5 minutes

Top 10 PPC mistakes and how to fix them

If I had a penny for every Google Ads audit I’ve conducted over the years, I’d be a very rich girl! When I speak to brands about their current Google Ads performance and set up, a common theme is them “having a gut feeling” that something isn’t right - with their performance looking stagnant (or even in decline in some cases!), but they aren’t sure on what exactly to be looking for to verify if that gut feeling is a cause for genuine concern.

Google Ads can be a scary game with the amount brands spend on the platform and place a lot of faith in most cases on this being one of their key marketing channels online - so I’m diving into this checklist for you brands out there to check if your accounts are in a healthy position or not! 

1. Your bidding strategies are here, there and everywhere

This is TOO much of a common theme in the accounts I’ve taken a look at recently. If your campaigns all take a different approach to bidding strategies, it’s a big red flag that whoever is managing the account isn’t clear on your account objectives. If an account has a real mix of bidding strategies such as target CPA, maximise conversions, target ROAS all being used - you need to review what the actual objective for the account is and move campaigns to that one KPI metric you’re focussing on. If you have a strict ROAS target on a certain group of products/account wide - but you’re using a target CPA strategy, you’re essentially giving Google the wrong target to go after and giving yourself no control over achieving that KPI.

2. You’re tracking half a story

Tracking as much as you can has become even more important in this day and age with the privacy updates recently, so making sure you’re tracking what matters most to your brand is your key to success. Is your measurement setup successfully? Are you tracking from the right data source? Are you utilising newer tracking functionality such as Enhanced Conversions to combat the loss in third party data, and therefore giving your accounts as much data as possible to set the account up for success?

3. You’re stuck in the past

If your accounts are still using outdated ad/campaign formats - this is another red flag that your PPC management isn’t being proactive and trialling newer formats to stay ahead of the competition. This can be a concern when spotting old formats/campaign types still being used as lots (especially at the moment!) are becoming obsolete e.g. Expanded Text Ads/Smart Shopping campaigns - so if your account isn’t making the most of new formats, your performance will suffer as a result!

4. There’s no newness in sight

In Google Ads language this means you’re probably in fact going backwards, not forwards! Similar to the above point, take a look at how new the features/campaign types/ad formats currently adopted within your account are. Is your account currently trialling beta products from Google to stay ahead in your market and get a lot of data trialling it under your belt ready for when the feature comes to general release in the industry? I’m seeing in accounts I’m auditing at the moment HUGE new campaign formats that have been released over a year ago (e.g. Performance Max campaigns), that are still only being “trialled” by the brand/not yet live! This means they have missed out on so much extra traffic and sales that this new campaign type can offer retailers over the likes of Smart Shopping campaigns which is soon to be sunsetted as a result.


5. Your account is built on jelly (i.e. not-solid foundations!)

You’d be surprised at the amount of accounts still running with outdated attribution models, tracking the wrong conversion data and campaigns even targeting the wrong locations! I tend to see this with brands who’ve had the same pair of eyes on the account for years, or when “successful campaigns” from the past are left to run without checking the settings originally put in place for them. 

It’s the first thing in my opinion to check before you even think about building newer ads/campaigns - look at how the existing campaigns are set up. 

 

6. You’re facing hypercompetition in your industry

If you’re noticing your performance is stagnating/in decline there could be a few reasons for this. Hypercompetition is likely one of these. With more competition than ever in most industries as a result of the pandemic, through new businesses going to market and the big players in each industry spending more than ever on digital advertising, your USP’s and product/delivery pricing is key to success on Google shopping. Are your products pricing themselves out of the sale? Are your delivery rates and options not competitive enough compared to the competition? We created our Price Intelligence Tool last year to support brands with all of this information to make pricing decisions internally, but also so we can take the learnings to strategically decide what budget to assign to what products depending on their pricing competitiveness (therefore how likely that sale will be!). 

7. Your Google Shopping campaigns are struggling

If it’s your shopping ads that are specifically struggling, have you ever checked whether the shopping feed you plug in to your shopping campaigns is optimised for success on Google Shopping? If not, this sort of goes back to point #5! Your shopping campaigns will only be as successful as the data you provide it with (from the feed itself!).

8. You’re spreading your campaigns too thin

Times have changed! Gone are the days of the best practice of splitting keywords and shopping ads out into as many campaigns as possible to give yourself the most control over things like budgets. With the Google smart bidding strategies, it’s recommended a campaign has over 30 conversions per month (50 if you’re using target ROAS as your strategy!). So how are your campaigns shaping up against these minimums? If you have lots of campaigns running with less than these, you’re not giving the campaigns enough data to work from to run effectively. My top tip would be to consolidate these as much as possible, quickly! For example, group more of your keywords together within a single campaign (where they have the same objective) to give that campaign as much data as possible to work with!

9. You’re throwing away budget

You’d be surprised at the amount of accounts I see that have campaigns/ keywords/ ad groups running that have stopped converting or never have! Have a review of what’s spending but not converting and assess whether there is any value to keeping it live. My other big point on this topic is checking over performance for things like quality score. If you have a lot of keywords live, how are they scoring? If you’re finding lots are 7 or below - you’ve got some work to do on making the ads/landing page more relevant to the keyword! If this is the case, you’re probably spending more than needed per click as a result of the poor quality score!

10. Your DSA campaign doesn’t seem to be hitting your objectives

Believe it or not, I’ve seen Dynamic Search Ads campaigns set up so badly with no thought put into the strategy - that they’ve been spending money for YEARS targeting pages like a 10 year old blog post… or showing for search terms that aren’t remotely relevant to the products the brand stocked… unsurprisingly with no conversions as a result! There is a tiny element of faith required with DSA campaigns, but 99% of it is making sure the page targeting you’re choosing is set up for success and that you maintain control over the search terms coming through. A successfully managed DSA sparks amazing growth opportunities for your account - it allows you to identify new trending searches, gives you ideas on new keyword creation and identifies where you may need to potentially adjust your on-site content too.

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