Oversights in PPC Campaign Optimization

Top 11 common oversights in Paid Search Best Practices

1. Failure to track; track the right things or the right level: the closer you can get to tracking immediate and long-term profit, the better.


2. Leaving the content network on, without testing: Just because the default is ON, that doesn't mean it's the right decision. Contextual advertising can be valuable, but again it can drive to unrelated traffic. (Often, it works best in segregated campaigns.)


3. Poor foundational keyword research and expansion: Keyword research never stops. While there's a point of diminishing marginal returns to adding additional exact match keywords to a campaign, most businesses change over time, requiring a review of keyword opportunities. Seasonal businesses require even more vigilance. Don't lose business opportunities by missing keyword opportunities.


4. Wrong mix of match types, including negative match: Exact match is great for high quality scores, and therefore being able to manage high positions at less expense. However, you still need some phrase and broad match listings to catch the searches that the exact match listings will miss.


5. Poor account structure: Review your campaign to make sure you haven't taken shortcuts to include too many keywords into an ad group. This problem worsens when keyword phrases look similar in meaning and you're left with ad copy that doesn't include the optimal phrases that were searched on. Make sure you've structured your keyword lists in ways that will truly speak about your adgroup theme and ads relevant to both adgroup theme and keyword lists.


6. Bids managed at the wrong level: Each keyword phrase is in its own bid auction, and therefore bidding decisions should be made granularly.


7. Landing pages selected too broadly: If user intent is different between two keywords, make sure the keywords get different landing pages (particularly if you have unique landing pages available on your site already). And sometimes the best landing page may not be the one that has the exact thing the searcher was looking for because sometimes users want relevant, but related options listed as well.


8. Failure to test ad creative within important or high opportunity ad groups: You don't have to test every ad for all the adgroups or campaigns. But the larger the current volume and potential volume for a particular adgroup or campaign, the more important it is to test ad creative.


9. Forgetting to test the marginal value of bidding for your own name and brands: Yes we need to bid for our brand name.


10. Using the engine's budgeting tools: Only you know the true value of a click based on it's daily budget spent retrieved from traffic estimation tool. Don't let the search engines send you less valuable clicks (with lower profit) due to a budget setting.


11. Failure to test geo targeting and dayparting: Trying different bidding option on a particular week day or weekends or daily hours based on analysis report.