Unspoken Paid Search Issues: Know How You Can Combat Them

Paid Search Is Awesome. You Aren’t Killing it? 

There is no other advertising method as “exact” as paid search.

What do I mean by “exact”?

To better explain this, let’s take a look at Instagram/Facebook ads. Yes, you can target specific demographics, behaviors, interests and retarget visitors who have already visited your website. While that’s all great, many of the Instagram users who are scrolling through their feed aren’t in “shopping mode”.

They are typically lying in bed at 11pm, half asleep trying to catch up with the outside world. That is heavily reflected in the industries CTR’s (Click Through Rate):

The CTR of most major social advertising platforms fall below 1% (except Twitter). And well… there’s a different story with Google And Bing.

Googles average CTR across all industries is 2.88% and Bing does not fall far behind with an average CTR of 2.83%. This is because of that “exact” quality I was talking about earlier. Your ad only shows up for people searching for your business or industry. Your ads are only showing up for people already interested and engaged. Not only that, you only pay when your ad is clicked. 

So… why does your dashboard look a little something like this?

Or Maybe:

• Your CTR isn’t even breaking 1%
• Your CPC’s are way too high for your budget
• You’re simply not getting enough clicks.

There are a few reasons this may be happening. The good news is, we know why and we’re going to tell you how to fix it. 

Let's get started! 

Targeting All Geographics In One Campaign

Does your location targeting look like this?

STOP!

PAUSE YOUR CAMPAIGN NOW!

When you target all your desired geographic regions in one campaign, Google Or Bing attempts to spread your budget evenly amongst all of them, limiting the performance of countries who may get you more, cheaper clicks. Not only that, but the Google/Bing algorithm will begin to show your ads significantly more in the country performing the best. This may not necessarily be the best converting country. 

So, what should I do?

Our answer:  Create a different campaign for each targeted region! 

Creating a different campaign for each region will allow Google or Bing to show your ads to their uttermost potential in each of your targeted regions. This will also let you experiment with different bids in different countries, being some countries will require different bids on similar keywords. 

After letting these campaigns run for a couple weeks, try creating a campaign, once again, targeting all of your geographic locations and properly adjust your location bid percentage based on the data you gathered from your independent campaigns.

Not sure what I’m talking about?

Take a look:

We found through experimenting that our keyword bids in the UK performed well at cheaper costs than Australia, Canada and the United States. The opposite was found for the US and Australia, who needed a slight increase in bids to perform as desired and to its highest potential. 

Experimenting and patience is crucial to run successful Google and Bing ads campaigns. Not only will your ads perform better, but it will help you save money by not “overbidding”. 

So, you’ve implemented this strategy and your ads are still not performing well?

Or, you are only targeting one location? 

There are a few more factors that could be limiting your campaigns performance.

Let’s dive into the next! 

The CTR Domino Effect 

The click through rate your ads are receiving heavily impact the long term results of your campaign.

Low CTR = low quality score

Low quality score = less ad coverage/lower ranking

Lower ranking = lower CTR 

And this can keep going, and going and going.

What is a quality score?

When looking at your ad groups chart, you will notice “Qual. score” to your far right. Google/Bing ranks your ad groups quality on a scale of 0-10. This ranking is determined by many factors such as your ads' relevance to your website, website quality, keyword relevance, keyword use in ads and much more. You should aim to have a quality score of 7 or higher. If it is lower, you may want to take a look at your ads, website and keywords. 

So what can you do?!!! 

Answer:   Add more ads! 

I’m not talking to 2 or 3 ads. I’m not talking 5 or 6 ads. Each ad group should contain AT LEAST 10 ads with varying ad text. Each ad should include ad text with many different keywords you are bidding on that are RELEVANT to your website. 

Your ads should each contain different sentence structures, orders and keywords to help match many different searches. Try to think of what someone would be searching. You can even use seo tools such as semrush.com, quora.com or even look at frequently asked questions on the google search results to find out exactly what people are searching.

You should try to match these questions and keywords in your ad. This will show google you are providing value to the searchers and your quality score should increase, along with your rankings and ad performance. 

After a week or two of experimenting (yes more experimenting…BE PATIENT) it will be clear which ads are performing the best. Take a look at your ads with the lowest CTR and pause or delete them. These ads are holding back your ad groups average CTR and ultimately reducing its performance potential.

When you pause or delete these ads and continue to let the rest run, you will see an increase in your ad groups average CTR, performance and potentially your quality score. 

There’s one more problem affecting your quality score… 

YOUR KEYWORDS! 

And that leads us to the third problem affecting your campaign performance. 

Keyword Clutter

Simply adding a few keywords that are relevant to your website, product or business will not do the trick. Using the Google or Bing Keyword Tool and adding 3,000 keywords to your ad group without reviewing them could be damaging to your quality score. 

So, what should you do? 

Continue to use the keyword tool but review the list.

First,

Search for keywords relevant to your business, then go to “keyword suggestions”.

After you have selected all rows on all pages, click “export”.

This will export all the keywords into an excel sheet in order of average monthly searches.

Here is where you need to go through ALL the keywords and phrases in the excel sheet. This is very important. You will need to delete all the irrelevant keywords on the list. There will be more than you think.

After you have gone through the list you can copy and paste the keywords into your ad group.

It’s that simple! 

Now your ads and keywords are all optimized, relevant and your quality score should increase. 

Your geographic targeting is now stellar. You have an abundance of relevant, quality ads with an amazing selection of keywords to go along with it. What else could there be? What other problems could you possibly face? 

Tossin In The Towel Too Early.

I’ve said it a million times and I’ll say it a million more. BE PATIENT. 

Has your campaign been running for a few days and had unsatisfactory performance even after optimizing it? 

Breathe in……. and breathe out……. 

It takes Google and Bing AT LEAST a week to review and learn about your campaign to then update its quality score.

Simply wait and let your campaign run for a week or two after completing the previous steps. Too many people see no results after a few days and pause or delete the campaign. Don’t be that person! There’s a ton of potential ahead of your campaign. Just wait and see. 

That’s all folks!

There is no rocket science to these steps. They are simply overlooked problems that everyone can fix that very same day. Therefore, if you want to increase your campaign's performance, you should go do that…

Like right now.