ANALYSIS OF A FAILING ADWORDS ACCOUNT

Ok this is going to be a little fun, and a little brutal at the same time.

This will illustrate the process of analyzing an account that is in pretty bad shape. I would consider over a million impressions with a clickthrough rate of almost ZERO to be in pretty bad shape.

Let's take a look:

When we log into the account, this is what we find:

Ok, with a 0% click through rate we have nowhere to go but up, lets see why this campaign is performing so poorly. As a side note, it is not smart to be using the Google tool to monitor those conversions, even though it is free. Get a real 3rd party tracker. Google representatives have admitted that this data is used in certain decisions Google has to make about the adwords program, and it is not smart to "open your books" to Google in this way. Ok lets look a little closer and see what we can find:

Notice two things- There are NO negative keywords at all, so there is no way to filter out bad or poorly performing traffic, or just plain searchers that are really not looking for a debt consolidation service that this company offers. That is the first thing, The second thing is that there are no sites listed to NOT be shown in the content network. In taking an account that is in trouble, its best to just shut of the content network completely while you work with your ROI on Google only for a little while, because almost every other option including the search network gives you worse quality traffic. So to stop the leakage, that is the first thing to do.

Lets move on a little bit more:

Just as expected, the content network is performing poorly as you can see here. The other thing to notice, which isn't obvious in this picture above, is that there is only ONE campaign and ONE ad group in the whole account. It is very hard to target your ads this way and get a good a good click through rate, which is the chief thing you need in order to reduce your cost.

The other thing that should be noticed is that they are paying a premium price on the content network traffic. The content network hack as described elsewhere in this blog should be employed, so that they can reduce their content network costs, but right now they should nuke it until the account can get under control. So far, here are the immediate steps to do:

1. Pause the whole account and lets do some operating
2. Nuke the content network from the one poorly performing campaign. Consider nuking the search network too, while you work on your targeting and Click throught Rate

Lets do a little further analysis and see if there is anything that is actually going right in this account:

Ok, this is a little brutal, don't say I didn't warn you. Like many beginners there are a list of keywords all lumped together regardless of concept, and a few ads. Also in the ads the phone number is listed which violates Google's terms of service for adwords. They don't want people to put phone numbers in there so that Google gets cheated out of their clicks. It is only a matter of time before a Google customer service rep sees this and nukes the whole campaign- not a comfortable place to be in. https://adwords.google.com/select/guidelines.html shows you what is kosher and what is not. You won't find phone numbers specifically mentioned on that page, but anything where you are cheating google out of clicks puts you at risk and is not a good long-term strategy. Phone numbers are a real dicey grey area, and I would avoid them, or at least be testing alternative ads, so that if the worst happens you can just get the ads themselves disabled and not your whole ad group with all the keywords. In this case its the whole account, this ad group, so that is gonna hurt.

Also some of the positions are very poor and there is almost no chance of getting a good CTR going because of these positions.

Now in spite of all of this, there are still certain keywords that are getting a decent CTR.

Instead of trying to fix this ad group which is almost dead, it is better to take these keywords that are actually working, and make an ad group that actually works out of them. Take a keyword that is getting a good CTR, like "debt services", and is actually getting the cheapest conversions, and build an ad group out of that concept and that concept alone.

Unfortunately, brand new ads will have to be tested that don't have the phone number in them, but if those ads are really focused on "debt services" and we monitor the competition for a litle while and make some better ads, there is the potential for building a decent business out of all this.

So to summarize here's the steps I would take to stop the leakeage and optimize this account:

1. Consider starting a totally new account with a fresh history to do your new experiments on, as it will take a long time with 1 million impressions to get your CTR above 5% for all time
2. Nuke the content network immediately in the campaign settings.
3. Look at your sites access logs to get some negative keywords in the account for some better targeting. There should be plenty of data there to get some good ones.
4. Take the few keywords that are doing well and build an ad group around them individually. Don't add unrelated phrases to these new ad groups- keep them in the same conceptual "theme"
5. Test some new ads that fit the "theme" of those keywords and stomp what your competition is doing for that keyword phrase
6. When you have a stable CTR, only then add the content network back in, but do it with the content network hack described elsewhere in this blog. This will allow you to pay much much less for content network traffic, which typically converts much less.

Now for the shocker.

It wouldn't be ethical for me to say exactly how much, but these guys paid a LOT of money from a major SEM firm, who I won't name, for their account set up. I won't say how much, but I will tell you I could buy a nice, nice car to drive around in for what they paid. Maybe I am in the wrong business.

We are going to bail them out for a lot less money than they paid for their origional "setup", and I'll post the results in future blog posts.

In the mean time, have fun kids, and watch your keyword themes.

-Steve

Steve Blom
Certified Google Adwords Professional

Adwords Training Video Author:

Blog:
http://marketingnewsblog.adwordstraining.org

Free Adwords video:
http://www.adwordstraining.org/video/free_adwords_tutorial_video.htm

Contact: steve@adwordstraining.org