Are You Making this Costly PPC Mistake?

Pop quiz: when was the last time someone changed your PPC ad copy? If it’s been more than a month there’s a good chance some of your ad campaigns are in trouble.

Neglecting your PPC ads is a costly mistake that can rob not only your campaigns of effectiveness, but your pocket book by paying too much per click over time. When this happens, you’ll start to lose some of the business you are currently generating with the help of these important campaigns.

There are several reasons for this:

Ad Fatigue

Eventually your prospects see the same ad copy over and over again. Sooner or later it just becomes invisible to them. As ad fatigue sets in your CTR (click through rate) starts to plummet. This is particularly true with display or remarketing ads but applies to search ads the same.

Sure, you’re spending less money, but you’re not getting any leads, either. Your ads are also going to start losing their position because your CTR impacts your Quality Score (see below).

Customers don’t just grow bored with the ads. Sometimes they get less relevant. That lack of relevance comes quicker than you think sometimes. How relevant is your “Back to School” ad when October rolls around? Did your ad mention a new trend in your industry or upcoming event that is now old news?

Read 4 Reasons Your Search and Display Ads Are Getting Fatigued on Search Engine Land if you’d like to explore the problem of ad fatigue in-depth. It’s an excellent article, but the quick version is: you don’t see the same commercials today you saw when you were a kid, and there’s a good reason for that. Marketers always have to change up their ad strategy to regain a customer’s attention.

The Competition Strikes Back

One of the biggest challenges I undertake on behalf of my clients is the trying to constantly improve their Quality Scores. Google uses far more than the amount of a bid to determine an ad’s placement. Google also uses the relevance of the ad to the keyword that the customer has typed into the search box by paying attention the CTR of that ad.

Google looks at the ad headline, the ad copy, and the landing page to determine that relevance. If searchers are clicking on your ads they believe they must be relevant.

Thus, you can adjust this copy to improve your quality score, and you’ll be happy for a little while. Then someone else will come along and write an even better ad with a stronger headline. It’s sometimes amazing to see how little changes in ads can create big differences in response—which is why you ALWAYS need to be A/B testing your own ads to stack them against each other, in addition to stacking them against the competition.

It’s possible to get outmaneuvered even when you’re working hard to keep your ads fresh and relevant and are staying aggressive about running ads that deliver the best CTR. Imagine how little time it will take to find yourself outmaneuvered if your strategy is doing nothing.

The Fix

You can, of course, log into your PPC account and start changing your ads today. If you have had two ads running in a particular ad group, pause the one performing the worst in terms of CTR and create a new one to compete against it. If you only have one ad in an ad group, create a new one to compete against it right away! Take a look at all your ads and see if there is a common theme amongst the best performing ads. If so, take that common theme and apply it to a new ad with a slightly different message. Make sure your ads are set to run evenly so you can give the new ad a fair chance at outperforming the old winner. Make sure you give each ad enough of a chance before you declare the winner and test the next new ad. Each should have had at least 250 to 500 impressions before you call a winner depending on how many impressions your keywords get in a month. That’s a good quick fix.

Of course, if you’re like many busy business owners you don’t have the time to check your ads or make adjustments on a weekly, or even monthly basis. Neon Ambition has the answer. As your Austin Pay-Per-Click consultants we’re here to ensure that you don’t make this (or any other) costly PPC mistakes.