Friday, February 15, 2013

How to Fix Your Basic Pay Per Click Advertising Troubles

pay per click


There is really nothing more frustrating than having trouble with your PPC campaigns. SEO forces you to wait a while until you see results, and then you see a few, and then you make long-term changes, and then you wait some more, and so on. The process is slow. When it comes to PPC, everything is moving much faster and you should see results much faster. When you don’t, it can get frustrating and exhausting. Fortunately, there are certain tactics and methods you can use specifically for times likes these. If you’re ready to throw your PPC advertising out the window, take a deep breath and read on.
Top 5 Ways You Can Help Revive Your PPC Advertising Campaigns
The very first thing you want to do when faced with this situation is determine exactly where the problem lies. It might sound obvious, but too many people are looking at month-to-month changes when sometimes it’s best to use more data and look from year to year. Compare your profits, orders, and clicks to see if you can determine an area that needs help. Once you do this, there are a few steps you can take:
  1. Quality Score – I think this is one of the most important aspects of PPC advertising campaigns and a great indication of how you’re doing. For this reason, it is important to monitor your quality score so that you always know exactly when you have a problem. If you find that your score needs help, you should regroup your keywords to make them more relevant, improve your landing page to incorporate your keywords, and try out completely new ads.
  2. Bidding Strategy – Although bidding may seem fairly simple, it’s very difficult to get it exactly right. If your campaign keeps failing, run an analysis on the keywords where you spend the most and determine if they are profitable. If this is the case, there are two different ways you can change what you’re doing:
Automated. It’s sometimes necessary to use automated bidding if you have a very large company and lots of keywords to target. If it isn’t working well, consider a different type. For example, you may want to use either target or max CPA bidding to help you adjust different factors that keep you under a certain number.  Simply make sure that your conversion rates aren’t declining and you aren’t changing your bids too frequently (the longer you keep them there the better your results).
Manual. If you have a small company that isn’t targeting many keywords, it might be best to ditch your automated bidding and do everything manually. This allows more control for you and could be the root of your problem.
3. Competition – A sudden change in your results could be as simple as an increase in competition. You will know if this is the case if you track your competition’s display ads as well as text ads. If it seems like they are ramping up their bidding and efforts, you could have yourself a battle to the top.
4. Placements and Ad-Group Setup – If your placements aren’t working, you might want to consider moving those that are “automatic” to give yourself a better chance. You’ll also want to review your ad group setup to make sure all of your ads are even running in the first place! It might sound obvious, but most often the most basic mistakes are the ones that kill you.
5. Campaign Settings and Negative Keywords – You definitely want to check and see if you have any negative keywords that are limiting your chances of success. On that same note, check to see if your campaign settings have a good budget cap ready to go. It’s all about double-checking that will help you get out of a slump.
PPC ad campaigns are ultimately about trial and error. If you’re getting tired of not seeing results, it is most likely an indication that you need to focus your energy on either a different keyword or on a different aspect of your campaign.

No comments: