5 PPC Management Blunders That Will Burn Your Cash

July 19, 2010 By Todd Julien Leave a Comment

A fool and his money are soon parted. This old time Idiom has never been truer especially when it comes to poor PPC management.

1) Website not clearly defined

All the traffic in the world can’t overcome a poorly defined website. Sites that are confusing with poor navigation will lead to poor website conversion rates. Remember, that finding the winning PPC recipe takes time and effort. If possible, test different versions of your site. Sometimes a landing page will work better than a 50-page website. Regardless, be sure to synchronize your keywords, ads, and site. PPC is a science of relevancy. Matching keywords, ads, and pages improves user experience. On the other hand, failure to do this will have a negative impact on conversion rates and quality scores.

2) Failure to implement AdWords tracking and Google Analytics.

With PPC virtually every metric is measurable. Without tracking, how do you know which page, keyword, or ad is working and what’s not working? Don’t do anything with PPC unless you can track it.

3) Sending traffic to broken pages

Sending traffic to broken pages only results in wasted money. Be sure when pages are deleted the corresponding PPC elements are also taken offline. PPC accounts should always mirror the website.

4) Not evaluating the competition

Frequent competitive reviews will help keep your pulse on the competition. Using your core keywords, you can easily study your competitors messaging and website in just a few clicks. From this info you can counter and find a hook that will differentiate your company from the competition.

Keep in mind you won’t really know what is working until you test it yourself. Be sure to also study your competitor’s ad text. At any time you might be competing with 9 other advertisers on the search network. Make sure you are always testing more than 1 ad at a time with a strong call to action. You should also rotate your ads evenly. You can then determine the best messaging based upon CTR and conversion rate.

5) Allowing campaigns to run on auto pilot

You might remember that old infomercial with the catchy tag line “Set it and forget it”? PPC is not a set it and forget it. If you have this mentality you might as well throw your money into the Fire Place. I recommend evaluating your PPC campaigns every day. This will help keep your finger on the pulse of your PPC campaigns. Many PPC managers don’t review data often enough. Failure to check in on a regular basis can result in lost revenue.

The bottom line is, don’t take shortcuts when setting up your PPC account. Setting up PPC accounts the right way takes a lot of research and time. However, the amount of money you will save in the long run will make the time you spent worth it. Stop donating wasted dollars to the Search Engine Slush Fund.

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Google AdWords Adds Ad Extensions Tab

May 24, 2010 By Greg Shuey Leave a Comment

On Friday afternoon, the Google AdWords blog annouced an ad extensions tab as an option for PPC campaign managers to view on those campaigns running ad extensions.

For those who don’t know, ad extensions are features that can be added to your AdWords ads. Some of these include Ad Sitelinks, Product Extensions, Video Extensions, Location Extensions, and Click to Call Phone Extensions.

Upon logging in to AdWords, you will probably not see this tab unless you have enabled ad extensions in at least one of your active campaigns. When clicking on the tab, you will be able to see the stats for any of your campaign ad extensions. You can also decide which data you want to see. You can see everything or filter out deleted ad extensions, or just filter the results by extension type.

Here is a screenshot right from the AdWords blog:

google ad extensions


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Google Announces Mobile AdWords Management Now Available to Everyone

May 3, 2010 By Greg Shuey Leave a Comment

Last Friday afternoon, Google announced that its AdWords for mobile is now fully available. This is big news for those individuals and agencies managing PPC accounts.

This brand new mobile interface is only available on Android, iPhone, and Palm Pre devices. For Blackberry users, I guess we will just have to wait. For some reason Google didn’t get the memo that 40% of smartphone users are running a Blackberry OS.

Now, when users log into their AdWords account from one these devices, they will automatically be directed to the AdWords for mobile interface. Unfortunately, this is only available for accounts that are being managed in the United States, the United Kingdom, or Australian English.

For more information, you can watch the video released by Google below:


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‘Google Advertising Professionals’ Changed to ‘Google AdWords Certification’

April 26, 2010 By Greg Shuey Leave a Comment

adwords-certified-partnerGoogle announced today that they are making some pretty big changes to the Google Advertising Professionals program.

One of the biggest is a change in name. In early 2004, Google launched “Google Advertising Professionals Program.” As of today, it will be known by the “Google AdWords Certification Program.” This change will offer more training materials, more challenging certification exams, and other advanced exams that will test search, display, and reporting/analysis. It will also provide a certified individual or company a redesigned Certified Partner badge.

There are a handful of us at SEO.com who are currently certified. What this means for us — and others who want to be certified — is we now need to pass 2 exams. Companies that want to be certified need to have at least one person in their organization who is certified and have a minimum spend of $10,000 per quarter.

Another welcomed change is one that was previously known as the “AdWords Professional Search.” The AdWords Professional Search went live in December of last year without much notice. Google is now relaunching this service under the new name of “Google Partner Search.” Here you can search for Google AdWords Certified organizations to manage your PPC campaigns.

Lastly, Google has also changed the pricing for the AdWords API usage structure. The new preferred pricing section will take you through a process to see if you qualify. This, however, will not be available for another month and will launch May 26. This means some developers will get free API units based on the client spend they manage. A company is eligible to apply for the preferred pricing program if it is a Google AdWords Certified Partner and their AdWords API-based tools is in full compliance with the AdWords API terms & conditions that are set forth. More information about this can be found at the AdWords API Blog.

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