Like most business owners you’re deep into managing your own PPC - and it probably feels like it’s an unending task. There’s always more you could be doing: refining keywords, optimizing your bidding strategy, rewriting your landing pages etc. And that’s just the good stuff, the stuff that you do when there aren’t any problems. But sooner or later the problems will come and when they do, you’ll almost certainly feel that you’ve taken a step over the edge of a Slip’n’Slide - the more you struggle the faster you slide downhill!

Problem #1 - lots of traffic but no conversions

If there’s one issue that bedevils most business owners trying to handle their own PPC it’s the fact that they can easily create campaigns that generate high traffic, but the conversions from that traffic are pathetically low. One reason this happens is that both Google and Bing have a tendency to default to the ‘optimize for clicks’ options which means that they push up the adverts with the highest Click-Through Rate (CTR) which can lead to this becoming the grail for the novice advertiser who sees his or her CTR booming but the action taken as a result of the clicks being minimal.

Fortunately this kind of problem easy to resolve - it simply requires a change of focus to the organization’s goal which is almost certainly creating conversions (it might not be, you can run a campaign that leads to better brand awareness or almost anything else you fancy, but if you’re going to move away from classic goals, you’d better be working with a really stellar team of PPC experts who can bend the system to meet your needs). If you’re not creating conversions you won’t be in business very long … so at this point you need to be able to evaluate your own keywords and see why your strategy isn’t working. Too broad in your keywords? Making ad promises that are unfulfilled on the landing pages? Weak Calls To Action in your landing page copy? Usually it’s not too difficult to find the problem.

The real trick is to change the problem into a solution and for many business owners this is much harder than they think - we have a certain mindset about our organization, especially if we’re the founder and it’s tough to, for example, let go of a keyword that is central to how we think about our business but that isn’t performing in PPC.

Problem #2 - your Google Adwords management system keeps falling apart

This difficulty is often seen where PPC has been grafted onto some other area of enterprise and is seen as an add-on to another function. So, for example a lot of brands that have succeeded in converting their word of mouth reputation into a viral marking strategy (think Vans and other lifestyle brands) have a period of transitional difficulty where they adjust to becoming a fully global online presence. It all boils down to weak campaign structure.

What does weak campaign structure look like? It’s often the result of more than one person overlapping or handing off responsibilities and it can lead to results like brand campaigns having geo location words in them because the brand has always seen its origin as being part of its unique selling point (it is, but it’s not part of a PPC campaign, that’s landing page stuff at best) or having non-brand campaigns that contain large numbers of non-brand keywords because the person who’s set up the account doesn’t understand how to differentiate the different campaign strategies by content.

Resolving these management level issues often requires outside expertise and the ability to bring clarity to the different campaigns, defining not just their content but their structure in ways that allow excellent reporting on a campaign by campaign basis without having the natural bias towards broad creative thinking that is naturally generated by being inside the circle of the business itself. There’s nothing wrong with having deep knowledge of the business, nor with seeking to represent its uniqueness and brand identity clearly, but relating those broad issues to PPC is an incredibly specialized skill and often requires a degree of detachment that is best sought outside the business.

Problem #3 - Landing Page issues

It’s no accident that Bing has a tool called Bing Ads Intelligence which has as its sole purpose the diagnosis of poor landing pages. One of the tricks with PPC is finding the right level of balance beset working on the PPC campaign itself and working on the ancillary but equally vital material such as landing pages, advertisement copy and cart processes. But the big problem is almost always with the landing pages which is a real difficulty because a failing landing page destroys all the hard work you’ve put into your PPC campaign. So what do landing page issues look like?

• Cluttered pages - too much going on, with no clear movement from headline to call to action, can cause people to click away.
• Weak or no headline - it’s terrifying to consider that many businesses are running high budget PPC campaigns where pages lack any kind of meaningful headline but as any experienced PPC agency will tell you, it’s often the first place to look for problems.
• Pop-up interference - yup, if you’re having problems driving conversions, look at your landing page interstitials! The last thing you want when somebody is heading for the shopping cart is for them to be distracted and possibly even diverted, by a pop-up that asks them to enter their email address for a relatively meaningless purpose. And yet it happens.

So why are so many landing pages weak? Because it’s really difficult to look critically at your own material. If it seems logical to you to dodge the pop-up on your way to the cart, you’re simply not going to recognize the problem. Even worse, copy is often a major problem because many organizations have a resistance to changing words especially words that were written by the founder or founders. It’s a kind of enshrining of the origin of the business which can be difficult to get past to create successful, meaningful, forward-looking copy. Critically, this can lead to continuing to make exactly the same mistakes over and over, because the impediment to success is not an inability to see the problem, it’s an inability to accept what needs to change.

Problem #4 Broad match and high volume are still part of your vocabulary

Seriously, you need help! When a business is struggling with AdWords, it’s almost always because the PPC team lack the ability to manage their bidding strategy and are falling into using too many board match terms and bidding on too many high volume keywords, leading to massive expenditure for almost no result. High volume keywords in particular can be useful but need to be managed with real skill, often by being placed in their own campaigns to ensure results are crystal clear. One high volume keyword can consume an entire budget overnight, so this is the time when your automated software needs to be on top of reports and your PPC team needs to have its finger over the pause button to ensure you don’t fall into a budget black hole.

Resolving Google Adwords Management problems with agency support

If you’re experiencing any of these problems, it’s probably time to seek help. If you’ve tried to resolve the issues and just dug yourself a deeper hole, it’s definitely time to get some expert assistance! Working with a specialist PPC agency can help you get past these difficulties and many more, and, if you’re lucky, finding a proficient PPC consultancy will prevent you ever falling into any of these traps so that you’ll be one of the businesses that looks at their PPC as a success story with no downside.

Finding the right PPC management agency to work with isn’t always a rapid process. At TEA we find that it takes a little while for clients to develop the confidence in us that allows them to step back and focus on other areas of their enterprise. What helps them to relax is that from day one we’re able to show them that the right combination of top flight software, like our click fraud analysis and prevention system, alongside individual expertise in the many areas of PPC which our consultants bring to the table, means that they will see a substantial improvement in their PPC campaigns almost instantaneously.