Paid Search Misadventures

Question 1

What are some targeting issues that could be causing challenges?

Answer 1

Incorrect Keyword Selection: Using overly broad or irrelevant keywords may drain your budget without generating quality leads. Alternatively, focusing too narrowly might limit traffic.

**Solution: **Conduct keyword research using tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush. Focus on a mix of broad, phrase, and exact match types and regularly review search term reports.

Geotargeting Errors: Campaigns might be targeting irrelevant locations or excluding profitable regions.
Solution: Double-check your geotargeting settings and ensure they align with your audience.

Question 2

What are some budget contraints that could be causing trouble?

Answer 2

Insufficient Budget: Your daily budget may be too low to compete in high-cost-per-click (CPC) industries, limiting impressions.

• **Solution: **Allocate budgets based on campaign priority and average CPC. Consider reallocating funds to higher-performing campaigns.

Overspending on Low-Performing Campaigns: Some campaigns might consume your budget without delivering results.

• Solution: Pause or reduce the budget for underperforming campaigns and reallocate to higher-converting ones.

Question 3

How can the landing page experience be a factor contributing to the campaign’s unsuccess?

Answer 3

Irrelevant Landing Pages: Sending users to a generic homepage instead of a specific landing page can lead to low conversions.

• **Solution: **Align landing page content with ad messaging. Ensure it’s optimized for speed and mobile devices.

Poor User Experience: Slow load times or confusing layouts can cause users to bounce.

• **Solution: **Improve page speed and simplify the user journey.

Question 4

Why could low ad rank be a factor into poor campaign success?

Answer 4

**Poor Quality Score: **A low Quality Score can limit impressions and increase CPCs.
* Solution: Focus on improving ad relevance, CTR, and landing page quality.

Question 5

How can seasonality or market changes affect campaign performance?

Answer 5

Fluctuations in Demand: Certain industries experience shifts in demand, affecting performance.
* Solution: Adjust campaigns seasonally and keep an eye on trends.
Increased Competition: A surge in competitors can raise CPCs or lower impression share.
* Solution: Analyze competitors and adjust bids, targeting, or messaging to stand out.

Question 6

Shared budget potential challenge

Answer 6

With shared budgets, you’re essentially going “first come first served”. I’ve had clients who, at different times, will ask to emphasize certain product lines, and other times they say they have no preference and to simply go for as many total conversions as possible. I’ll give you an example.

Hypothetical business sells 2 different products. At any point, based on their own supply availability or the cost of goods, etc, one product might have better profit margins for them or vice versa. So at different times, they might want to push one product over the other. That’s where those products having their own campaign budgets makes sense. However, if they have a slow month and a lower budget, they might want to go after all available potential buyers regardless of what they’re looking for, so a shared budget makes sense, because they don’t care if one product dominates the budget.

Think of a car dealership - they might have a certain model they want to push, but if they’re having a slow month and someone walks in saying they want to test drive something that isn’t their product of focus, the salesperson isn’t gonna say “nah, that’s not the one we want to sell the most this month, have a nice day”, they’ll still take that opportunity.