Over the years, Pay per Click (PPC) has revolutionized the manner in which organizations and companies promote their services and products. Gone are the days, when the brands contrived to buy massive banner space on the websites. Using the Pay per Click platforms such as Bing Ads and Google AdWords, brands can now come up with customized ads while targeting the specific keywords which are relevant to the dedicated audience. However, what’s important to know is that running a successful Pay Per Click campaign is never an easy task. So, here we are going to take a quick look at some of the most common reasons why PPC campaign fails.
Reason #1 – Keeping CPL as the prime focus
Many PPC account managers have a common belief – CPL or Cost Per Lead is how it is determined whether the PPC ads are producing substantial results or not. In the past couple of years, PPC is considered to be the best practice and it has experienced a paradigm shift from optimization of clicks to optimization for conversions. Of course, that’s one step taken in the right direction, however, Cost per Lead is only an indicator and not a measure of the success of your PPC campaign. Now, the problem is that narcissist metrics like CPL never guarantee profitability. You may come across 100s of PPC campaigns that depict phenomenal CPL yet the base problem is these aren’t profitable. True that CPL can be a good campaign health marker, but what’s the point if the campaign ain’t worth running?
What to do?
Rather than stressing over CPL, focus on profitability. In order to do that, you must tie your PPC campaign data through to the baseline. The idea is to figure out the keywords that will ensure the lowest Cost Per Sale, the ad copy that produces the maximum ROI and the search terms that bring in maximum revenue. So, the most effective way to tackle this sort of tracking up is via CRM (Customer Relationship Management) such as Marketo, Salesforce, Infusionsoft, and others. If the truth is told, this process would require the same effort, however, the results produced will have a grave effect on how you approach the PPC advertising. Bottom line is, getting your profitability metrics requires some extra work however it does empower you with the knowledge that is required by you to make the decisions that result in the success of your campaign.
Reason #2 – Keyword Overload
Always remember that the 80/20 rule very well applies to your PPC campaign. On an average, the PPC account of most brands produces majority of its sales from only 12% of its keywords. Yes, that’s right! So, if your account is also like one of those average AdWords accounts, the truth is only 12% of your keywords are responsible for whatever sales you are producing. The nonperforming 88% of the keywords tend to consume 61% of your ad spend. Usually, the most companies know what the good keywords are. The problem lies in the fact that they also bid on a couple of other keywords in the hope of acquiring some extra business. This does not mean that you shouldn’t be doing this but the problem is, this rarely works out.
What to do?
Fortunately, this is one of the easiest things to fix. Firstly, if you are using BROAD MATCH – chuck it off, straight. True that broad match is the default match type however that doesn’t mean that you must use it. Next, you ought to identify the search terms and the budget sucking keywords. In order to do that, you must open your Google AdWords account, click on the Keywords Tab and go to the Search terms. From there, you must create a filter for “Conversions < 1” or something alike. This will tell you how many of your keywords aren’t producing conversions. Once you have this report in hand, you can begin eliminating all the poor performing keywords and rather focus the budget on the keywords which drive real value for your brand. As a result of this, the overall traffic might see a drop but as you know the wrong traffic never leads to conversion, you may see a higher conversion rate. So, you’ll only be paying for what works for you.
Reason #3 – Limited by Budget
Once again, this is a counter-intuitive reason for the failure of the PPC campaign. Because of being short of budget, you tend to bid less. The higher you bid, more will be the cost per click. This is true however there is one more factor that you ought to take into consideration. Ad rank and Click through rate go hand in hand. With a rise in the ad rank, the number of clicks also increase. Guess what? When you are starting a campaign, the basic agenda is to acquire more clicks. The longer you spend in getting clicks, the longer it will take for you to figure out which keywords, landing pages, and ad copy produce the most significant results. If you slowly increase the bids, you tend to spend more on bad keywords and ads. More so, you end up losing potential conversions to the poor performers. So, if you think slowly increasing the bids is your way to launching a campaign, Think Again! This strategy actually makes you lose money in the long run.
What to do?
It’s easy, instead of starting low and making your way up, it is better to start high, analyze the data that you need and then dial back. For instance, if Google recommends bidding $ 10, you must go ahead and bid around $ 30 to $ 50. With this, your actual CPC will rise by a couple of bucks however you’ll get the click volume that is needed by you too quickly decide whether or not the campaign strategy is profitable or not. Please know that this strategy will work for you only if you have got a compelling and consistent funnel set up for your campaign. In case your landing pages, keywords, and ad copy aren’t banged on with a compelling offer and a consistent message, you can spend a lot of money and learn very less. When you are experimenting, the objective is to gain viability and not profitability. After you have proven that your campaigns are able to drive sales, you can cut back your bidding strategy and now focus on profits.
Reason #4 – Zero Call Tracking
For several brands and companies, especially the brands working towards lead generation campaigns, the phone calls happen to be the most important source of sales and leads. However, despite leads having a significant importance and the availability of different call tracking platforms such as Google’s Call Forwarding Feature, most of the companies are still not able to track their phone calls effectively. In case, you aren’t able to track your calls, you really can’t tell which channels are producing which sales. This means you’ll not be able to tell which of your campaigns are truly profitable.
What todo?
Favorably, the call tracking feature is relatively easy to implement. For this, all you need to do is use a call forwarding number in your ad copy call extensions. This will help you record calls right from the ad group level. You can also do this, by employing a simple code on your site that directly places your calls from the website displayed number to the forwarding number. It will directly help you track the campaigns that generated the calls from your web portal. In order to work on this, you can associate the calls, ads, and keywords with the actual sales. For this, you can implement the use of platforms such as Five9 or Call Tracking Metrics which will integrate smoothly with the CRM. This may require an extra bit of effort from your end but this measure of call tracking will produce a humongous change in the PPC results.
Reason #5 – Duplicated Ad Copy
Did you ever ponder how all the PPC ads for a search may come across as the variation of a theme? True, these may all seem like competing for the same search intent however it gets hard for you to gain recognition when you sound and look like everyone else. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with learning from your competition but most of the PPC account managers only end up writing ads that are similar to those of the competitor’s ads. Now the problem is, despite you being on the top of the page, you won’t get any attention if you fail to stand out from the rest.
What to do?
In order to come up with a standout ad copy, you must focus on the pain point for which you are offering a solution to your target audience. You need to get the pain point directly in your copy. It is a good idea if you can experiment with a couple of creative ideas to address that pain point but in the process, you must not ignore the point. Always know that the audience is only seeking companies that understand their problems and have a solution for the same.
Final Say
It is these 5 principal reasons why most of the Pay Per Click campaigns fail. As a result of this, companies lose some thousands to millions of sum each month. Favorably, if you employ these simple fixes as suggested above, you can work on a poorly performing campaign and metamorphose it into a cash cow.
