Mona Elesseily will be speaking on the “#FAIL Free PPC” panel at SearchFest 2014 which will take place on February 28th, 2014 in Portland, Oregon. For more information and to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I work as the VP Online Marketing Strategy at Page Zero Media and have been in the online marketing space for 10 years. I work with several clients and develop PPC strategies related to search, display, remarketing/retargeting, PLA, mobile, geo specific, etc. I also do work related to conversion rate optimization (CRO), landing page optimization (LPO) and develop integrated online marketing strategies. I also write for online publications like SearchEngineLand.com and the HuffingtonPost.com to name a couple.
2) What are some of the most common PPC “Fails” that you see in self-managed (or agency managed) accounts?
There are quite a few fails in campaign settings area of Google AdWords. The default settings are not always obvious so it can take a little digging to get there. One such default setting relates to ad rotation and the default option is to “optimize for clicks” With this, Google will selects the ad that has the highest CTR (not the ad that has the best ROI/CPA) and serves it more often. My advice is to select “rotate indefinitely” so that all ads show more evenly. With this option, you’ll be able to select the best performing ad in terms of CPA & ROI.
Another default option is relates to keyword matching options. The default in Google for phrase match and exact match to include plurals misspellings & other close variants. We opt out of this as we expect misspellings, plurals, etc. to factored in with our broad match strategies that involve precise bidding, negative terms, etc.
My advice is to choose “do not include close variants”. With this, you should have a specific broad match strategy and include specific keyword terms and match types in your accounts.
I’ll cover many more PPC “fails” in my SearchFest presentation.
3) Please share with us some Enhanced Campaign functionalities that most people should be using but aren’t.
There are a couple of functionalities that are not well utilized. The first is advertisers not making bid adjustments to mobile. With Enhanced Campaigns, advertisers are automatically opted into mobile advertising and the mobile bid is equal to the desktop bid. It’s worth noting that it’s not possible to make this change while setting up a new campaign. To change this, advertisers must go to setting tab -> devices to make mobile bid changes.
The other is not modifying bids by geographic region. A very obvious way to improve ROI is to focus on geographic areas that are performing well and/or not performing well. Here’s an example:
New York
Ad spend = $2000
Conversions = 2
CPA = $1000
Chicago
Ad spend = $1000
Conversions = 100
CPA = $10
In the example above, it would make sense to ramp up bids in Chicago and decrease bids in New York. Note: the above example is for illustrative purposes only and there are a lot of other factors that go into increasing/decreasing bids.
I’ll also be covering Enhanced Campaigns in my SearchFest presentation.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.