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:
- Pause the whole account and lets do some operating
- 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:
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