Paid Search Faux Pas 

Search-based Marketing is big for 2006, and it’s only going to get bigger. According to a recent Forrester report, search was the #1 interactive online marketing tool for 2005. Last year, online marketers spent $5.75 billion on search engine marketing. This whopping figure is expected to double in the next five years. 

The lion’s share of search marketing efforts and expenditure is going to Paid Search. According to the same study, 83% of all 2005 search marketing dollars went to Paid Search or Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. But are marketers getting the return on their dollars that they could be getting? We’ve found in our practice that there are dozens of commonly overlooked aspects to paid search campaigns that can sabotage your marketing efforts. Here are just a few:

Ranking Myopia

Some companies are obsessed with having their ad show up in the Number 1 or Number 2 slot in the paid search area of major search engines; so much so that they spend big dollars bidding on their search terms. While it’s great to be in the top spot for visibility, a high ranking is only a potential doorway to turning that ad into a productive lead generation tool. When setting a PPC budget, be clear about what your goals are, both in terms of visibility and conversions. If you can’t tie PPC dollars spent to actual new leads or conversions, you are likely throwing money down the search engine drain. 

Keyword Chaos

We consistently find that companies do not understand the importance of proper keyword and adgroup setup. They either have too many keywords or too few. And, even if the keywords are targeted, the adgroups may not be. If your adgroups are too general, you run the risk of having your ad served up to a non-qualified prospect, lowering click-through rates or resulting in empty (non-qualified) clicks. Make sure that your keywords are as specific as possible, and that your ads and adgroups are tightly aligned with your keywords. 

Overlooking the Offer

It’s amazing how many companies use great ad copy to invite the user in, then take them to a web page with no specific offer. Or worse, there is a disconnect in messaging between the landing page and the ad. If you’ve gotten someone to click through to your website, don’t make the mistake of leaving them lost, confused, or randomly surfing until they eventually abandon your site, leaving no trace behind. Instead, provide an offer of value, whether it’s a whitepaper, free demo, discount, etc. Then, link your ad directly to a landing page that reinforces the ad copy, offer, and gives easy, specific instructions on accessing the offer. They get what they want and you get the lead you want.

Loser Landing Pages 

We cannot stress enough how important the landing page is to your overall PPC campaign strategy. The landing page should be singularly focused on one goal: Follow-through with the promise of the offer from your adword, and get the user to register for the offer. For a more thorough discussion on increasing conversions through landing page best practices, see Nowspeed’s article, “Landing More Leads.”

Set and Forget

Put all these recommendations above into place, and you’re on the way to ensuring a successful PPC marketing campaign. But if you don’t take the time to monitor, adjust and improve, you will sabotage all your efforts. Unfortunately, this “set and forget” attitude is all too prevalent, resulting in lost opportunities for truly optimizing PPC campaigns. Why the neglect? Frankly, staying on top of PPC campaigns requires a lot of work. You need to learn how to use PPC analytic tools, and track what keywords are most successful, what offers are working, and what ad messages are working. Building a test plan is also critical to determining what works best. Only when you analyze this data, and make changes based on your findings, will you get the quality conversions that you want for the least price.

Paid Search campaigns that are well executed can be one of the most cost-effective ways of generating qualified leads. And, with the trend toward more and more dollars going into paid search, the bar is constantly being raised as to what makes a Paid Search campaign work. For more information on Nowspeed Marketing’s Paid Search services, contact us. 


Have any comments or suggestions regarding this topic? We’d love to hear them! 

Email your comments to info@nowspeed.com.