5 “Hidden” Things that May Be Hurting Your PPC Account

There is so much going on within any PPC campaign that it can be difficult to keep track of all the moving pieces. You can be a proactive PPC manager but there could be elements of your account that may be quietly hindering your performance. Actually, when an account is performing well, this is when you need to be most vigilant in searching for these “quiet killers” because they may be harder to notice blatantly.

Incorrect campaign settings

When you create a new campaign, I am sure you check all of your settings to make sure they’re correct. However, if you launch numerous campaigns at once or if you add campaigns frequently, something may get missed. This doesn’t mean the campaign is broken but it may not reaching its full potential. As a proactive step, you should make sure that these settings have the correct information for your campaign’s goals:

• Location targeting
• Networks, devices and extensions
• Bidding and budget
• Position preference, delivery method
• Ad delivery: ad rotation, frequency capping

Just do a quick review all of your campaigns just to make sure everything is correct. If you no errors, great! However, if you do find a setting that is incorrect, you can make great progress with just a few clicks.

Neglected ad text split tests

Continually testing your PPC ad texts is the key to click-through success. However, you may have launched a test, or perhaps a few tests, that you have not recently checked in on. If your account is performing well, then you may over look following up on a split test. It happens. Now is a good time to run an ad text report to see if there any ads that are under performing. You should make sure that each ad group has a statistically valid sample size in order to determine the clear winners and losers.

Under performing keywords that hide in good ad groups

If your account is performing well overall, that’s great. And you may not even have any ad groups that stick out like a sore thumb due to poor performance. However, this doesn’t mean that there are no rouge keywords that are generating traffic but few conversions. You should run a keyword report to hunt down those terms that are not performing well and adjust accordingly.

Irrelevant search queries are not always obvious

If you are utilizing broad match or phrase, when was the last time you ran a search query performance report? This report is easy to run and can help you hone your campaign by building your negative keyword list. In fact, you should make it a point to run a search query report at least once a month in order to monitor which queries are matching to your keywords.

Poor converting sites on the content network

The content network may be working great for your account but I bet if you looked closer, you would find a handful of sites that have a higher-than-average cost-per-conversion. Similar to poor performing keywords, the content network as a whole may be doing great but I’m sure there are a few sites that are quietly hindering your campaign. And these sites can get away with this when everything is going well in an account.

There are numerous other elements that can negatively and quietly effect your campaign’s performance, but this is a quick check list for you. Remember, if your account is generating great results – it can always do better!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 10:57 am and is filed under Basic PPC Strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.