PPC Advertising Tips – 7 Ways to Flush Money down the Toilet
7 Ways to Flush Cash on PPC Campaigns
Dennis Yu of Blitz Local was a speaker at SMX Sydney 2009 and gave a great animated speech on PPC, how to implement it, and warning on 7 of the ways people new to PPC are likely to “Flush Money” on their PPC Campaign. Here is the powerpoint of the presentation: PPC Dennis Yu Presentation
But here is a summary with some added comments from me:
Indiscriminate Brand Branding – Bidding on the business’s name or products tradenames. He stated that many companies are spending a large percentage of their ad spend on getting people to click on a PPC showing when their business name or trademarks are shown. And these people would have found the right site anyways, because almost everyone ranks for their business name. He suggests putting these trademarks in a group and pausing it and carefully tracking the difference between less PPC clicks and more SEO clicks.
Start off with a zillion keywords – There is no need to have a lot of keywords as most of a huge list will generate no or little traffic. And they will just dilute the account as a whole having a lot of keywords that don’t generate clicks, or ultimately conversions. Not totally sure if I completely agree with this. And now Google will not let you add keywords that have very low traffic.
Choose the most expensive software – He warns against picking an expensive PPC bid management based solely on price alone. He even suggested a piece of software by name that happened to have an exhibition at SMX Sydney… umm about 50 meters away.
No Conversion Tracking – He warned of having accounts without keyword level conversion tracking. This is definitely true as without that people are just driving blind and trying to get as much traffic as possible and hopefully sales or conversions on the other end. But in the middle of that is a process that is not very much understood.
Using default campaign settings – I have said this for a long time. Don’t leave the standard campaign settings to the settings Google has set. Many of the settings are not in your best interest and are there to get you showing ads in the most places for the most expensive keywords, and for more expensive keywords than you have suggested. Content network is probably not for a new campaign or for newbies. Why this is on for a default setting is slightly questionable.
Staying with keyword targeting – Most people think of advertising on the internet as Google Adwords and buying contextual ads. There are reasons for that and many of them are a credit to the successes of Google. Their interface is the easiest to use, shows the best ads typically, and also has the most traffic. In the Australian market the keynote of SMX Sydney discussed the 90% market share Google has. It is without a doubt the highest traffic place to advertise. But there are other ways to advertise on Google. You could do content network (but shouldn’t from the beginning), Map advertising, image ads, and mobile ads. You could also pick other places to advertise such as Stumbleupon, Facebook, Youtube, and AdMob. These places show typically broad market ads at a good rate. If your business has a universally accepted product or service these other locations may be a good place to advertise and should be tested with good conversion tracking (as per tip before).
Rely completely on the Agency – Even though Dennis Yu who works at Blitz Local a successful Online Advertising Agency, he states that customers of them, should not rely on the Ad Agency completely. This could come from a variety of means from having access to the Google account, checking stats themselves in reports, and working towards KPIs that they help define. The standard reporting of the Ad Agency may be in a report that is not clear or directly outlining the success of the overall campaign. If an ad agency shows you a report showing growing traffic over the life of the campaign is that universally good? What if the CPC is going down? Should that be enough to make your firm happy with the results of your PPC agency? It shouldn’t. You need metrics closer tied to the success of your business like Conversion Rate or Cost per Acquisition.