indicates some warning signs that together bring about this situation.
Poor click through rate actually increases your advert budget. CTR directly affects your account’s quality score which is instrumental in reducing advertising cost in Google.
Low CTR indicates poor ad position. When your ads fail to remain in the top ad position for a considerable amount of time, CTR gets affected.
Most visitors click on the ads which appear in the top positions. To improve on this situation you have to-
- Boost cost-per-click
- Improve Keyword quality score
Your ad should be relevant to what you actually sell. Relevancy of landing page plays a significant role in deciding CTR. CTR partly works behind deciding CTR.
CTR and quality score have a direct relation. Along with landing page avoiding the use of Ad Extensions also puts quite an impact.
9. Irrelevant Landing Page
When a landing page becomes eligible to show, Google immediately crawls to evaluate its relevancy.
If Google deems the landing page as irrelevant then like a chain reaction CTR, quality score decreases and CPC increases. Landing Page’s irrelevancy inflates ad spend.
Poor landing page not just puts your CTR down but also downs your quality score. When a visitor is redirected to a landing page, its content should cater the query of the visitor.
Keep the following things in mind to make your landing page potent-
- The landing page should load quickly. Slow loading of a page affects quality score.
- If the landing page is your destination page then make its keywords and ad copy as much relevant as possible.
- Send visitors to the most relevant page of the website and avoid home page.
- Make sure it contains your keywords else it would have a serious impact on the quality score.
- Not having a comprehensive privacy policy and details of the cookies used on the site is a breach of Google’s guidelines.
10. Optimizing Social Media, SEO and Content Once in a Quarter
Social media, SEO and Content Marketing, these three pillars require updating on a regular basis. A weekly updating is preferable. Most marketers learn this aspect after losing their valuable bucks in PPC.
Do not try to do the hat of a social media and SEO expert and content manager’s hat together. By doing that you will corner your account and make it suffer.
Agencies which promise to give your all square service check their employee strength and past record to know if they really can pull off the job efficiently.
Give at least 20 mins per week assigned to AdWords.
[bctt tweet=”Do not juggle multiple responsibilities if don’t know how to do it efficiently at regular intervals.” username=”adstriangle”]
11. Spending High but Conversations are not Growing
Although many marketers experience this situation and tag spending in AdWords useless. There is common saying that spending in AdWords is similar throwing to money in the black hole.
Your company is not registering expecting ROI and you start thinking that AdWords is not suitable for your business. Well, this way most marketers think and it’s wrong.
Before declaring futility of AdWords please delve deep and avoid following things if you are practicing-
- You are displaying your ads in both search and display network
- Using only broad match and not using negative keywords
- Your ads are not shown in their respective peak hours
- Not using conversion tracking tools or any other mechanism to track conversion.
12. Do You Rely on Optimization Tips from Google?
Relying on the tips and suggestions and tips of Google is not always a good idea. Most PPC experts advice to not follow Google’s suggestions.
Most PPC experts advice to not follow Google’s suggestions.
Google is one of the most prominent profit making company of the world, is here only to do business with and make revenue. Keep this fact in mind.
Google wants your ads to receive most clicks as with every click Google earns millions. So, it gives you suggestion in a way which ensures that your ads receive more clicks.
In the journey, you will exhaust your budget. There are other multifarious options to choose apart from taking Google’s advice. So, take their advice with a pinch of salt.
[bctt tweet=”Take Google’s suggestion and tips as little as you can. ” username=”adstriangle”]
Summary
While using AdWords, most marketers fail to gauge the warning sign in their campaigns. This cascades in the low-quality score, conversion rate and low or zero revenue.
Hence, each warning sign discussed here imparts a vital effect in any AdWords campaign. Resolving these problems requires time and patience.