Okay grass-hoppa…take a knee or park it lotus-style while we emblazon and illustrate these 3 lessons on how to FINALLY see success-sized-strides with your PPC campaigns.

Lesson #1: Focus on Structure First

If your PPC conversion and ROI completely suck, then it’s time to go back to basics! It’s literally the very first thing any PPC expert you hire is going to do anyway. They’ll approach your account like they approach all other new clients. They’ll examine three things:

1. The number of keywords in each ad group.
2. The number of ads in each ad group.
3. How relevant keywords are to one another and the ads within each group.

They’re looking to optimize around tightly-themed ad groups and clean up the shitstorm you probably left in your wake as you were just “wingin-it.” Within a week or so, if you log back into your account you’re going to gasp so don’t be holding a cup of coffee: organization…

… wait a minute…look at all that juicy specific relevancy and those sparkling new optimized campaigns. Holy heaping qualified traffic Batman! Imagine that, they found an effective way to spread your budget-feelers out a bit wider while focusing on, say products for example.

Lesson #2: Forget the Keyword Fodder

Don’t let the keyword trolls fool you. Don’t be one of those people who think they can somehow game the machine or treat PPC like the Wheel of Fortune. If keywords aren’t performing, then either put them on pause, add them to your negative keyword list, etc.

Now, if you asked your new PPC expert how they distinguish a crappy keyword from a good fit, the first thing they’ll say is, “I look for any running history to gather data. At least a week on the ultra-low end.”

If it’s been failing miserably for like 6 months they’ll do a little homework before grabbing their keyword bazooka.

1. Is the bid high enough? Oftentimes what you’ll find out is that the reason the keyword hasn’t been performing is because your bid isn’t competitive enough. You’ve been a bit too conservative. It might be that you just need to kick it up a notch or three instead of sitting at a penny…
2. Is it just low search volume? Conversely, if the bid is high enough but the traffic is still horrid maybe it’s too complex (long-tail) or outside the realm of real users (how we actually type something into Google to search for something). If this is the case only a small pivot is in order to capture a bit more qualified traffic.
3. How’s the match type? What if everything’s awesome but your conversions and click-throughs blow? Then you probably need to pause and get more specific; more relevant.

Lesson #3: Continuously Adapt & Optimize New Ad Text

Right, so you need to be constantly changing, adapting and curating your ad text. Stagnating ad text is never a good thing. The diminishing returns are typically off the charts. Of course there are exceptions but never stop testing and tweaking. Here’s a thought…you could hire a copywriter.

Alright, now go practice Tiger Kicking the fail out of your PPC campaigns and replacing it with the new knowledge and perspective you’ve just gained. Thanks for reading!