At some point or another, it’s going to happen; whether it’s a rise in ad costs, a decline to conversions, or even a complete flatline in your ad groups or campaigns.

It doesn’t matter how brilliant you are at PPC, some problems will arise that are just out of your control. But there is a simple checklist that you can go through to quickly find the problem, as it will normally be one of the common ones.

We are going to be looking into each of these common problems, and indentifying what the source is.

Total Flatline in Your Ad Groups Or Campaigns

Occasionally you will find that after looking through your analytics data, the ups and downs that you are used to seeing have gone. Instead, your data will show a complete flatline.

Here are some of the more common reasons why this occurs.

• You accidentally added a negative keyword to the account that has blocked something crucial.
• Your ad position has suddenly lowered.
• An issue with low bids or lack of budget in the account.
• Your quality score has suddenly dipped. (Could be because you promised something that isn’t true within your ad copy, or made some other mistake in the ad copy.)
• Somebody changed something with the back-end of the site

Your Ad Spend Has Risen

• Your bid rule is no longer best practice for your account. Experiment by switching between enhanced CPC and manual bidding. It could also be fixed by doing something as simple as aiming for a different position.
• Lack of negative keywords. Go into your search term report and look for clicks on your ads that are irrelevant.
• There is an increase in sales. (So why are you worried?!)
• A change in the competition.
• A keyword has suddenly risen dramatically in spend.

Your Sales & Leads Have Decreased

• It could be the time of year. If you have enough data, look deep into your industry and see if sales change by season.
• You may be out of stock.
• A competitor has entered the scene and undercut you.

Whilst all of these problems may seem extremely straight-forward, you would be surprised at how many people encounter them and don’t know what to do.

If you ever see a change in the results you are getting from your AdWords account, make sure you go through this checklist to double-check.

Quality score is one of the most important things to pay attention to inside your AdWords account. Amazingly, it does not even automatically show the figure next to your keywords by default.

To make it appear next to your keywords, navigate to the keywords tab, click on columns > customize columns > and then add qual.score from inside the attributes metric.

Google assigns quality to keywords score based on factors such as the CTR on your ads and the bounce rate on your landing pages.

They want ads to be clicked often and when clicked they want users to prove they got what they were looking for by staying on the site. That way, users get a better experience, and Google’s profit is filled.

Let’s look at the four reasons that make it essential that you pay extremely close attention to quality score for all of your keywords.

Ads Appear In a Better Position

If your ad appears higher, it’s going to have more chance of being clicked, right?

As a way of rewarding ads that perform well and ensuring that they appear in the best position, those ads will appear higher due to their high quality score.

If you manage to out-perform your competitors with more compelling ad copy and better landing pages, you will appear higher than them without spending more.

Clicks Are Cheaper

Another reason why quality score is so important is because it directly impacts the amount you pay for each click.

For most businesses, the CPC of your account is going to be a make or break factor that determines their success.

And with a high quality score resulting in massively cheaper clicks, and a low quality score causing dramatic increases, it becomes extremely important.

Your Account Will Be More Profitable

It’s pretty safe to say that your quality score is capable of single handedly determining how profitable your AdWords account is going to be.

Cheaper clicks and better positioning is going to reduce how much you need to spend to make a conversion. With it costing less to convert traffic, your business is going to get better and better.

Focus on creating compelling ad copy so that users are enticed to click and your CTR increases.

Also, ensure that your landing page offer something valuable to the users, and aligns with what the ad copy was promising. That way, your bounce rate will be lower (which affects quality score) and you will do a better job of converting visitors in the first place.

Google is finally making a change that should have been made a very long time ago, something that has caused headaches and frustration for countless AdWords consultants and business owners alike.

In the past, it was impossible to distinguish between different types of conversions. So, if one person actually purchased your product, whereas another simply downloaded your book, these two conversions would appear identical to advertisers when they look in their AdWords account.

Now, Google has officially announced that this is a thing of the past. With new flexible conversion tracking, advertisers will easily be able to tell the difference between different types of conversions.

Two new columns replace the previous: “one per click” and “many per click”. Instead, these two columns are going to be replaced by “converted clicks” and “conversions”. (Go into customise columns in your AdWords account to add them to your interface)

Vishal Goenka, the product manager of Google Adwords had this to say in a video: “Converted clicks record clicks that deliver value to your business, or in other words, only clicks that drive conversions,”

“The new conversions column gives you even greater visibility. It allows you to see the relative value of each converted click. This column will report all your conversions, whether you want to count all instances of the conversion or just unique conversions. Now you can focus on the value of each conversion delivered to your business.”

Check out the full video below.

Many of us don’t have the time to dig deep through our AdWords accounts on a regular basis.

However, even if you spend less than an hour optimising your account, it’s time well spent…

…Especially when you use some of these strategies, which are quick and easy to implement.

Reduce Your Bids For Keywords With High Conversion Costs

If you don’t have a figure in mind for how much you are willing to spend to get a conversion, then you need to work one out.

From there, you can look through your data and make adjustments to your bids on keywords that are not managing to stick within this figure.

Reducing bids for keywords that are not bringing in the ideal number of conversions is an effective way to keep costs down.

In doing so, you will ensure that you spend less of your budget on the keywords that are not doing very well, leaving more budget for the better performing keywords.

Use The Search Term Report To Add Negatives

Go to the campaign tab and then click on keywords, and then you should see “keyword details”, click on that

When you click on “all”, you will be able to see all of the search terms that your ads showed for within the time period stated at the top right of the AdWords interface. You can even export that data to excel.

You can then look through and identify certain search terms that you don’t want your ads to show for, and add them to your account as negatives.

This is a great, time-efficient way of maintaining the relevancy throughout your account, and preventing wasted clicks.

Adjust The Bidding Strategy in The Dimensions Tab

If your ads have been running for a while, then you will likely have a decent amount of data to work with.

You may find that your ads perform better at different times. People might not be as likely to make a purchase on a Monday as they are on a Friday.

By going into the dimensions tab, you can adjust your bids across entire campaigns based on the day of the week, and even the time of day.

Raising the bids for times where people are most likely to buy is a great way of improving your return on investment, and it only takes a couple of minutes.

Rewrite Ad Copy For Ads That Show Often

When split testing ads, it can take a while to go through all of your ad copy and rewrite the worse performing ones.

If you don’t have enough time to change all of the ads, focus on the ones that are appearing the most and getting the most clicks

By sorting the ads by clicks or cost, you can easily identify ads the most important ads in your account. Then, you can focus on changing these, to ensure you get maximum benefit from doing the least amount of work.

It’s really important that you continue to make changes to your AdWords account, even if you think you don’t have long to work on it

Even if you spend an hour a month, you can save yourself money and get more out of your AdWords account.

Thanks for reading.

Relevancy is arguably the most important factor to pay attention to within your AdWords accounts.

A lack of relevancy can cause your ads to get clicked on less, it can cause people to immediately leave your site even when they do click, and it can even result in Google themselves charging you more for your clicks!

So, how is all this possible? And how can we ensure a high level of relevancy throughout our marketing efforts, to ensure we see the very best results?

Let’s find out.

Ad copy – Keywords

First of all, it is essential that every single keyword be inside an ad group that has ad copy that is relevant to the keyword.

If you don’t, people are going to be less likely to click on your ad. (Which will result in Google decreasing your quality score and charging you more for your clicks, which we will cover next)

When your ad appears to Google users, your ad copy will appear bolded if it matches the keyword that they used to search.

So, the more relevant your ad copy is to the keyword that they searched for, the more people are likely to click on your ad.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to make sure that you match the ad headline to the keyword.

So, if you have the keyword “adwords training” inside an ad group, make sure the headline of the ad reads “adwords training”.

Now, in order to make sure that your keywords are relevant to your ads, you will need to create many ad groups.

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they are new to AdWords is to put too many keywords in each ad group.

The Impact of Quality Score

Quality score is a score out of 10 given to each of your keywords. It starts at 7, and it will go up or down based on certain factors, which will cause you to have cheaper or more expensive clicks.

If you do a really good job and maintain a high level of relevancy and have a high percentage of people click on your ad, you will be awarded a quality score of 10, causing that click to cost you 30% less than it would normally.

If you do a bad job and get a quality score of 1, you will be charged 600% more for every click.

The key to achieving a high quality score is directly related to the relevancy throughout your AdWords account.

If your ad copy is not relevant to your keyword, not many people are going to click on your ad.

If your keyword or keywords have a low click through rate, Google calculates this as part of their algorithm, decides that your ad is irrelevant, will lower your quality score, and charge you more for each of your clicks as a result

Landing Pages

Finally, you need to make sure that the landing page that the user lands on after clicking on your ad is relevant to the keyword and the ad copy.

If people click on your ad and decide that the place that they landed on wasn’t what they were looking for and then they immediately leave, this will negatively affect your quality score.

Therefore, we need to ensure the page that people land on after clicking on our ad is relevant to the keyword, has what they were looking for, and is attractive and compelling enough to get them to stay on our site.

Also, it’s important to not overpromise within your ad copy. By that I mean suggesting something within your ad copy that isn’t reflected on the page that they land on.

So if you are currently offering a 20% offer and you mention it in your ad copy, make sure you reflect that once they land on your site. Otherwise, they are going to think they are in the wrong place, give up, and leave your site.

That’s all for today.

Relevancy is key, so make it happen, and make more money!

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