What if changing one word in your PPC campaign could triple your effectiveness?

Looking for a super-fast way to lose money? There are plenty of Google Adwords advertisers out there pioneering the way to rapid bank account depletion.

Here at AdAuditors we like to reverse these situations so campaigns actually make more money instead of wasting it. If you want to make money, then I suggest you let us take a peek at your campaigns. If you’re looking for a way to burn money faster, then I’ll send you my PayPal address…

Seriously… as independent auditors of PPC advertising we have seen cases where a very simple change, such as adding a negative keyword or changing one word in the ad text, can more than triple the return on investment of a campaign. Sometimes the mistakes come from a lack of information and experience with AdWords, but sometimes it’s such a small thing that only a nerdy, nitpicky outsider could ever pick up. That’s what we’re here for.

Glaring Grammatical Glitch

Your ad is the first communication a potential customer will have with you. There is no room for misspellings or grammatical errors. I’m not talking about situations where an advertiser intentionally captures a commonly misspelled word, but rather an obvious typo. This simple mistake can cost you serious business.

Several times I’ve “scene” ads with the wrong word in the ad text. I’ve “past” up ads with the wrong word in the title just on “principal.”

This not only looks unprofessional, but it can throw off the entire ad group. Often when the wrong word is used in the ad text, it’s also used as a keyword incorrectly.  Even if the keywords are correct, they no longer match the word in the ad, which decreases quality score. Likewise the word does not match the landing page, which further decreases quality score and dramatically increases cost per click.

Finally, the muddled message tends to cause confusion in viewers making them far less likely to click the ad or buy from that advertiser. This means the click through rate will drop, tanking the quality score along with it.

Clandestine Terms of Ill-Repute

There are certain words that seem very friendly to most people but can be devastating to an online ad campaign. I’m going to give you a very simple, real-life example. It’s a word we all know and love: “Free.”

Yes, people like free stuff. Unfortunately, the word tends to draw in people who do not like to spend money. The advertiser then wastes clicks on people without the means or intention to buy their product. They expect a handout and you expect to get paid for your hard work.

What’s worse is that Google does not like advertisers to use certain commonly abused words in their ads, and their very presence can cause an increase in cost per click. By simply removing the word free, some companies have gotten two and even three fold increases in return on ad spend.

For example, many companies offer a “Free Report” in their ad. By simply changing the ad text to “Special Report” they can often get their clicks for cheaper and eliminate some clicks from people who would take their free gift and never buy anything.

Visit my Retail Store that’s 1179 Miles Away…

Google spent a lot of time and effort adding features such as Geotargeting to save you money and deliver more advertising value. Still, some folks refuse to use them correctly. If you are advertising a business that can only operate locally, you need to be absolutely sure that your ads are only being triggered by local visitors. Don’t rely on geographic terms in your keywords, make sure you add geotargeting restrictions to every campaign.

But it doesn’t stop here. You should ALSO use relevant geographic terms in your ad text (headline ideally) to alert the viewer that you really are a local business and not another idiot that forgot to turn Geotargeting on. I suggest you create one broad ad group for the city or state as a catchall, and then create smaller ad groups using more specific geographic keywords such as towns, communities, and so forth. Use the town or community term in your ad text.

Automation Aggravation

It’s great to have a campaign with automagically generated keywords, ads, and bids, but it’s extremely important to allow a human to double check and thoroughly test each campaign. I’ve seen several campaigns that were built from faulty data cause the ad to direct to a blank or mostly blank landing page. The advertiser was flushing money down the toilet with every single click and he never even heard the swishing sound. Not only was he paying for useless clicks, but he was giving his business a bad reputation.

Even if your campaigns are automatically generated based on product or location data, you need a human being to look over everything and make sure the data came together correctly. In every case you should click every single destination link in every ad to make sure they work properly and direct to the proper location with the correct tracking information. You should continue to run these checks, especially if you use dynamic data.