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Below Are the First Items We Check When We Analyze a Prospective Client’s Marketing Campaign.

Quality Score Problems:

• You are using keywords that are too broad, and this is killing your quality score and conversion rates.
• Your Adgroups have too many unrelated keywords, and the ads are not relevant.
• Your landing pages do not have important keywords on them, or they are not specific enough for your Adgroups.
• You have no negative keywords, and you don’t use phrase and exact-match keywords enough.

Campaign Setting Errors:

• You are day parting based on your office hours and are missing out on great sales that come in after hours.
• You have the search network turned on, and you are in a B2B market.
• You are inadvertently rationing your ads with standard distribution instead of accelerated distribution.
• You have the content network turned on, and you have never run a site-performance report to block bad sites that do not convert.
• You never split your content ad prices to even out your conversion costs.
• Your campaign budget is set too low, and your keyword bids are too high. You are not engaging the algorithm to “pull” your ads to optimize your click costs.

Geo-targeting Errors:

• Your geo-targeting is set to show your ads in too many countries from one campaign.
• Your geo-targeting is set on a city-level setting and is missing a lot of good traffic from servers outside your city.
• You are not running local keywords on a national level to capture all the traffic you can.
• You are using state-name keywords in broad match, and you are unaware that they are showing up for cities and towns you never intended to run on.

Analytics Tracking Set Up Issues:

• You have not set up goals properly to see where you are losing sales or leads in your sales funnel.
• You have not set up your analytics to see full-referring URLs, so you can see exactly where your visitors are coming from and what keywords they are using.
• Your site uses multiple domains, and you are not passing the analytics data to other domains properly.
• You haven’t used the URL builder to track the results of your other campaigns.

Just Plain Wrong:

• Your ads land on dead pages or irrelevant pages, or they all go to your home page even though you have plenty of good landing pages on your site.
• You haven’t tried using content ads or site-targeted ads because someone told you they don’t work.
• You are violating Google’s Terms of Service by double serving ads from two accounts with very similar offerings.
• Your competitors are running pay-per-click ads on your name, and you are not running ads on your own name because you tell yourself it’s enough if you are showing up in the natural results.
• Your competitors are using your trade name in their ads, and you never issued a cease-and-desist letter to them from your attorney.

Ad Copy Problems:

• Your ads have none of your keywords in them, and they are not being bolded.
• Your ads have phone numbers in them, and this is driving your CTR down.
• Your ads don’t make use of any keywords or ad copy in the display URL.
• Your ads don’t fully explain what you offer on your site, and your bounce rate is extremely high.
• You are running split tests on multiple ads without splitting the traffic, and Google has automatically chosen the ad that makes them the most money with a high CTR, but your conversions from that ad are ineffective.
• You made your ad copy cute and catchy at the expense of getting a high quality score.
• You did not capitalize all the first letters in your ad text.
• You did not use up all the space in your ad, or you used the space you had without being specific.
• You got an error message from Google for using a keyword that was not allowed, and you didn’t request an exception for the use of that keyword.

Bidding Problems and Errors:

• Your bids are extremely high to get you a top position, but you have never tried to get the same position with a lower cost by improving your quality scores.
• Your bids are so low you are showing on page two; this is useless.
• Your bids for some of your best converting keywords are too low because they are buried deep in an overcrowded ad group, and you didn’t split them out into their own Adgroup.
• You obsess over keyword bids constantly and make too many adjustments based on short-term anomalies.
• You are obsessed with being number one on the page, and you have never experimented with lower positions that can be much more cost effective.

Keyword Research and Use:

• You have used all the big keyword programs like Wordtracker, but you have never checked what keywords your competitors are using the most.
• You don’t run keywords that are common misspellings.
• You didn’t try running keywords that are tangential to your industry or keywords that people type in well before they make a purchase.
• You have never combined your keywords with generic words that boost conversions like “reviews” or “buy.”
• You are not using keywords that are your competitors’ brand names or URLs.
• You are using keywords that are so broad they are meaningless and are killing your quality scores.
• You have many keywords that have been “slapped” with high minimum bids, and you gave up on bidding on them because you have no idea how to get the minimum bids down.
• Some of your keywords attract an audience you don’t want (you may be selling B2B software, and your keywords are attracting consumer traffic).