 Over the past few years of working with many clients to understand how effective their pay-per-click campaigns are (and often figuring 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 pages. This is tremendously frustrating to those visitors who arrive at your site after just searching on specific words at 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 that just won’t add conversion tracking code to their thank-you pages (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 two 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 PPC campaigns is not a one-time task. Effective marketers pay attention (analyze, modify and improve) campaigns often. With campaigns that are dormant, you throw money away uselessly by continuing to spend money on keywords or ads that don’t work and by not optimizing 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" web analytics 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, you can 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. Lyris HQ (formerly 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.
For more info, here is LyrisHQ.com's Top Ten list of articles and blogs on this topic:
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8 Tips for Organizing Your PPC Campaigns - Part 1 and Part 2
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About the Author
Joy Brazelle is director of product marketing and client services at ClearSaleing. She spends her days with her two professional passions - analytics and helping customers spend money more wisely by making informed decisions. Analytics has been her priority for over 10 years, helping clients build and grow their online presence. She has enjoyed the best of both the agency and the product worlds. Joy has also been a member of the Web Analytics Association since its launch in May 2006.
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