i've just recently been hired and brought in to fix what is a god awful mess. i was brought in as an SEO, but our adwords PPC campaigns are god awful, the tracking code was never in place and the account has been running more than 11 months now, and based on what limited info i have, i've calculated our PPC budget is almost a complete loss, 89.1% loss to be exact. our average quality score is a 4, and honestly i think google is being nice there, and we've got 678 keywords spread out in only a dozen ads, so you can imagine how ugly this is. i've been consulting with a PPC marketing firm who is trying to convince us to outsource the whole thing, which i'm inclined to agree but i know the bosses won't. one of the recommendations the firm gave at this point, which makes complete sense to me, but again i'm getting a lot of resistance on, is to burn the adwords account and create a brand new one and start over fresh. he wouldn't say exactly why but i'm guessing our hilarious calamity of a performance up until now is being factored in to our quality score, namely in to our expected CTR, which is giving us bad CPCs right from the get go. so, would you agree at this point that our account should be scrapped or should we keep working with what we've got? cuz i'm pretty sure i can get the company owner to agree to a new account, but my immediate boss isn't going to like it. i mean if we can slash our CPCs by doing that one little thing, i think its worth it. thx in advance for any help.
Should I start with a fresh new adwords account?
- Thread starter likwidneo
- Start date
Endire
Elite Member
- Mar 27, 2012
- 1,756
- 1,075
Likwidneo,
Interesting question you have here. I'm not sure why that third party told you to start fresh or what their reasoning is but starting a brand new account as opposed to just revamping the existing one will make no difference. It will be less work and just as effective to sort out the existing account.
Ad performance as far as click through rate is factored into the quality score however the score is re-evaluated each time a keyword is eligible for the ad auction which can potentially happen dozens of times per day. Is your supervisor opposed to rearranging the account at all? Or starting fresh in terms of new ads and keywords? I'm not sure I understand why they would be so opposed to starting a new account as this would be the same as just rearranging the old one.
At any rate, I would suggest not even looking at what the account was set up like before and take the approach of setting up the account as if you were starting from scratch. This seems like it would be a lot easier than sifting through what someone else tried to do, especially if it failed. So - select your target keywords (if some happen to be in the account already then so be it), organize them into logical adgroups with relevant ads and make sure your landing pages are relevant.
This thread on SEOMoz speaks to your question,
http://www.seomoz.org/q/poor-perfor...rent-subdomain-be-a-good-way-to-start-a-fresh
Hope that helps,
Shawn
Interesting question you have here. I'm not sure why that third party told you to start fresh or what their reasoning is but starting a brand new account as opposed to just revamping the existing one will make no difference. It will be less work and just as effective to sort out the existing account.
Ad performance as far as click through rate is factored into the quality score however the score is re-evaluated each time a keyword is eligible for the ad auction which can potentially happen dozens of times per day. Is your supervisor opposed to rearranging the account at all? Or starting fresh in terms of new ads and keywords? I'm not sure I understand why they would be so opposed to starting a new account as this would be the same as just rearranging the old one.
At any rate, I would suggest not even looking at what the account was set up like before and take the approach of setting up the account as if you were starting from scratch. This seems like it would be a lot easier than sifting through what someone else tried to do, especially if it failed. So - select your target keywords (if some happen to be in the account already then so be it), organize them into logical adgroups with relevant ads and make sure your landing pages are relevant.
This thread on SEOMoz speaks to your question,
http://www.seomoz.org/q/poor-perfor...rent-subdomain-be-a-good-way-to-start-a-fresh
Hope that helps,
Shawn
No trust me, I've been screaming that the account needs a complete reboot at the bare minimum, every ad needs to be burned and almost every keyword. we're in the e-commerce business and have no blogs yet or anything like that. we sell hundreds of widgets and knick knacks, and yet we are targeting keywords like "engineered hardwood flooring reviews" "install wood floor" "bathroom and kitchen" and my personal favorite "stainless steel kitchen countertops" (we only sell laminate countertops) all on the prospect that we might get lucky and someone "might buy" on a $30 a day budget with an average CPC of $1.59, giving us 19 clicks a day to try and generate a minimum of $100-150 in sales just to break even. The only reason many of these keywords were targeted is because they simply were high traffic, and a blind assumption was made that we want to target high traffic keywords. I've been reverse engineering our main competitor and discovered that they are only targeting 1 keyword above 9,900 searches/month, that keyword being their URL. They are targeting keywords as low as 170 searches/month, and they are banking on PPC. Hard. We had a half hour argument the other day where he was absolutely adamant that quality score has nothing to do with determining our CPC. I could go on and on as to the comedy of errors being committed here but I'm assuming I'm the only one who thinks any of this is funny. Either way thanks for the advice, I appreciate it.
P.S. I read through the blog post you linked, and now I'm curious. Should I pause the existing campaigns and ads or just delete them alltogether? I mean our progress is miserable. I'm not sure if the existing material will hurt or help any new material.
Endire
Elite Member
- Mar 27, 2012
- 1,756
- 1,075
Likwidneo,
If you are interested the historical data that the current ads and keywords have, I would just pause them. You can pause at the campaign level and then start a fresh campaign. If you don't care what was happening before, then delete them.
I'm not sure how much experience you have with PPC or Adwords but some of the things you mentioned in your previous post are hurting your progress. For example, selecting keywords just because they have high search volume will not get you where you want to go. You should investigate a more in depth keyword research method. For instance one phrase might have high volume but be extremely competitive. Trying to bid on that keyword may suck up your budget very quickly with small to no ROI. In contrast, if you were to choose a long tail keyword that was not that competitive, you may get fewer clicks but they will be of higher quality and may lead to higher ROI.
Another thing that caught my eye was targeting keywords for products that your company doesn't sell. The example you gave was stainless steel countertops when they only sell laminate. Using a shot-gun approach is not effective for online advertising. Campaigns, adgroups and keywords associated with them must be highly targeted. For instance you could create a campaign for countertops, only have keywords related to countertops, and only have adgourp(s) related to countertops. Further granularization may be necessary if you are selling different types of countertops. From a user perspective, if I'm looking for laminate countertops and your account displays an ad for stainless steel countertops because its connected to that keyword phrase, I'm not clicking on it. In the same vein, if an ad pops up for buying laminate countertops when my query was countertop reviews, I'm not clicking on it because I want to know what people think about certain countertops, not where to buy them.
When constructing your campaigns and keyword lists; be sure to make them highly targeted. Very tight set of keywords/keyword phrases, same keywords included in ad copy and don't forget to optimize your landing pages to help complete the conversion funnel. Make sure text that is in the landing page also appears in ad text. Users who click on the ad are doing so to take advantage of whatever you are offering and they need to see that on the landing page.
If you are interested the historical data that the current ads and keywords have, I would just pause them. You can pause at the campaign level and then start a fresh campaign. If you don't care what was happening before, then delete them.
I'm not sure how much experience you have with PPC or Adwords but some of the things you mentioned in your previous post are hurting your progress. For example, selecting keywords just because they have high search volume will not get you where you want to go. You should investigate a more in depth keyword research method. For instance one phrase might have high volume but be extremely competitive. Trying to bid on that keyword may suck up your budget very quickly with small to no ROI. In contrast, if you were to choose a long tail keyword that was not that competitive, you may get fewer clicks but they will be of higher quality and may lead to higher ROI.
Another thing that caught my eye was targeting keywords for products that your company doesn't sell. The example you gave was stainless steel countertops when they only sell laminate. Using a shot-gun approach is not effective for online advertising. Campaigns, adgroups and keywords associated with them must be highly targeted. For instance you could create a campaign for countertops, only have keywords related to countertops, and only have adgourp(s) related to countertops. Further granularization may be necessary if you are selling different types of countertops. From a user perspective, if I'm looking for laminate countertops and your account displays an ad for stainless steel countertops because its connected to that keyword phrase, I'm not clicking on it. In the same vein, if an ad pops up for buying laminate countertops when my query was countertop reviews, I'm not clicking on it because I want to know what people think about certain countertops, not where to buy them.
When constructing your campaigns and keyword lists; be sure to make them highly targeted. Very tight set of keywords/keyword phrases, same keywords included in ad copy and don't forget to optimize your landing pages to help complete the conversion funnel. Make sure text that is in the landing page also appears in ad text. Users who click on the ad are doing so to take advantage of whatever you are offering and they need to see that on the landing page.
Well I actually have zero experience with PPC before arriving at this job, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to take one look at these campaigns and figure out what they're doing wrong and just how much wrong they're doing. Our competitor who's making a killing on PPC has a 1.18 to 1 keyword to ad ratio. We're working with a 56.25 to 1 ratio, and trust me, I've actually brought that ratio down quite a bit since I started. I already exported all the previous data so I'm ready to nuke everything we have now, which is exactly what I think I'm going to do. I hate having to constantly look at failure, even if it's not happening anymore.