The B2B SaaS Marketing Blog

14 Deadly PPC Mistakes That’ll Bleed Your Account Dry (and how to fix them)

by 

Goran Popovic

Last updated: April 12th, 2016

PPC can help your business grow to new heights or seriously hurt your budget if you don’t know what you’re doing. In this video, our Partner and VP of Sales Matthew Hunt will go over the 14 mistakes you just can’t afford to make. Follow his advice closely and you’ll be surprised at how much revenue you’re missing out on!

Video Transcription

Matthew: Hello. Welcome to the webinar today. Today’s webinar’s topic is about pay per click, PPC. And specifically, really looking at AdWords. We are going to talk about the 14 deadly PPC mistakes that will bleed your bank account dry. And of course, we’re going to show you how to fix those things. Before we do it, I would like to introduce myself. My name is Matthew Hunt and I will be the presenter in today’s webinar. I’m very excited to share this information with you because I know that you will get at least one great tip that will really help you improve your business, marketing, PPC ads, or with AdWords. I personally have been doing PPC for over a decade now. I’ve probably worked on a couple hundred accounts. I’ve worked on small business accounts, enterprise accounts, accounts that require e-gen to e-commerce accounts. I’ve even had skin in the game before. In fact, that is how I started my career in internet marketing. In fact, started all with PPC. I guess you could say it was my first love.

I guess the origin story, if you want to go back, it began back in 2007. I was selling POS machines, those credit card machines, door to door at small businesses. And I just knew there had to be a better way. I knew there were people who were using Google to find stuff like what I did. So I asked a friend of mine, who knew how to build websites. So he built this one-page website for me. Then I bought this book called The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords by Perry Marshall. I taught myself the ins and outs of PPC and AdWords. And within months, believe it or not, I actually had a thriving business. It grew into a big business where I actually had the ability to hire people. It allowed me to go in and learn even more about internet marketing. Then, I started doing internet marketing and PPC management for my friends businesses. And before I knew it, it was 2010 and I had started my own digital marketing agency. That’s a little bit about me and how I ended up creating a digital marketing agency.

Let me tell you a little bit about the digital marketing agency I work for. It’s called Powered by Search. And Powered by Search is a full-service digital marketing agency. This is our office here, and I think one of the coolest things about our office is we have this amazing office dog. His name is Jack. If you come by, we would love to have you come visit. We are at 211 Yonge Street. Now, we are 211 Yonge Street in Toronto. That’s where our headquarters are. We are considered Canada’s fastest growing digital marketing agency. But just because we are in Toronto, we actually serve business globally. Most of our clients are all over different places in North America. But if your business needs English marketing, We can help you no matter where your business is located. I mean, it is what it is. It is the internet age. Welcome to 2016.

We’ve also, we’re really blessed to have some great clients. I mean, we love our clients. We are humbled by the brands that have chosen us to work for them in the short six years of our existence. It’s crazy, brands like FedEx, and Rogers, and ReMax, and Bank of Montreal. And we haven’t always just worked with enterprise businesses. We also work with funded start-ups and small business who happen to have a decent size budget to do some marketing online. But we’ve been really, really, really lucky to be in a position where companies want to come to us to help them with their marketing. And in fact, we actually can’t help all companies that come to us. In fact, we can only help five or six clients every single quarter.

And I think the reason we have more people come to us than we can actually help is because we have this belief in providing value first. Hence, why we are putting this webinar together. We like to give much before we take. We like to provide and give back to everybody in the communities, more so than we take back in. That’s part of our value system, and I think because of that being part of our value system, we end up with a lot of benefits back. I think the success of your company is always directly related towards the value that you put back out there.

One of the compliments that we get, or three of the compliments that we get that we are very good at is we’re really good at doing three things. That’s getting more relevant traffic, or not really necessarily always more. Sometimes it’s getting the right traffic for business. Because it’s not always more traffic that you need, it’s the right traffic that you need. We are also really good at helping businesses create the right kind of content that engages visitors. It helps them shorten the buying cycle or helps them increase the frequency of purchases. Both are valid and important. Last but not least, we’re also really good at helping companies improve their website’s conversions or conversion rate optimization as it’d be known out there. For websites who already get a lot of traffic that’s probably the most important thing that they want to focus on, is conversation rate optimization. And we’re going to tell you today how PPC can help all of these things. Help you get more relevant traffic, help you improve your engagement, as well as help you increase more conversions. Get you more leads or more revenues or more sales. We are going to talk about that in just a minute.

We are going to talk about, real quick, who this is for, this webinar is for. So this webinar is for those who want more red hot leads for less. It’s also for those who want more paying customers for less. So, if you’re in e-commerce, this is going to show you how to do that. This also for those who basically just want more money from each customer too. So we’re going to show you how to increase the frequency of purchases, as well as to get more sales out of your existing customers today through PPC. Now, who this is not for, and this is sometimes just as important, this is not for people who spend little or no money for PPC ads. If you have very small budgets on PPC, it’s not like you’re not going to get some tips from this that might benefit you. But the chances are the impact is going to be very low if your budget is like $500 month. Yeah, you can make these changes but how much of an impact is it going to really make to your business? This is for people who have a decent sized budget. This is also not for people who need convincing that PPC works. So if your someone who just not really, like, it doesn’t work for me. I don’t want to do PPC advertising or any AdWords, then you could probably just jump off this webinar now. And this is also not for people who are not really coachable. So if you’re someone who is sort of I know it all, or not really open to learning, then probably this is not going to be great for you today.

We are going to talk about what you’re going to learn in today’s webinar today. You’re going to learn how to avoid some of the common PPC mistakes that people make in AdWords, as well as other PPC platforms. You’re going to learn how to not fall for PPC’s hidden taxes. And trust me, there are a lot of hidden taxes and landmines that exist out there. And if you fall for these common mistakes that we see happening, these 14, then you’re definitely getting taxed more than you need to. You’re going to learn to delight your prospects with your ads. Believe it or not, ads can be a great experience for people when they are set up right. People are looking to solve a problem, and you can help them solve that problem. So ads are not a negative thing. You’re also going to learn to shorten the sales cycle of your PPC ads today. And of course, finally, you’re going to learn how to make more money with less. So if that interests you, then you are definitely going to want to stay tuned to this webinar right to the end.

Let’s talk about this real quick. This is a fundamental belief that we have. We’ve worked with a lot of business, but if you can’t pay money to acquire customers properly then you do not have a business. So basically at the end of the day, this usually means you need to start with PPC and usually AdWords. Because it’s search. People go to search engines to solve a problem. They have their wallets open looking to buy. You need to be there. You need to make that profitable. Now if you can make that profitable, then yes, you have a business and everything else is gravy. So, invest in PPC. Invest in AdWords.

Let’s talk about the first mistake that people make when they start their PPC campaigns. And the first one is they don’t know who their buyers are. I can’t believe how many people don’t do this and figure this out. It’s really important that you do. I am going to tell you the reasons why. First thing you should be doing is creating some sort of Buyer Persona. This is an example of a Buyer Persona that we created for one of our clients recently. It addresses their personality as well as it talks about what keeps them up at night, what they are looking for in that particular service or product, as well as how do we get their attention. And it talks about the demographics, like gender, their age, their location, their interests, and even their job title. Because we can target by all those demographics today. We can target on the internet by age and by gender, where they are located and their types of interests.

Now we write the other stuff like what keeps them up late at night and what do they look for in that particular product or service, because we want to be able to write sales copy and good text ads, and create good banner, creative, and good landing pages that match up with what it is they are looking for. We’ve got to think about what are looking for, what are they thinking, what is the intent behind the search query that they are creating, the problem that they are literally trying to solve? Then we also want to look at the different types of buying personas that are out there and make sure that we are addressing all the different types of buying personas that exist out there their personalities. So it’s really important that you take the time to create this. If you do not have a card like this for your business, that is a mistake. You need to go and create these Buyer Personas.

How do you get that information? Well, it’s really easy. Log into your Google analytics, log into your AdWords. It’s going to show you where people are purchasing from right down to which cities. Now take a look at that information based on conversion data versus impression data and traffic data. Because it’s the conversions that are really driving it. You may notice that you get a lot of traffic to one particular location or from a location but none of them buy from there. So if you have a limited budget, which most people have, a good way to sort of move it around is to move it to the city or location that’s driving the most conversions. And then you can also find this information as well about the demographics. Maybe log into your AdWords account, view the display network, and then you click on demographics. And then you can sort it by impressions, traffic conversions. My suggestion is to sort it by conversions and look at that data and know who you buyers are. If you have a limited budget then let’s target those who will most likely buy from you first.

There is really four types of buyers. I’m not really going to spend too much time on this. But there is really four different types of personalities that buy out there. You want to make sure your text ads, as well as your landing pages, talk to each one of these different types of personalities. There’s the competitive, the spontaneous, the methodical, and the humanistic. And really the best way to describe the results is kind of the job title roles they fit. Like competitive would be the CEO. Spontaneous would be like the sales or V.P. sales role. Methodical would be like your accountant or CFO. Humanistic would be the H.R. Person. Right? That’s kind of how you can look at it. And you’ve just got to remember that people do buy emotionally based on their personalities. So we all don’t buy the same way. You need to make sure you are addressing all four of these. It’s not enough to only think about demographics. Also, think about their personality too.

Mistake number two: analytics and goals are not set up right. I can’t tell you how many accounts I log into and I see this in Google analytics. No goals set up. No goal values there. Its really easy to do. You just go to your AdWords account. Click on tools. Click on the conversion actions with Google analytics. My suggestion is to actually sink your Google analytics with AdWords if you can. Just note that if you already set up pixels that are around Google AdWords, and you do the analytics afterwords, to disable those pixels for the AdWords. Otherwise, you’re going to be double counting conversions. What you need to ask or know before setting up Google tracking properly? You need to ask how much is a customer worth to you? Because it’s really important when you put in a value, particularly if you’re an lead gen business. E-commerce business is all set up where it shows the numbers. So it’s really clear about whats working and whats not working. But for lead gen businesses, it’s not. You need to figure out what a lead is worth to you so you can put a value in there next to that goal and the lead.

Also, think about the lifetime value. You’ve got to remember someone can purchase from you more than once and you can cross-sell or up-sell. Look at that lifetime value because it might be worthwhile breaking even on the first purchase or having that loss leader just to get them in the door to make it profitable. So make sure you understand lifetime value. Also, know how long your buying cycle is, and what happens, and the train of thought that happens. So this is really important around re-targeting and creating all kinds of different messages to avoid brand blindness. And we will talk about that a little bit more. These are things that you need to now to set up around goal tracking, and we are going to talk about that right now. So when you set this up, these are all the different things you can set up for goal tracking. You can have website conversions in the form of leads, app downloads, phone calls, Phone calls are really, really, really important, make sure you are tracking that stuff. You can do that through AdWords right now through their call tracking system. Or you can use companies like Callrail to connect it back to your analytics. You can even import your data through the CR app.

Now one of the things I want to point out right here is phone calls. If your business is heavy in phone calls, make sure you get a phone tracker. I can’t tell you. We recently ran into a business where in 4000 leads a month, 3500 of them are through phone calls. But they weren’t tracking that as goals. So that like having 90% of your business not being tracked and knowing what really is working. And the reason, if we look over here if you can see your conversion windows, real important to understand your buying cycle. Because if its 90 days, you want to open it up and look at that. You don’t only want to look at last click conversions. You want to look at assisted click conversions to really judge wether PPC is working or not. It can be a huge mistake that I’ve seen where people go oh, there’s not a lot of conversions. But it was the first interaction and they bought later on through another channel. You want to know if it was driven by that. So I would recommend opening up to 90 days. But again, it depends on your buying cycle. Same thing for creating audiences.

And then here you can see here once you put in the URL of the tracking of what that looks like in AdWords, be sure to add in a goal value. So don’t forget to do that. I can see a lot of people set up goals, but then they don’t put a value. And it really helps to understand the dollar amount that is involved there. You can tweet this: if you can measure your PPC with goals and values then you can improve upon your PPC. If you can measure it, then you can improve upon it.

Mistake number three, campaign structure is setup wrong. Listen, you can’t have a messy campaign structure setup. So here are some questions that you’re going to want to ask before you set it up. What locations do you want to target? Do you have any top selling products or services? Because if you do, you’re going to want to peel and stick them into a separate campaign that has more budget. If there’s more margins there, then focusing on products or services that are just not important to you. So sometimes you have a limited budget. It’s better to focus on the things that are gonna work really, really well for your business and 10X your businesses growth. Do you have any seasonal products? Again, you might have put them in different campaigns. So you might need to pause or un-pause them, depending on the season. And what is your website structured like? Because a lot of times we’re going to follow the campaigns based on your structure.

Here’s an example of structure. If you have a furniture store, you don’t want to set your campaigns this way. You would want to have a campaign for tables and a campaign for beds. And then you can allocate the budgets as appropriate. And the reason why you want to do this is instead of having all in one campaign, which a lot of people do, they have the beds campaign. They have one campaign and then they had all the different ad groups, ad groups for beds, ad groups for tables and so forth. It’s not really a good plan. Because what if you find out that beds is selling a lot better than tables? Then you’re going to want to put more budget towards beds. You wouldn’t know that if your budget is running at getting all that from tables. So you want to have separate campaigns. And then within those campaigns, you’ve got these different ad groups. So you had a tables campaign, you have the coffee tables, the dining room tables. Then, of course, you have the beds, you have the sofa beds, the kids sized beds, and so forth. You get the idea. Then within the ads here you always have four ad sets. Two for desktop, two for mobile app. I’m not going to talk about that too much right now. But this is a good structure to kind of how in an e-commerce business. It would follow your product structure. So create campaigns per product grouping.

Here’s another way that I like to structure campaigns, particularly around lead gen too. And it’s around buying intent. So there’s bottom funnel, middle funnel, and top of funnel. So bottom funnel would be like where people are ready to buy. You know, where to buy a specific model, or I want to buy a 70 inch TV with this model. Middle funnel is where they’re looking for discounts or sales. Top funnel is information, like which TV is best. Right? Well, if you have a limited budget, which I guarantee most of you do–again, you keep hearing me say that–you would want to put the majority of your budget here in the bottom of funnel first. Probably at least 50% of it, if not maybe even more to that. Because that’s going to be great. What I notice when I go into a lot of accounts is that they have budgets in the wrong areas. They have it in the middle or the top of funnel. And the first thing I do is remove it out of there and move it into the bottom funnel. That immediately generates them more revenues. So if you like more revenues, put more budget into bottom of funnel.

Here’s another way of naming structure. It’s real important to understand naming structure too. Basically, look at this. Think about this, and this is really horrible, but it really sheds some light on how important this is. Just imagine if you were hit by a bus tomorrow and someone had to log into your AdWords account for the first time, would they understand what is going on based on the naming convention within five to ten minutes? And if the answer is no, then the naming structure is wrong. So really put some thought into this and plan this out for campaign structure, okay? So here is three ways that you can have a naming structure. You can have it based on campaign type. Like search, exact search, broad search, display, display video image, so forth. Shopping, etc. You get the idea. Or you can do it by theme and then campaign. So you go theme one, as in like ‘beds search’. Then you can have theme two, which would be like ‘table search exact’, and so forth. Right? I do like to break up campaigns, as well, by exact match and broad match. And the reason being is usually exact match you can control. It have very strong buying intent. Where broad has less. And so if I’m going to put budget somewhere, again, it’s in that bottom of funnel type stuff with exact match.

Then, of course, if geography is really important to you, you can add UK versus Canada or versus Germany, and so forth. You get the idea. So, naming stuff is really important. And in fact, I believe that for every hour spent organizing your PPC campaigns saves you 10 times that in rework time. And I can’t tell you how many times we have taken over accounts where it’s…we just scrap it. It’s just so messy. And we just build from the beginning again. You don’t want to have to do that. So make sure you spend some time thinking about the structure of it, as well as the naming convention of your campaigns.

Mistake four: budgeting allocation is wrong. And I was kind of touching on this already. But let me give you an example. Who else would be happy if I could get an additional 342 leads in less than 5 minutes of work? Five minutes without increasing your budgets. Put up your hands. Everybody should be putting up their hands. Right? Okay. So here’s what I am going to show you. What you want to do is create an extra column in your campaign level. The column is search is lost due to budget. And look at that and then look at the campaigns that are converting where your ads are turned off because you don’t have enough budget there. Then go look at campaigns, like this one here that is not making any conversions and yet you have a lot of budget to it. Well, we just need to remove budget from the campaigns that are not converting to the campaigns that are converting, but yet the ads are turning off.

So that’s what we did here. You can see we paused this here. This particular client had 12 grand spend into campaigns that was not working. Their average cost per lead was $35.00. We moved it over to the campaigns that were not showing up. You can see here one campaign was off 50% of the time. 56% of the time, ads were turning off because there was not enough budget. Yet, it was converting a lot of leads at $31.00. You know? Converted 252 leads. Like, hello? Why are we putting budget into stuff that is not working? Right? And vice versa. The other ones are 20 and 26. Just move it over there and voila. An extra 342 leads for less than 5 minutes worth of work without increasing your budget. Budget allocation is extremely important and we see people making this mistake all the time. That’s how you fix it. Ideal budget allocation, I recommend this. Like strong buying intent being 50% of your budget, moderate buying intents being 30%, and like 20% for testing. If you’re really conservative maybe it’s more like 10% for testing. Tweet this: if you have a limited budget then put all your money into campaigns or ad groups that are driving the most revenues.

Mistake number five, accepting low-quality scores. Quality scores are really important, because Google, at the end of the day, doesn’t really care who’s paying the most or willing to pay the most. What they really care about is the most relevant ad and best experience for searchers. And if you have a low-quality score and low ad rate, that’s basically just saying that you text ad, your ad groups, and the landing page are not right and you need to improve it. And now, you’re going to pay a premium for not doing that. So let’s just look at why quality score is important. Look at it like this. Look at advertiser number one who is ranking number one here. Their max bid is 2 dollars yet they are only paying $1.61. Yet, advertiser two is almost paying double because they have a low quality score of six. And the way it works is advertiser one has a quality score of 10. So it looks at advertisers two’s ad rank and divides it by that, which works out to $1.60 plus one penny. That’s what they pay.

So there’s two things that are involved in this formula. One is your quality score, as well as your competitor’s ad rank, is what determines what it is that you pay. So not only is it important to have a really good quality score, but Google thinks of the cents between the keyword that you’re bidding on, the text ad that you’re creating, or creative banner ad that you’re creating and landing page. That’s how they determine that. But its also important what your competitors are doing. If they’re really good at what they do, it could cost you more. But if they’re really bad at what they do it could cost you a lot less because you are beating that one. Quality score is super, super important. You need to look at your quality score. If you have a quality score like this, where it is three to ten, that’s a warning sign that you need to work on something and improve it.

The way quality score is determined is partly based on your bid. It mostly looks at click through rate as the primary function. But it also looks at the ad relevancy. Does the text ad match up and have the keywords that are in the ad group? It looks at historical performance, as well as the keyword relevancy and landing page. Right? Do they look like they add up between them? And that creates your ad rank, plus your PPC cost. Okay? Tweet this: having AdWords quality scores below six means you’re getting taxed more because your account is mismanaged. So if you do notice that you have an earned average quality score of six and under, you probably means you need some help.

Mistake number six, ad groups are disorganized, okay? I can’t tell you how many times…this is a client we’ve had in the past. And they just dumped all their keywords, broad match, into one ad group. Do not do that. Do not put all your keywords…and look at the clickthrough rate over here. All below 1%. If you have clickthrough rates that are below 1% on the search network as opposed to the display network, you have a problem. You’re probably doing this. Really, ad groups should be broken into exact match, phrase match, and broad match. Do no do this. This is a huge mistake. Messy, messy, messy.

How do you solve that? Well, this is how we solve it, by using match types. This is where people are not using this, and you saw this. So there is really four major match types plus negative. There is exact, phrase, broad, modified broad, and negative. The way it works is like this is that if you put something in brackets and let’s say you’re bidding on the keyword wedding dress. Then your ads are only going to show up for wedding dress. If its phrase then it can have wedding dress in that phrase but it can add another word like white or blue, and your ad’s going to show up. And broad could be bidding on wedding dress but then you’ll show up for wedding gown or anything that’s like closely related. Modified broad just basically means that whatever you put the plus symbol next to means that it has to be in the search query somewhere. So in this case, like wedding dress, you could show up for dress or wedding. And the negative keywords are super important. We’re going to talk about those in just a minute.

But it’s important you do these and it’s really important you break up your ad groups by the match types. So I suggest you have an ad group of the exact match, that’s usually only showing up for that particular keyword. That’s strong buying intent. Then you do a phrase match ad group. but, make sure you make a negative keyword match type to the exact match in the phrase match. That way it doesn’t have any bleed into the phrase match ad group and all your exact match keyword search words will show up in the right ad group. If you don’t do that, it can bleed into the other one. And ditto with the same thing on broad that if you’re doing a broad make sure that you have the negative keyword from the phrase match, it has a negative in that ad group campaign.

Mistake number eight, not using negative keywords. So here’s an example. Plumber jobs. Yet look at all this stuff. These are plumbing services showing up. Obviously they didn’t get the memo. It is really important you put in negative keywords. Here is another example of a client that we managed and took over. And it’s easy for you to find out what kind of search queries are showing up. So just go into your keywords, click on search terms, and it will show all the keywords that are there. In this example, this particular client sold equipment but not supplies and aesthetics. And here they are in this month showing up for all these keywords. They had something like 50 clicks and spent $100 on wasted clicks because they don’t even offer supplies. So that should be a negative keyword that will save you tons of money of month. That’s like $1200 savings right there by adding negative keywords. And that’s one particular ad group. So add your negative keywords, okay? It is really easy to add them.

Benefits to adding negative keywords. It lowers costs. Who doesn’t want that? Obviously, creates more revenues. It increases your clickthrough rates which usually leads to better quality scores. It also increases conversion rates, okay? I love this. Not adding negative keywords to your PPC campaigns is not like wearing pants to work. I don’t know if anybody has ever participated in ‘No Pants day’. It’s a big thing. Next time it’s going on ride transit somewhere. It’s funny as hell to see no pants day. And it happens in all the major cities.

Mistake nine: Bad landing page scent, or even worse, no landing pages. If all your ads are going to your homepage, please stop. You are making a huge mistake. You need to create landing pages, per ad group that you have. It’s really, really important that the scent stays the same. I’ll show you what I mean as an example to understand scent. This is bad. So lets say I was searching, I went and searched Knob and tube, okay? I needed some knob and tube work. And this is one of the ads that came up with no landing page. It just links to a general services page. It talks nothing about knob and tube. That is bad scent. Its also bad relevance and it’s going to lower your quality score too. Don’t do that. Here’s a better example. I searched this as another ad. And then it led to this where it’s a page about knob and tube. The scent is correct. I see knob and tube. Now, they could remove some of the distractions that are on there. There are some ways that they could have improved this. But at least, its similar scent to what it is that I am searching for. Okay, don’t waste your PPC budget by not having good scent between ads and landing pages.

Mistake ten. No real mobile experience. Here’s a good example of this. I was searching TN Visa because one of our clients is in this niche. And I clicked on one of the competitors ads. Ah hah. And this is what came up on the phone. Like, holy, horrible. I can’t use this. Remember it’s got to be mobile friendly and making your web site responsive is still not good enough. Just remember that people have fat thumbs and you have to think about what it is they are trying to complete on their mobile experience. Is it their phone use? Is it to drive to you? Is it to actually transact? Really, really important. Now this is our client, what we’ve done. Look at the ad. Ten times better. Look at all this great real estate we have. We will get into that in a minute on how to do that. But look at the experience here. It has a nice hamburger menu at the top, a nice headline, a video, a clear button of an action. What you need to know about TN Visa. You can watch it. You can read a little bit more. Start your free assessment. That’s a good experience. You need to have a strong mobile experience.

Just check your Google analytics and see how much traffic you have. So in this example here, we can see that the mobile experience currently right now is almost half of their traffic on this particular website. And as soon as we made their website more mobile friendly, look at what happened to the conversions. It went from 12,000 leads to 26,000 leads. 100% jump in leads once the website became mobile friendly, okay? So you’ve got to look at your year over stats on mobile. And you can see that their mobile traffic is increasing by 46%. And I guarantee you that your mobile traffic is increasing too. You have to do that. One way to look at this, just look at your PPC spend, whatever that budget is. Let’s just say for example you’re spending $100,000 a month. Keep the number easy; it doesn’t matter what it is. But if 50% of your traffic is coming there and your website isn’t mobile friendly, you are basically flushing $50,000 down the toilet. So just to make it a little bit more extreme, that’s one way to look at it. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly.

Okay, another pro tip you can do with mobile is if your website is mobile friendly, let them know that they can transact with your website on their phone. A lot of people have so many bad experiences with phones they don’t think that it’s even possible. So here’s four magic words, buy from your phone. When you add this to you ad, man it really can increase conversions for you. Because people don’t even think they can. And it’s going to increase click through rates and so much more. But once they know that they can from your ad and then…trust me, make sure that you can. Don’t write this if they can’t. You might want to write something different like cannot buy on your phone. Maybe not, but you get the idea. But this is great. This works every single time for us so far. Buy from your phone. Four magic words.

Mistake number 11. Not bidding strong enough for good positioning. Here’s a good example. You know, where are you going to click if you’re on your phone and your searching oil change? The first two ads, above the fold, is all ads. If you don’t own the first two positions on mobile you are invisible. So when you’re on mobile you need to own the first two positions. On desktop, you need to own the first four. I mean, look at this. Now that it’s four ads above the fold, and there is shopping on the right, it means the old organic section, the old organic number one is now the new number four ad. So it’s a pay to play thing. And I can say that. I don’t work for Google. But at the end of the day, all these networks are going that way. Facebook and so forth, its pay to play. So if you want to be seen and be visible, you need to invest in PPC. You need to invest in AdWords.

Mistake 12, boring text ads or no sitelink extensions being used. Let’s talk about sitelinks first because its an easy win. These are sitelinks. You need to add them. It also increases your ad rank. So just go to ad extensions, add your location, call extensions, sitelinks, products, social, mobile, call out all of them. Basically this is what it does. I mean, look at the two bottom ads that are bordered versus the top one. Which one are you going to invest in? Obviously you are going to invest in the one that has more screen real estate. Like, do that one. Really, really important to add those in. You can’t have those show up if you don’t have them set up. We see this all the time. We go into AdWord accounts and people just didn’t set them up. Well, you’re definitely paying more to be able to rank higher compared to competitors who do it. And you have a lower ad rank quality score when you don’t. Grab more screen wherever possible.

Now, you also need to ask questions in your ads. These are some ways about kind of like sales copy of the buying intent. This is a little harder. You need to understand buying intent law. One way to solve that is ask questions. Here’s an example. If you are like a divorce lawyer, “Getting a divorce? Think your husband is hiding money?” See what they are thinking. This is what people are thinking. You can target women, demographics only. We can find a free consultation. You can vice versa for men. “Getting divorced? Think your wife is hiding money?” Or it could be a different thing. What are men worried about? Are you worried about child support? Worried about paying too much child support and alimony? Not to say that men make the majority of the money and that’s the situation. It could be reversed. But you get the idea of what we’re going for.

Use a story in your ads. A lot of times we’re not using stories. You gotta think about this. Here’s one. “Want to renovate your basement this year? Call [inaudible 00:31:05]. Find out how this 36-year-old mom renovated her basement for under 20 grand.” And you can target women who have kids on Facebook who are in that age group, in their thirties. Who wouldn’t want to click on that if you’re a woman searching basement renovations? Don’t you think that is super targeted? Don’t you think that your clickthrough rate is going to be huge? Hell yeah, it’s going to be huge. You have a unicorn in your hands. I bet it’s going to be like 30%. Because you are targeting women, who live in the GTA, who are in their thirties, who are parents, and they searched the term ‘basement renovation’. Yeah. Hell yeah. You’re definitely going to get amazing engagement that way. Right? And you’re using a story.

So think about it. Think about what is it they want to know. They’re not going to make a buying decision right away. They are probably going to want some information or story around how someone did it cost effectively. And you can rinse and repeat this. Get case studies and stories in your business you can share as landing pages. A lot of times, remember, people buy emotionally. And how do we like to buy? We like to buy through stories and understanding someone else’s previous experience. Doesn’t matter what business that you’re in. It’s a great way to sell. Particularly if you sell high ticket price items, you need case studies and stories to share. E-commerce stuff that’s a purchase that’s like 50 bucks and under, maybe not so much.

Ask yourself these questions prior to writing your ads. So what are they thinking? What are they thinking before they make that search query, right? Where are they? Are they at home? Are they on the road? Are they in the car? Are they at work? This can really affect things that you’re doing. What problem are you helping them solve? Right? Think about that. Can you add it into the ad? Show them the benefit of how you will solve that problem. And then are they trying to research something or are they trying to complete something? That’s really important so you understand what it is that they’re trying to do there. Understand the intent behind the search query. At the end of the day, search queries are to fulfill a need. So be sure to understand the intent behind the search query before writing the PPC ad.

Okay, mistake number thirteen. No exclusions in past placements. Here is a good example of this. This is a huge fail. Obviously, why would you have a Mcdonalds ad next to a child obesity ad? Context is everything. You can do this on AdWords. You can avoid things that you don’t want your ads to show up with. Your ads shouldn’t look like ads that are everywhere. They should look like well-placed ads that make sense to the content that is next. Give it some context. You can do placements. You can do peel and stick. Go to your display network. Look where your ads are showing up. Some of you might want to pause out. Some of you might want to do a peel and stick and put in separately at a URL level, or even a website level, to really show up there. Like, if you know your affinity markets and where they hang out, you might want them to show up there. For example, if you’re in the real estate market in Canada, you might want to make sure that you’re showing up on any of the global news site where they talk about real estate. Right? Because maybe they read the Global News, or the CTV News, or whatever. You get the idea.

Mistake number fourteen, poor retargeting strategies. Okay, the average website converts at 2%, therefore, most first-time visitors leave without taking the desired action we want. Right? And I’ve worked on a lot of websites. Yes, some convert better than others. But generally speaking, this is the average. Which basically means 98% of the people are leaving without them doing what it is that you want to do. And you paid good hard money to get them there. And it’s not because they didn’t want to do it. It’s because life gets in the way. They are like “I’m at work. I really shouldn’t be doing this right now.” Or if you’re in my house, some two-year-old kid comes up and says Daddy, I pooped my pants. And then by the time you get back to it, do you really remember where you were? No. So lets retarget to them and get them back.

For those of you who don’t understand retargeting, it’s basically where people come to your website and pay for them there. They didn’t take the desired action you want. But, then later on at some period of time, depending on how long you make the pixels or cookies last, could be roughly a few days to 180 days, they may be searching somewhere on the web and they see one of your ads. Ideally, your ad is placed against content that makes sense and has some sort of great offer. It brings them back to the website and they end up doing that offer. Now the biggest mistake people do is they just blindly retarget everyone everywhere. Like, once they come to their website they just make their ads all around the web and stalk them. That’s really not a great way to use retargeting. And there’s better ways to do it.

Here’s three reasons why you should care about retargeting. Basically, the clickthrough rate is ten times higher, which gives you great quality score, it give you much better return on your investment. Retargeted visitors are 70% more likely to convert. Just go to your Google analytics and search you’re new versus returning. And you’re going to notice that returning visitors are generally speaking a higher converting rate. So if you have a higher conversion rate on returning visitors, the goal should be to get more people to continue to keep coming back to your website. How do you do that? Through retargeting, right? One in five marketers have dedicated budgets for retargeting. It really should be five in five. But just to show you that people are doing it, and if you don’t do it, then your competitors are going to beat you.

Now, here are some retargeting strategies you could follow. I’m just going to give you a couple quick ones that are important. At least, do page level stuff. So for example, we have a client who does Canadian and US immigration. Well, we don’t want to follow up with the same ad. We can look at the URL structure if they were looking at Canadian immigration stuff, we can build an audience for Canadian immigration and then make an ad that’s related to Canadian immigration. Right? Vice versa, if they go visit the US immigration pages, we make an ad that revolves around US sales. So make sure that you have page level retargeting ads. Make sure creative that speaks to each sort of section or topic that you do or product that you do. We see often the biggest mistake people make is they just don’t have enough creatives. You need to create a lot of creatives to really make this kind of stuff work well. So don’t be lazy and just have one general creative. They are doing a poor job if that’s the case.

You can do the sequential type of retargeting. So for us, as an example, some people, so for the first week, we’re going to have them have an AdWords tip. Then week two, we’re going to send them screenshots of our AdWords improvements that we’ve done or case studies that we’ve done. Then, week three we’re going to send them to a AdWords webinar. Like this one, for example, or probably a recorded one. Then, in week four we’re going to show them we have been voted in somewhere and received some awards that we are the thought leaders on PPC. And then on week five, we’re going to show them about the PPC packages we have and give some sort of limited time offer to that package, or why they need to take action now. That’s really great. You’ve got to remember that banner blindness is a very real thing. You need to keep new marketing messages that go out there constantly. And you need to make it go in a sequential type of formula or funnel with your ads.

Customer match retargeting. Really important too. If you actually have email addresses, you can upload them to Google today. And you can do all kinds of amazing things with them. You can use them for up sells, cross sells, testimonials, surveys, exclusions, and, of course, creating amazing similar audiences. So you can say hey, these are people who bought from me. Google, go and find more people who’ve actually bought from me. It’s very, very, very powerful. We actually have another 33 other strategies that we could follow for retargeting type stuff that works great. But those three that will really help you out.

At the end of the day guys, PPC works. Investing in PPC is a great way to have predictable growth in your business. There is no reason not to invest. Do this little exercise for me right now. Pull out your phone or piece of paper and write down what is the revenue goal that you and your company want to be hitting on a monthly basis. Okay, just do that. Okay, I’m going to give you a second to do that. Write down the revenue goal you want to be making on a monthly basis. And now, right down the revenues that you are actually making. And then minus from the two. And that’s basically what it’s costing you. A lot of times people are like ” Oh, we shouldn’t get going” But really if you look at it that way, there’s no reason why not to invest in it right away.

Now, why some companies partner with Powered by Search is this, is they want to learn how to improve their PPC accounts, their AdWords accounts. They want to shortcut the mistakes. You can do this on your own, but you’re probably going to make a lot of mistakes that we already made. Like I said, I actively managed a couple hundred accounts. There are some things that I know that you don’t know. If you have not managed a couple hundred accounts at all, various different budgets, different stuff, there is definitely stuff that you don’t know that we know that we could shortcut you, and probably save you a lot of money. A lot of times companies lack the internal resources. I mean, they just don’t have it, the help or the expertise to handle it themselves. Or they want to grow fast. They just say you know what? We know it, but I know that we’re going to grow faster with your help. And we just need to go really, now. Like a funded started up, where they need to press go now to get their next revenue funding.An they want to get more for less at the end of the day. I mean, not only do we help you get more but we also help you save money with knowing what land mines not to fall into, or where the hidden taxes are.

The way we work, if you are interested in reaching out to us and getting some help, it’s really easy. We go through a discovery call. And then if it makes sense to work together, our team would do an audit and find all the opportunities. And then we’d sort all the opportunities by effort and impact and work on those opportunities that are going to drive the biggest impact with the least amount of effort first. And then if you don’t have internal resources, we have that here. We can do the implementation for you. So not only are we amazing coaches and consultants, we also have players on our team that if you don’t have enough players and resources, we can help you with implementation. So that’s our process.

If you’d like to do a discovery call with me, or get some tips on how to improve your PPC, feel free to reach out to me. The best way to do that is going to poweredbysearch.com, or you can go and book an appointment directly with me at poweredbysearch.com/bookmatt. I warn you, I do book up fast. So you may need to wait a couple weeks before you can actually get to me. But trust me, it’s worth it. If you really need to talk to someone and I am too booked up, there’s other people on our team that can help you too. I’m not the only PPC expert and specialist. In fact, I’m not even the smartest person on our team around PPC. There’s actually, we have a huge team of super smart people who can help you as well too. Thanks a lot for taking this webinar. And if you have any questions, again, feel free to come back and visit Powered by Search.

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