Efficient PPC Management Part II - Google Adwords Troubleshooting

This is probably slightly out of position as the second part of the ‘Effective PPC Management’ series, however I would suggest most people reading this probably are more concerned with getting to the bottom of Paid Search management issues, and as such it seems appropriate to include this earlier.

Google Adwords is one of the primary reasons, Google is the behemoth that it is today. Adwords is designed to make Google money, and it certainly does that, over and over and over again. For this reason, it is imperative that your campaigns are carefully managed, constantly optimised and refined. If you don’t understand the system, it is very easy to get burned.

1) Know your networks

The number of times I have gone into a campaign, and seen huge volumes of impressions, and clicks, and very little ROI from campaigns which have the content network included is phenomenal. Whilst utilising the content network isn’t bad, many people do this without careful analysis of the potential audience, and without careful thought to budgets, and by the end of the month, have a very big bill, with very little ROI. I will use a local solicitors we were helping recently, on a campaign supposedly set up by a PPC expert - however careful analysis showed that despite some good keyword research - many of the fine tuning of the campaign had been forgotten. For example

• Content network activated on loosely related generic phrases. i personally have used Content Network, where a niche exists. Content network basically displays ads on sites which have related content (and who are part of Googles publisher network - Adsense), however this relationship is determined by Google rather than you personally and as such, the link can be somewhat ropey to say the least. The more generic the phrase therefore and the more competitive the industry, the less inclined I would be to use the Content Network - particularly if budget is an issue.
• Content bids are the same as Search bids. Browsers entering as a direct result of search network activity are often more ‘qualified’ than content network browsers and as such are generally (not always) more likely to convert. Therefore I would suggest if you are going to use the Content Network - pay careful attention to your content bids. Careful management of this aspect of the campaign can save you a lot of money

2) Keyword matching
By default, Google defaults keywords to broadmatch. Leaving your phrases broadmatched will lose you a lot of money, again particularly if you are working within a competitive sector such as debt, insurance or real estate.

Careful consideration should be given to your choice of keywords, and I would suggest research should play an important part of your Paid Search campaign. If you check the phrases your ads are being shown for on many of your broadmatched terms, you will find Google is really pushing the ’semantic envelope’ on some of them.

For this reason, I would suggest looking at the following:

• Negative keywords - Some thorough analysis of your analytics will often highlight a number of terms which provide traffic, but often result in high bounce rates and very low conversion rates. Many of these terms can be ‘removed’ without adversely affecting the scope of visibility of the phrase itself
• More targeted matching - Rather than broadmatching, there are other matching options available that will give you far greater control over what terms your ads display for. These include ‘phrase match’, ‘exact match’ and the afore mentioned ‘negative match’. Strategic use of these matching options will often result in significant improvements to your ROI.

3) Impressions

High numbers of impressions are not necessarily a good thing. High impressions and Low CTR (click through rate), can often be indicative of issues elsewhere in your campaign, such as your Ad-creative or the like.

However more pressingly though, high impressions and low CTR damages your quality score, which results in you having to pay more for every click.
4) Multiple campaigns

I have seen a number of ‘campaigns’ where multiple clients are managed under one account, or hundreds of diverse adgroups are run from one centralised campaign. Don’t be afraid to split the account into multiple campaigns (broken down by theme, budget allocation etc).

Doing this not only allows for easier management of your campaign, but also will allow:

• Greater control over where your budget is spent - Rather than allocate 100% of your budget to one campaign, allocation can be split over multiple Adwords campaigns providing better scalability, and focus, particularly where a good ROI has been established.
• This will also allow you to get a clearer idea of where volume is, either in terms of impressions or clicks. From an ease of management perspective, this will allow you to analyse and fix any potential bottlenecks that exist

5) Analyse your keywords

Don’t just monitor your campaigns at campaign/ad group level. Delve deeper - get your fingers dirty, and analyse the campaign at its root. Looking at ROI and conversion rates at keyword/phrase level can often uncover some gems, often missed during the campaign setup, which given some time, and attention can result in significant improvements to your Adwords ROI.

This is possibly one of the most important parts of the optimisation process. Careful analyse of your keywords not only uncover the gems, but also the snakes, which as mentioned above can often be the difference between successful PPC management and failure.

6) Targeted Adgroups

We covered this to a certain degree in part 1 of the Effective Pay-per-click management series, however this is one that can really pay dividends. The more targeted your ad groups, the more targeted your creative can be. Reinforcing the points made from point 4 - having relevant ads will often result in a higher CTR (due to the relevancy of the ads vs the searched query thus a lower minimum bid), which therefore means you pay a much lower cost per click.

7) Landing Pages

We discussed the effects a well structured and optimised landing page can have in the first part of ‘Effective PPC Management’, however again it is worth highlighting the benefits of focusing significant time and effort on getting these right. Thorough analysis of user behaviour on your landing pages is paramount to establishing how your users browse and convert and thus capturing the best way of converting ‘wannabe’ customers into ‘confirmed’ customers
Adwords is not easy - many of the biggest (notice I didnt say best ) companies out there such as Latitude, Starcom and the like have years of experience behind them - however I would suggest it is the process of doing the above well that determines the success of many of their campaigns.

Add comment October 23rd, 2007