Here is a common error that most companies make when using pay per click advertising. I see this all of the time even when companies have previously outsourced their Pay-Per-Click (PPC) management to a professional firm.
Impact
First, let me illustrate the impact of this error. I saved one company $8,000 per month by pointing this error out to them. They were spending $10,000 per month with a very well known company that managed their account and yet they still made this error and wasted 80% of their clients money for a year - that is $96,000. And this is something very easy to check for.
You can easily check for this common mistake or have someone on your staff check for it and point it out to your PPC management company.
Why?
This mistake is rarely highlighted because it requires cross referencing your Google analytics report with your AdWords account.
You can’t see this by just looking at your AdWords stats.It happens because while running AdWords accounts we get too caught up in driving traffic and forget that the goal is to increase sales not website traffic. So we tend to focus on click-thru rates, ad performance, and bids.
What’s worse is that some PPC management companies get paid a percentage of what you spend in AdWords. The more you spend the more they get paid..hmmm. Does anyone see a conflict of interest here? (I’m going to get some angry comments for that)
So right now, you’re saying to yourself this is not happening to me because my guys/gals have conversion tracking installed. And we track which keywords are getting people to fill out our forms. OK.. What about all your leads that call in over the phone and didn’t fill out your form? How do you know which keywords are converting those visitors? You don’t know, and neither does your PPC company.
So what can you do?
- Well...you can tell which keywords are not getting them to call in and eliminate all of those. How? Easy...pull out your Google Analytics report because you can’t get this info from AdWords.
- Now that you have your Google Analytics report out, set the date range to include at least several thousand visits so we have a significant number to look at.
- Go to Traffic Sources - Search Engines and then click on Google (cpc). If you don’t have a category for Google(cpc) then you can go to Traffic Sources - Keywords.
- Now sort by avg time on site. You may have a lot keywords so you may want to export to a spreadsheet to sort and filter.
What are you looking for?
- You are looking for keywords that have a lot of visits but the avg time spent is less than 10 seconds.
- It could be higher or lower then 10 seconds depending on the depth of information on your site.
- Use your own judgment based on how much time you think someone would have to spend on your site to before they would understand your offer.
Now what?
The premise is that you paid to send these people to your site and once they got there they left because they didn’t see what they expected based on the keyword they used. Avinash Kaushik - the Google Analytics Evangelist - refers to this as, “I came. I saw. I puked!” Now stop spending your money on those keywords and see if the amount of leads coming in over the phone or through your forms goes down. Most likely it will stay the same.
Now take that new found money and invest in making your website convert better for the keywords that do work because, “I came. I saw. I puked” is also caused by the usability of your site not just the keywords we choose. We all need to keep improving our websites’ usability.
Costly Pay-Per-Click Advertising Errors