Nov 21 2012

Zombie Paid Search: Your PPC Campaigns May Be Dead!

When was the last time you gave your PPC campaigns an audit? Don’t remember? Well, its probably time you glanced through them. Most of the time search marketers are busy looking at more creative ways to creative ways to build links that they don’t pay attention to their PPC campaigns.

Sometimes, this may not mean anything. Your campaigns may continue to perform well and for certain niches, they may even do better than the last time you checked them out. Most of the time however, your campaigns require constant watching and tweaking. Otherwise, you will soon see no ROI. This effectively means, you will be putting in more money than you are earning from the campaign. And nobody wants that!

So how do you know if you are losing money? These are generally very obvious red flags. Check your CPCs. Are they rising? And are your conversion rates falling behind? Do your ads have poor or no ranking? Are the quality scores for your keywords coming down? All these are indicators that you ought to revamp your campaign.

So how do you do it?

1. Start by removing the dead weight. Look at what keywords have done well for you in the past and which haven’t. Promote the well-performing keywords and get rid of the bad ones. Your campaign should not have any keyword which is not making you money. Split-testing of keywords is a useful technique you can use here.

2. Organize your campaigns. Most of the time, we put all our keywords in one Ad Group simply because it is easier than creating new groups and sorting keywords to be put into those groups. However, this is an important step as it helps organize your campaign. Not to mention all the valuable time you will save when you want to search and find the right keywords.

3. Use the right match types. This is probably the single biggest mistake you can do with your campaigns. If a keyword does not have the right match type attributed to it, then you are going to lose money. There’s no question about it. Make sure not all your keywords are in broad match and that you do have a large number of negative keywords as well. As soon as you keep finding out which keywords don’t work for you, add them to your negative keywords list.

4. Use diverse landing pages. If all the ads point to your homepage, then you are not taking full advantage of your PPC campaigns. Be sure to create appropriate Ad Groups, link them out to suitable ads and direct those ads to the right pages on your website. If your landing page is simply the home page, then your conversion rate is going to be lower.

5. Be more creative with the keywords. It is never a good idea to compete for top placements for an obvious placement, especially if your competitor has deep pockets. Think of overlooked niches within your site that you still have not capitalized on. Use Adwords’ query report to see what kind of searches are currently being directed to your ads and sees if you can find hidden opportunities there.

Follow these simple steps and you will give your PPC campaign a new lease of life which will in turn give you better returns on your investment.

The author of this post, Chris Barnwell is the Local Search manager for SEO Inc, a company that specializes in ppc management services. In his spare time, he enjoys outdoorsy activities such as hiking and camping.

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