The most common way PPC ad budget is wasted

The most common way PPC ad budget is wasted: -

To measure what matters in the PPC account.

To avoid wasted expenses and incorrect data so that someone can make the most of the media budget.

As paid search marketers they will have something of a love affair with data.

PPC has become more expensive over the years, making it even more imperative to understand where every penny is going and if it is producing sales.

Having managed millions of dollars in ad spend across all kinds of industries, someone has also had the opportunity to find something amazing:

All those different accounts have many of the same problems!

Despite the obsession with data and conversion generation, there are many search marketers who are not or are too obsessed with it and completely miss the most important piece that plays in sales: marketing.

For data-obsessed paid search marketers, audits can provide a new way to use data and dramatically improve performance.

Usually, one is done to assess the efficiency of spending.

The trick is, in many cases, that the data used for decision making is flawed.

The metering is not configured correctly and creates a domino effect in decision making.

Here's the double-edged sword that creates inefficiency early on in PPC.

Conversion tracking:

It's always surprising to find accounts without effective conversion tracking.

It is usually one of the following scenarios:

• The accounts are tracking all user shares known to mankind and include them in optimizations, including low-value stocks.
• Some tracking integrations are missing, so a complete picture of leads or sales is missing.
• They are tracking a very high-value stock (but one that happens less frequently), robbing PPC of the credit it should get in the buying process.

Both are problematic for different reasons.

If someone not tracking all conversions, someone leaves valuable data on the table.

Take companies like HVAC or lawyers. 

Generally speaking, most leads come in the form of phone calls, not in the form of introductions.

However, many do not have call tracking so they only get part of the picture of what their PPC is generating.

Technically, they have conversion tracking, but it is not helping them at all.

There is also the opposite problem: so many things are being tracked, conversions are counted twice.

This often happens when accounts are transferred to different administrators over time.

Here is an example of phone calls that are counted in two different ways:

it's the same conversion, but one version is counted each time, and the other only the unique caller:

The most common way PPC advertising budget is wasted.

This is common to find when going through the audit process.

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Businesses often say they have conversion tracking in place, but when they research what actually constitutes a conversion for their business, it quickly becomes apparent that the numbers are not correct.

Not surprisingly, these cases cause most of the conversion rate estimates to be skewed, either very high or very low.

Also, what is defined as conversion may vary based on industries or customer definitions.

The efficiency of advertising investment:

Clearly, most Google Ads accounts don't do a good job tracking conversions.

Campaign performance and budget get more complicated over time.

In the past, Google Ads was pretty much the only game in town, so things like CPA and ROAS were calculated in their silo.

Have Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, YouTube, Programmatic Viewing and the list goes on and on.

Investing in Google Ads does not exist in a vacuum.

While this creates incredible opportunities to reach potential customers in so many ways, it also makes attribution a real beast.

Since Google Ads is based on PPC, it didn't make much sense to bid on keywords or search terms that didn't convert.

If someone is paying for non-converting traffic, they are probably paying for the wrong traffic.

But not all of them turn to search, and as many marketers know, search is a powerful information discovery engine.

If someone is researching a high-cost, enterprise-grade B2B product, is the money being wasted on customers doing their due diligence on a product?

The key is to assess attribution to understand the role paid search plays throughout a user's purchase process and to make any necessary adjustments.

Without that context, someone is basically judging Google Ads' ability to convert at the bottom of the funnel.

These search terms are how the target audience actually finds.

Let's now look at the long-term selling of B2B business software advertisers.

Months of research are spent on bigger buying decisions like that, so measuring something like the quotes generated from Google Ads will never make it look favourable.

Goals should fit the role.

In those examples, micro conversions can be helpful.

This includes actions such as:

• How many pages do they see?
• What content they saw.
• If they downloaded additional information.

All of these can serve as prime indicators that are talking to the right customer.

Ideally, this type of advertiser has a larger CRM that includes all of these interactions, so an attribution model can help guide each channel's spend allocation.

Start with the right foundation:

After auditing hundreds of Google Ads accounts, it can still be found that search marketers are not consistently using PPC to its full potential.

While there are many other levers that can be adjusted to further improve performance, most of them are not useful if are dealing with faulty conversion data.

To be successful in today's competitive paid search market, we have to do more than just talking about data.

We need to track everything and then use that data to focus our efforts on minimizing marketing waste and maximizing conversions and profits.