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08.21.07
Do You Make These AdWords Mistakes?
 By
Dave Davis
The majority of our new clients and consultations come to us with their PPC campaigns in a very similar state.
In most cases, the only reasonable thing to do or recommend to do is to start their campaigns fresh and new. Even though there are countless "AdWords mistakes" lists that have been published and synchronized all over the Internet, I would like to make some suggestions to everyone on the not so common mistakes. If you are setting up your first PPC campaign or thinking of expanding your current PPC campaign, I urge you to read the following list before shelling out your money to a PPC management firm.
The following advice is based on questions received from our clients and from companies who have come to us seeking consultation.
1) Having a non-converting landing page.
I would estimate that about 90% of our clients come to us either directing PPC traffic to their home page, or directing it to a standard product they are advertising/selling page. It is very easy to get caught up in the excitement of PPC advertising and the instant gratification the search engines promise but just throwing traffic at your site will not cut it. If you are advertising a product for the first time You absolutely need a tailor made landing page for that product. The page should cater for PPC visitors only and be very targeted. You should have split testing or multi variant testing set up on this page before you start sending traffic to it. When you have the optimal landing page (according to your tests) then start to focus on the intracies of PPC bid management, gap surfing, bid jamming and all that fancy stuff. Your landing page is also an essential part in getting your AdWords quality score perfect from the start. Your landing page will make or break your PPC campaign. Do it right from the get go.
2) Installing only one form of tracking.
The majority of accounts came to us from other PPC management agencies and a lot of what we see is quite shocking. Many accounts have not installed their conversion tracking code and any that did left it at that. For example, if you use AdWords and sell online You need to install e-commerce tracking to track each and every order. If you are not comfortable with the sometimes complicated setup, at least use the basic value tracking in your conversion tracking code.
3) Not tracking the correct metrics.
It may take more time but if you can, set the value of each sale in your conversion tracking code or e-commerce tracking code as the profit per sale. This will allow you to see exactly how profitable your campaigns are and focus more on the keywords, ad groups and products that are making your more money. If you run a completely e-commerce based product site, set the value tracking as your profit and your e-commerce up normally. It's win-win. At the end of the day, your ROI is the most important metric (generally). Make sure you know exactly what it is. (And I mean EXACTLY, not just a rough estimate from how positive your bank balance is at the end of the month.
4) Failing to optimize ad serving for your ads.
By default, AdWords sets your ad creatives to be "optimized". This means that they display the ad with the highest CTR more often. You do not want that. You want to be able to make that decision yourself after a statistically sound sample size (about 30-100 clicks per ad). In your campaign settings, simply change your ad serving preference to "Rotate Ads Evenly".
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Dave Davis is the managing director and founder of RedFly Marketing, a full service search marketing agency based in Dublin, Ireland. Dave's thoughts on search engine marketing from a European perspective can be found on the Redfly Search Marketing Blog.
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