
Checking each of your ads to ensure that they’re directing searchers to the right pages on your site may be tedious, but it’s always worth it. Sending traffic to your home page or to an unrelated category/product page can significantly decrease its chances of converting. Make sure that each ad is sending traffic to the right page or a dedicated landing page.
2. Outdated Ad Text
If you regularly modify your ad text to reflect current prices and promotions, there’s a good chance there may be an ad here or there floating around with outdated information. Having ads running with expired discount codes or old prices listed can frustrate shoppers and turn them off from making a purchase on your site. Ensure that every ad has up-to-date information to entice shoppers and reflect positively on your brand.
3. Costly Broad-Match Keywords
Broad-match keywords can serve a purpose in an AdWords account, but they can also be a waste of money. Monitor your keywords to make sure that you’re not throwing ad spend away on overly general broad-match keywords. Pause any keywords that are falling short of conversion or ROI goals or turn them into phrase-match or exact-match keywords.
4. Disapproved Ads
Disapproved ads aren’t achieving their primary objective of bringing visitors to your site. Furthermore, they can signify a bigger problem with your account or your site. Disapproved ads will always have a disapproval reason listed, which is something that you should take the time to read and investigate. If it’s just a simple matter of having a typo in your destination URL, that’s something that’s easier to fix. However, if it’s something bigger like copyright infringement or use of banned terms, you may need to pause your ads and rethink your strategy.
5. Miscalculated Bid Modifiers
Bid modifiers are a great way to have precise control over how much you bid for a particular keyword in a particular situation. However, if you don’t do the math to figure out how much you’ll be paying, it’s easy to overspend. If you’re using multiple modifiers for things like device, location and demographics, calculate the potential cost of a click before moving forward with your bids.
6. Display Network Turned On
The display network can be a good way to increase brand recognition, however turning on the display network accidentally can cause costs to rise and Click-Through-Rates (CTR) ad conversion rates to drop unexpectedly. Don’t turn on the display network without having a focused and structured display strategy in place first.
This Halloween weekend take the time to go through your AdWords account to uncover these PPC ghosts anything else that may be going bump in the night!
Kate Pierce is the owner of LionShark Digital Marketing LLC, a West Michigan internet marketing company. Her areas of expertise include Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Web Consulting for small businesses, Copywriting and Local Online Marketing. She lives in the Grand Rapids area with her husband and enjoys cooking, watching sports and spending time outdoors. Like a true digital marketing expert (i.e. geek), she loves talking about marketing theory and SEM trends… so don’t say you weren’t warned!