Yesterday, I introduced you to Matt DeYoung, and he weighed in on the SEO vs. PPC debate. Matt also talked about how small businesses need to closely examine why prospective customers would buy their product/service before setting up their pay per click campaign.
In today’s installment, I ask Matt what common mistakes are being made by small businesses that set up their own pay per click campaigns.
When you’ve audited campaigns that small businesses set up themselves, what are the most common mistakes that they make?
I see 6 common mistakes when I review pay-per-click campaigns:
- Trying to manage too many keywords. Once upon a time you could get cheap, converting traffic by bidding on lots of keywords. That simply doesn’t work anymore. You have to be more focused now because Google values quality over quantity more than ever. Bidding on too many keywords usually leads to a huge, bank-breaking invoice from Google. You’re better off picking keywords that match your product or service exactly. If you pick keywords that help meet your customers where they’re at in the sales process‚ learning, researching, deciding, etc.‚ and mapping that to the right entry point of your website (i.e. landing page). Google will even give you a discount on your cost-per-click for this effort.
- Poor organization of campaigns and ad groups. I still see business owners lumping 15 or more keywords into a single Ad Group. This is a horrible technique most of the time for one reason: It makes financial and performance controls almost impossible. You‚’ll get a few high traffic keywords, or poor performers that muddy up the works. There are instances where an Ad Group has a few great performing keywords. But then the 10 other words are just holding them back from their full sales-generation potential.
- Picking the wrong keywords. Usually business owners conduct keyword research by trying to find keywords that basically describe their business, but that’s a well-intentioned waste of time. It’s too broad an effort. You have to be more specific. If you use keywords that don’t match your website page, you’ll end up paying the “idiot tax.” Google’s happy to take your money‚ and charge you a premium‚ when you bid on PPC the wrong keywords.Keywords can be defined as “wrong” for 2 reasons. Either they keywords are too general to predict anything about what the customer is looking for, or they simply don’t align with the service offer.
- Picking the wrong landing pages. I think the value of landing pages is grossly overlooked. Even I overlooked their value for a long time. I’ll admit that was the single most costly Internet marketing mistake I ever made.One of the best ways to waste money is sending PPC traffic to the wrong landing page. Even if your landing pages are bad, but keyword-specific, you’ll still see more sales than if you use the wrong landing page.
- Not knowing what to improve. The number one reason business owners come to me for advice is not really knowing what to do after setting up a PPC campaign. PPC optimization is a “black box” for most small business owners I think. The question is “Where do I start?” What usually happens is there are too many clicks that don’t convert. Or hundreds of keywords get a few clicks but no sales. It starts to get as overwhelming as doing your own taxes. You start to think “what does any of this even mean?” The issue for most businesses is understanding each metric individually, but not understanding how all the PPC results lead to the next optimization step.
- Not deleting the unproductive keywords. Why hang on to a PPC keyword that’s not profitable? You wouldn’t hang on to an employee who under-performs or helps you loose money — fire them. Do the same with keywords. Fire the keywords that aren’t performing. If a keyword is converting, but the cost-per-conversion is to high, optimize. Look at your biggest costs per campaign per month. Get rid of the ones that aren’t working fast. You’ll have more cash to promote the ones that are doing well.
On Monday, I’ll share the final part of my interview with pay per click expert Matt DeYoung. We’ll talk about landing pages, pay per click tools, the rising cost of pay per click marketing and alternatives to Google Adwords.
February 15th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
Soeren Sprogoe says:
Very, VERY wise advice!
Re. #6, I usually don’t “fire” those too expensive keywords. But rather “park” them either in a campaign with a low budget, or on an adgroup with a very low keyword bid.
That way I don’t forget that they are expensive, and I don’t loose the data on them if I ever suddenly need to buy some more expensive traffic for a campaign.
Not sure if it is a wise way to do it though
February 15th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Rick Whittington says:
Soeren,
I typically don’t delete keywords or ads — rather, I pause them so I can maintain that data and remember why they are not working or too expensive. I also keep a log book of actions I make and when I make them so I can remember.
March 13th, 2009 at 9:44 am
Matt says:
Another point about pausing vs. deleting is Google bases your quality score on both your ad performance and your account performance. That means account history can be important to maintain. It also means account level history can work against us if we’re not careful. I don’t think many advertisers know/think about this element.