Why Your AdWords Campaign Isn’t Profitable

1) Not Using Targeted Landing Pages
Some of the ads created by the client had destination URLs that led to pages on their site specifically relating to those products/ services, which is ideal. But most ads led to the generic home page of the client’s site, which was never going to be effective, especially now that Google takes landing page relevancy into account when determining a keyword’s quality score. The destination URLs for all ads and keywords should be reviewed to ensure they are laser-focused to the search query.
If there aren’t suitable landing pages for a keyword or phrase, the development of tailored landing pages for each keyword set or Ad Group should be considered. The landing page is also your opportunity to make that all-important conversion, so remember to take your new lead by the hand and walk them through the steps required to reach that goal.

2) Incorrect Use of Keyword Matching Options
Most of the client’s keywords were set to broad match. Broad match means that you want your ad shown for variations of your keyword/ phrase. So if you target ‘wedding dress’ using broad match as my client had done, it means you want your ad triggered for ANY searches using those two words in any order. So your ad will automatically be shown for ‘ugly wedding dress’, ‘I need a dress to wear to my friend’s wedding’ etc. To avoid your ad being shown for inappropriate search queries, I highly recommend using a combination of “phrase match” and/or [exact match].

3) Not Using Negative Keywords
The client was not using negative keywords. The use of negative keywords is a very powerful but often overlooked feature of a PPC campaign. A negative keyword is a keyword that prevents your ads from being shown for irrelevant search queries. Adding a negative keyword to your campaign means that your ads won’t show for search queries containing that term. For instance, the negative keyword “-free” tells the PPC system not to show your ad for any search query containing the term “free.”
This feature is extremely useful because it helps you rule out any searchers who are less qualified and less likely to be interested in your offering. For example, if you run an e-commerce site selling DVDs, you probably want to add “-free” as a negative keyword so that persons searching for “free DVDs” don’t see your ad.
You should always include some negative keywords in your PPC campaign to ensure your ads are not triggered for inappropriate search queries.

4) Not Using Tracking URLs
Tracking URLs were NOT being used. As with any advertising campaign, results need to be tracked to determine overall ROI. Pay per click campaigns lend themselves to this because you can add a simple piece of code to the end of your landing page URL and most site statistical packages will allow you to track click-throughs. This code is called the tracking URL and looks something like this:
<http://www.mysite.com/mypage.htm?source=adwords-mykeyword>.
Everything from the question mark onwards is the tracking code.
Many of the larger PPC providers provide automatic tracking of your ads, but the statistics you get are not always detailed enough or, in my experience, accurate. I recommend implementing your own tracking code to the end of the destination URLs of all your ads, based on keyword, ad group name or unique ad creative. You’ll then need to set up your web analytics program to be able to track these individual parameters to determine which keywords, ad groups and ad creatives are the most effective.

5) Setting the Daily Budget Too Low
The daily budget was set too low. Because the client had been targeting very generic keywords using broad match and had also opted into the Content Network, their ads were attracting thousands of irrelevant clicks (including some fraudulent ones!) and the costs of the campaign were skyrocketing.
To try and curb this, the client had lowered the maximum daily budget for the campaign, meaning their ads were only being shown for around 2 or 3 hours per day until the budget was used up. What they should have done was to pause generic keywords, add more targeted 2 or 3 word keyword phrases, use phrase or exact matching options and opted out of the Content Network. That way, their ads would be shown 24 hours a day to a more targeted audience, they wouldn’t miss out on any traffic, they would reduce the amount of click fraud they were experiencing, yet they wouldn’t exceed their maximum daily budget.

6) Not Using Conversion Tracking
Finally, I noticed that Conversion Tracking had NOT been switched on for the campaign and no conversions were being measured. This is because what constitutes a conversion for the client hadn’t been determined and conversion tracking code had not been integrated into the site. Not using conversion tracking makes it very difficult to measure the effectiveness of the PPC campaign in real dollar terms. PPC advertisers should always define a successful conversion and establish conversion goals and targets prior to campaign launch.
A successful conversion might be a sale, submission of an enquiry form or a newsletter subscription. Tracking such conversions is a simple matter of embedding some javascript tracking code into the conversion page, for example the *thank you for purchasing* page. Tracking this data lets you identify how effective your PPC campaign is in isolation from your other
marketing efforts.

The Turnaround
So what were the results of my investigation? Well, after I pointed out the problems to the client and made the changes, the campaign made a complete turnaround. One week after my changes, the campaign was experiencing Click Through Rates of up to 20 percent and the client began receiving higher quality traffic, more inquiries and a huge increase in conversions as a result. The turnaround has renewed their faith in AdWords and they are now excited about increasing their PPC marketing efforts.
If you ensure your campaign avoids the 6 common blunders listed above, you too will be well on the way to a profitable PPC experience.