Let’s get right to that list….

1. Online Marketing budgets aren’t allocated to enable you do to the job right.
2. Because of #1, I am sure you could list 98+ more reasons!

Too often the C-Suite has not figured out that your digital marketing (I include web, email, mobile & social here) activity is the glue that binds their brand together. They miss that online is that initial first impression before most people even decide to step into your physical store. So it demands that online live by the metrics but rarely gets the benefit of those squishy soft “brand” dollars. It’s 2011 and digital marketing and digital experiences are still way too often treated like the red-headed step child of traditional marketers. These digital marketers are expected to perform at incredible efficiencies which are never expected nor demanded from their traditional marketing counterparts.

As I stated in my last column, Conversions: Who’s Job is it Anyway; in the offline world there is a VP of Marketing and their counterpart the VP of Sales, but no such thing exists online. That column elicited a comment from a reader stating that you can’t “really offer an employee 8 hours per day 5 days per week and a good paycheck just for conversion optimization (CRO).” He went on to babble about how he would rather see a PPC manager or an SEO manager do CRO as part of their job.

Let me start by sharing the ugly truth! Most PPC accounts are a mess. We’ve audited many of them looking for conversion optimization. At best they need tons of work just to get them to a satisfactory level . Nevertheless, at least they seem to hit most of the core metrics at least in part because the media has still been wildly misattributed. Most of the PPC managers don’t have the additional bandwidth to simply maintain their account efficiently but yet you want them to have the time and learn the vast range of multi-disciplinary skills needed to do conversion optimization? Huh? Digital marketing is pretty complex work.

Most SEO managers are in the same boat. Just ask any consultant or Search Marketing platform vendor who has worked across enough accounts and they’ll tell you how 95%+ of all accounts are a mess. Oh yeah! The same is true of web analytics analysts as well.

These aren’t simply my opinions – go talk to them.

Now ask anyone who has ever been in the online optimization business and you’ll learn the same thing for each one. The budget to launch new websites or new campaigns tend to be healthy but what might be left over to improving the campaign or website after launch is worse than anemic.

To wring out significant returns on your investment, optimization must be an ongoing part of your daily marketing activities. It has to be a habit. So if you’re aiming to come to a point where you’re “finished” with optimization, you’re missing the point. Optimization is not a project, it is something you do daily to maximize the revenue of your marketing efforts.

Over the last few years the job of the conversion optimizer has been aided by the explosion of applications and services to help you improve your website or marketing efforts. Many of these services are low cost or even free! I often recommend that companies should get good at free first, then pay for a more robust solution once you have adoption.

A big excuse for the lack of optimization was the lack of access and resources to the tools. Web analytics, A/B & MVT testing tools, personalization tools and even usability studies were expensive, that is no longer a valid excuse.

For years I have blogged a yearly list of these tools. Three years ago I published my first blog post listing 33 free tools to improve your website, the following year it grew to 69 tools, last year it mushroomed to 99 free & low cost tools to improve websites and marketing efforts. This year I wanted to publish over 120 tools when Jeffrey asked me if I was out of my mind! That was my clue that it was time to launch a website dedicated to online marketing tools. You can check out the website at http://www.WebsiteTestingTools.com.

These tools allow a CRO specialist to spend his day gathering insights about your customers and your campaigns, identifying opportunities for creating new landing pages, developing new hypothesis for tests, figuring out how to segment and target your customers effectively and how to improve each and every one of your marketing campaigns. If you only have a handful of campaigns you may not need a full time employee but any business doing more than a couple of million dollars in online revenue probably does and the larger the company the more resources that will be needed.

The only excuse for not optimizing vigorously now is just being too lazy, ignorant or worse to prioritize the optimization of your efforts. I know that this column might hit a nerve. So if you’re a CEO or a senior executive who has been sent this then I have one question – when will you take optimization seriously?

During March’s Conversion Conference final keynote “Confessions of a Conversion Rate Optimizer” I shared this 7 minute video from advertising legend David Oglivy of a impassioned speech “We Sell or Else” he gave to a group of direct marketers in the 1960s. He was a huge student of Claude Hopkins “Scientific Advertising” first published in 1923 and a huge advocate of “if it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.”  It was required reading for David Oglivy’s employees and should be for yours as well.

Here we are some 80+ years after Mr. Hopkins advised marketers how important it was not to argue about what works in a campaign but to bring things to the court of last resorts, your customers by testing. Listen to David Oglivy’s speech today and you’ll see how these incredible words still are meaningful today as we continue to struggle with marketing directly to consumers, expecially as the equation has been turned around.

Click here to view the embedded video.

No question FaceBook advertising bears little resemblance to Search Advertising.  However, we are starting to see some great success stories of companies success with FaceBook advertising.  Nevertheless, FaceBook’s advertising model may be seriously flawed.

If you ever accessed Facebook using one of their mobile applications; perhaps you noticed something missing. There are no ads.

Most 30-40 year old women (one of the most coveted and powerful consumer groups) access their Facebook accounts usinge their mobile device.

While I agree that FaceBook needs a native iPad app, for the sake of their business, I think they first need to find a way to make sure all those current mobile users interact with ads.

As my good friend, Avinash pointed out in his 11 Digital Marketing “Crimes Against Humanity”, there are 6.9 billion homo sapiens on the planet and 3.7 billion of them actively use 4.3 billion mobile phones.

You hardly ever have to worry about keeping up with your competition if you keep up with your audience. Facebook is not keeping up with their audience and all companies do this at their own peril.

So do you agree that there might be a problem here?

No one knows exactly when the first advertisement was published on a printing press. We do know: In 1609, a British newspaper published an ad for migration opportunities to America. For hundreds of years, ads and print went hand and hand. Then came the Internet. AT&T was the first to pay HotWired to display the first ever online ad; a 468 x 60 banner that came to life on October 25, 1994.

Do you remember the days of explosive CPMs? Many people long for those times – before rates for traditional banner ad plummeted just as the market crashed from 2000 through 2002. These banner ads couldn’t support those rates because low click-through rates (CTR) and conversions didn’t justify the spend. To find ways to make online ads justify premium prices, publishers have had to experiment with all kinds of formats, including all intrusive full-page overlays to the content the reader is after. This still wasn’t the answer any one was hoping for.

There have even been attempts at changing the nature of print ads. Everything from CBS embedding a video screen into an “Entertainment Weekly” magazine to creating ads that you place your iPhone over to make the rest of the ad “come to life” like this example from AXA.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Then along came Steve Jobs (I wish him a quick return to health), and the introduction of the iPad.Nearly 15 million iPads sold this past year. This year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) seemed to be a lot about iPad accessories or iPad “killers” and the nature of consuming content is changing dramatically. And as part of that change, it seems that advertisements have changed as well.

While many magazine publishers are still struggling at grabbing subscription revenue from their iPad digital magazines, a recently completed study by Alex Wang, Ph.D., on behalf of Adobe is showing the effectiveness of ads placed in these digital magazines. Participants in the study who saw the interactive ads had stronger engagement, message involvement, and attitude than participants who viewed the same static ad in a print magazine. Participants who engaged with the interactive ads also perceived stronger interactivity than the participants who saw the static ad. It is easy to speculate that higher ad interactivity could generate higher brand awareness.

All this interactivity combines the best elements of consuming printed content with the Web’s full interactivity. Best of all, the tracking of metrics is built right in. Now publishers and advertisers can find out how people really are engaging with their ads and content. This is why a software company like Adobe acquired Web analytics company Omniture; it saw where publishing was headed and how all this fit into Adobe’s Publishing Suite. Next step, Adobe just acquired audience optimization firm DemDex.

Matt Langie, an Adobe senior director, told PaidContent: “Audience optimization, which we define as putting all of the data that a publisher collects and matching it to an advertiser looking to reach a specific segment of those users, is the key driver of online advertising’s growth.”

It won’t be long until advertisements in digital magazines will be personalized based on a reader’s past participation with content and ads, location, time of day, etc. Might this also be where book publishing’s future is headed? Perhaps there will soon be interactive books that are free but supported through targeted advertisements or additional embedded content? The future is always interesting.

There is hardly anyone who would argue over the impact that search, social, and mobile technologies have had on the customer buying process over the last five years. However, while many companies worry about keeping ahead of their competition, they actually have a much bigger issue – keeping pace with their customers. Indulge me while I explore the changes we’ll see over the next five years.

A Marketer’s Job Is Already Hard Enough

Jeffrey, my partner and brother, and I were discussing this column and I took the following notes about marketing that I wanted to share:

• Many times when marketing is called upon to solve a problem, it’s not a marketing problem at all. Marketers’ challenges begin with the brand they choose to represent.
• Marketing and sales have always been driven to reduce friction buyers experience; always – and with every improvement in technology, logistics, or payment options.
• The day has passed since marketers were paid to make promises the business had only a vague intention of delivering.
• Transparency isn’t a choice, it’s what is demanded by your customers; authenticity is a choice and your responsibility as the brand.
• Getting heard through all the noise is hard enough, so anything short of a truly remarkable brand promise is simply more noise.

Technological and social advances over the next few years will force companies to embrace authenticity, improve customer experiences, or suffer the consequences. Will your company be ready to handle this future?

Tomorrow’s Customers

Tomorrow’s customer is already today’s connected customer, with information just a few clicks away on their computer or mobile device. However, when a 7 inch or so iPad-like device is in the pocketbooks of your grocery store shoppers, they’ll be able to point the device’s camera at the shelf in front of them and using an augmented reality program like Layer they’ll be presented with the information they need to make their best choice. Reviews? Check. Cost per serving? Check. Nutritional or taste comparisons? Check. Coupons or better offers available? Instantly downloaded or ordered elsewhere.

No amount of great packaging or promotions will be able to sell the customer if people say your product sucks or costs way more per serving simply because you say it uses premium ingredients and added nutrients when this information layer shows the “real” deal. With the wide adoption of shopping scan-and-compare apps like ShopSavvy and RedLaser (already downloaded over 2 million times), is this new reality that far behind? Probably not, and it won’t be limited to the supermarket aisle either.

As All Media Digitizes, Product Discovery Evolves

As Apple and Google prepare to tackle the largest screens in the house with their TV offerings, what will those products look like in the next five years? Will those set-top devices they design constantly search out and deliver you the best content based on your personal preferences (sort of a Pandora for TV)? It could just be if Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s IFA keynote is any indication:

“Not only are you never lonely, you’re never bored! We’ll suggest what you should be watching, because we know what you care about.”

You can be assured the ads will become more personalized and targeted. Will those set-top devices sync up with your mobile devices to deliver content and ads on the go? Again, Schmidt may be leaving us clues from his speech:

“We can suggest what you should do next, what you care about. Imagine: We know where you are, we know what you like.”

One day, you’ll be watching an episode of “Sex and the City,” fall in love with a blouse one of the stars is wearing, touch the screen and activate your shopping avatar to try on your clothes virtually and see how it will fit based on your personal dimensions, and be able to order it with just a couple of clicks. Perhaps it will be super chef Bobby Flay making an incredible barbecue rib recipe that you want to make at home; a couple of clicks on the TV and the recipe is synced up to your kitchen and the missing ingredients are added to your weekly shopping list. Of course, all this will be highly measurable and television show producers will work closer with advertisers to make sure the right products make it into the right content for their audience.

The Future Buyer’s Life Made Easier Day by Day

It is easy to see how the evolution and convergence of technology will continue to reduce the friction of the customer buying process, and I can show you countless numbers of other ways technology and advertising will change our lives in the near future. Advertising will start to fulfill its promises of true one-to-one messaging as we all carry powerful computers in our pockets and the systems are available to personalize our experiences to make our “future shopper” lives easier. It may only be a couple more years until our advertising makes us feel like Tom Cruise in “Minority Report.”

In the meantime, Schmidt says, “I spend most of my time assuming the world is not ready for the technology revolution that will be happening to them soon,” and I’ll spend my time thinking what companies need to do in order to optimize those selling experiences. Will you?

Watch this marketing keynote presentation- includes a few attendee testimonials (this is a 45 minute+ presentation, please give the video some time to load):

In my previous life, I was a social worker who helped mentally ill and chemically addicted adults on their road to recovery. I see many of the same symptoms of addictive behavior in too many pay-per-click (PPC) advertisers today. After all, there’s something terribly seductive about the simplicity of creating a PPC (define) ad; within moments your ad shows up and gets you clicks. As the high continues, you crave more, adding more keywords and new campaigns to keep increasing your dosage. However, sooner or later you realize that you have to put more and more into it to keep getting the same effects. Like every other addiction, it eventually catches up with you. The return becomes more limited; you need lots more to keep up your addiction, often times at the risk of pain.

As in all addictions, the first step to recovery is recognizing you have a problem. I often find most advertisers I speak with have a feeling something isn’t right, but they aren’t really sure what the issue is. Since the beginning of the year, we’ve performed PPC audits for clients to show them where things were failing. Nevertheless, to help people get over this addiction required us to find some simpler and faster ways to give advertisers the intervention they need to get help and recover. So, next week I’ll be offering a new workshop, PPC Addiction: The Road to Recovery, in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City.

To make sure the content would jolt attendees into recovery mode, I’ve been testing it on some former clients and friends. Let me share with you the letter one of my friends and former clients sent his agency (I changed the names to protect the guilty) after our 30 minute conversation:

I just had a long conversation with Bryan Eisenberg about some PPC audits they’ve been doing for clients. He said that a few months ago, Google really changed the game, and it’s all about Quality score, and it’s no longer just about bids. [Author note: If you don't understand this relationship, you should watch Google Chief Economist Hal Varian explain it.] And clients are contacting him to look at their accounts because they find themselves paying MUCH more for MUCH less.

So we pulled a few reports to see how our account is doing. The results are a bit frightening. Yet, they give some validation to a question that has been nagging me, “Why does PPC seem to be getting worse?”

1.) Conversion Per Month – As you recall, we stopped bidding on brand related keywords in Feb 2010 as an experiment. The PPC conversions went way down. No surprise there. Thankfully, my thesis has been proven correct as overall revenues have stayed the same. Unfortunately, PPC spending has increased without a jump in non-branded conversions!

2.) Impression Share – This shows how many impressions we’re getting for each campaign. Except in our case, our ads are hardly ever showing up. According to Bryan, this is a huge part of what changed in PPC and is directly related to Quality Score.

3.) Quality Score Distribution – We exported all the keywords and their corresponding quality scores, then totaled up the number of occurrences for each number. 7 and above is good. 6 and below is bad. 65% of our keywords are 6 and below. Ouch!

I believe Bryan has uncovered and demonstrated the reason for the numbers going down. In general, the problem – as best as I understand it and am able verbalize it – is that we’re going for “long-tail reach” with broad terms without using enough (any?) negative keywords, and this radically lowers Quality Score over time. Instead, we should be aiming for super-strong relevance using exact matches in small ad groups going to very relevant landing pages.

In addition, we looked at the ad copy, which frankly, has also been nagging at me. Our ads seem to lack keyword relevance and strong value statements. Plus, from what I can tell, very few (if any?) new variations have been tested in the past 12 months.

Joe Smith, you and I have a long history. And I like you very much. But I think I’ve let my personal feelings and faith in you get in the way from drilling deeper into this nagging PPC issue. I’ve sent several emails to you looking for your help to try and figure this out – and MAKE PPC WORK BETTER. Yet nothing your team has done has moved the needle in a positive direction.

This brings us to a fork in the road. Is your agency interested in keeping my company as a client? If yes, I need to know that you’re interested in doing everything it takes to improve Quality Score; starting with changing from broad to exact match on keywords, adding negative keywords, and re-arranging Ad Groups.

If not, then I’m afraid I’ll have to discontinue service with your agency immediately.

The first step to recovery is recognizing and admitting you have a problem. I think my friend has certainly done that. If you recognize you have a problem, you’ll be on your path to focus on improving relevance and quality and focused less on reach. Over $10 billion dollars were spent on PPC advertising last year. A portion of that came out of your pocket.

Are you satisfied you’re getting the maximum return on investment from it? Do you find it more and more challenging to continually increase your PPC effectiveness?

P.S. I have 1 Free ticket to give away in each city. If you are interested and can make it to the Boston, Philadelphia or New York event next week let me know in the comments below.

Actually the answer is pretty simple. You haven’t given me sufficient reason to choose you over your competitors. Today’s customer has more choice, more knowledge, and even tabbed browsing to evaluate you and distinguish you from all of your competitors. In the few seconds they’ll invest in your website, if they can’t decide why you might be the solution to their want or need, they’ll close that tab faster than your Flash promotion can ever engage them.

I just returned from SES Toronto. One of the sessions I moderated was the PPC (define) ad and landing page clinic. A common mistake we saw: companies failing to position their value relative to their competitors.

So how do you avoid this mistake?

First, position yourself in your ads. The typical searcher is evaluating your ad compared to three to five others. Then, of course, position yourself on your landing page, but don’t forget every other page on your website. Buyers rarely see only your landing page. Give people a reason why they should choose you.

Don’t use flaccid, sugar-coated copy. If I could have a nickel for every unsubstantiated superlative I see in PPC ads and on websites, my great-great grandchildren would never have to work a day in their lives. No you aren’t amazing, the best, most innovative, number one, etc. At least not until other people say it and you can document it with facts. Two examples from the clinic come to mind. I won’t give the specifics to protect the guilty, but enough that you will get the idea.

The first example was from someone who sells used cars. Their ads sounded exactly like everyone else’s – “search from our extensive collection.” Extensive, according to whom? Is that an extensive three cars or 30,000? So, the first thing we asked the person from this website was – why should anyone buy from you? He replied that they were the biggest. The biggest what? According to? He said they had the largest inventory. That’s a great benefit for someone searching for a used car, but superlatives and hyperbole don’t help your visitors choose. Use specifics. Say something like “search from over 36,000 used vehicles in our collection.” If you could say “search from over 300 Acura TL no older than 2006″ that would be even better. Get it?

Another example was a company that sold leadership training. Their ad sounded just like Charlie Brown’s teacher: Wa wa wa wa wa wa. Every ad on the page sounded exactly the same. When I asked what they do differently and what was their goal, they responded that they were rated number one by a major publication and that their goal was to get people to come and get evaluated. I recommended they change their ad to suggest they were top ranked and that they should register to see if they qualify. They had to be sure that on the landing page they documented their number one ranking. And by telling people they may not qualify, being a bit exclusive could help their positioning.

People are bombarded with sales messages all the time. If you can’t cut through the clutter immediately to offer them something that has obvious value, they’ll be long gone to someone who can.

Nowadays, a lot of prospective customers have very short attention spans and even shorter memories, and they’re jaded.

You must make your value proposition or campaign proposition – strong, simple, quick, and clear – immediately, when prospects first hit your site. If you don’t have a strong value or campaign proposition and don’t state it clearly right upfront, you’re sending your traffic elsewhere instead of drawing them deeper into your own sales funnel.

Need help figuring out how to do that? Write down every possible reason you can find why someone should want to do business with your firm. If you want real results, involve your entire company in a high-energy brainstorming session. If you don’t find at least a few dozen reasons, either you aren’t trying very hard or you have a very boring company. Don’t be afraid to get professional help. Your survival can depend on it. Afterward, review the list and eliminate everything that is also true of your competitors. Nothing should be allowed to remain on the list that can also be claimed by a competitor. Here are some quick guidelines:

1. What is unique about your business or brand vs. your direct competitors?
2. Which of these factors are most important to your prospects?
3. Which of these factors are most difficult for your competitors to imitate?
4. Which of these factors can be most easily understood by your prospects?

Now create a memorable message out of these unique, meaningful qualities about your business or brand. And make sure it’s a message that speaks to the need your prospective customer feels, not some self-centered stuff about you.

You should also watch this video.

When we audit clients’ PPC (define) accounts, we look at their work from two aspects: the technical and the creative. While a 95-character ad shouldn’t be so challenging, common flaws appear in almost every account.

Let’s start out by examining the creative aspect.

Creating the PPC Searcher’s Journey

For visitors to convert, the five steps of the PPC searcher’s journey must be in alignment along the conversion path. I describe that five-part journey below. The model is simple, the execution challenging, and the businesses that effectively align these five parts are rare.

Intent: Behind every search is a person. That person has a want, a need, or an itch to scratch. If only we could tap directly into his mind, then we might be more relevant to his search. Imagine, if you knew the true intent of a search inquiry (query) and you could respond to that intent perfectly, then you’d convert most of the time.

Query: The searcher’s desire isn’t a keyword. The intent gets translated by a searcher into a keyword or key phrase that he hopes best expresses the need he has in their mind. Of course this process is complicated by the level of skills, intelligence, domain knowledge, language skills, and patience of the searcher. We, as marketers, must select those keyword we believe are most relevant to our business and choose the appropriate match types, negatives, and bids to maximize return on investment from these queries. Keywords are the bridge between the prospective buyer’s intent (want, desire, and/or need) and the experience you provide. Divining the searcher’s intent and responding appropriately should be the holy grail of all search marketing.

Google algorithm: Your keywords and key phrases are only the triggers for the actual search queries. Google uses a complex formula based on your campaign settings, budget, Quality Scores (define), Ad Rank (define), etc., to choose which advertisers ads will appear and in what position. It is your job to ensure all the technical settings are done properly and to continue to routinely optimize these settings. Many settings can be regulated by a rules-based system and can likely be automated or semi-automated based on criteria that you set.

Advertisement: The most important fundamental mistake we watch companies make is thinking of their Ad Groups as keyword groups. Bunching seemingly related keywords into one group and assuming that one advertisement can be relevant for the intent behind each of those keywords. Remember they are called “Ad Groups” not “keyword” groups. What does that means for you, as an advertiser? You must create ads that are truly relevant for the queries that your “keywords” will trigger the most relevant ad based on the actual query.

It helps to think of every hyperlink (PPC ads, SERPS (define), your navigation, banners, etc.) as a contract between you and your reader or prospective customer. Every time someone clicks on a hyperlink, he’s asking a question either implicitly or explicitly that he expects you to answer with precisely relevant information. Understanding and planning relevant hyperlinks and the content that corresponds to that hyperlink (UX people call this concept “scent”) is how we teach companies to maintain persuasive momentum. It is rarely good enough to use “dynamic keyword insertion” to ensure pseudo-relevance.

Relevance is always relative to buying mode. Lots of factors affect buying mode (economics, demographics, psychographics, stage of buying process, etc.). You must plan your ads to match buying mode and still optimize those ads for click-through rates and conversion. All too often advertisers limit themselves to only having one advertisement and not testing multiple versions of their ads.

Landing page: We often say, “Keywords don’t fail to convert, we do!” Why? If you believe the keyword query that you selected in your PPC settings is relevant to your business, your ad and landing page must deliver a relevant and persuasive experience that explains to your visitor how you can scratch their itch and offer him greater value than your competitors. Keep in mind: the searcher’s experience doesn’t often end on the landing page on your site, but rather continues several pages deeper toward your conversion goal. All of these pages must be in sync with the searcher’s journey in order for them to convert.

The Three-Step Paid Search Management Process

To successfully align your business goals to the PPC searcher’s journey, you must also have an effective and nimble PPC management process.

Step 1: Targeting. This step involves choosing keywords and organizing campaigns. This is where you deal with understanding the searcher’s intent and query steps in their journey. This is an ongoing process that continuously needs refinement and adjustments.

Step 2: Valuing. In this step, you leverage your understanding of the pay-per-click engine’s algorithm and set match types and bids. Most of this work can be automated or semi-automated. Every keyword has a different value for each match type. Typically an exact match (define) will converts at the highest rate but will have the smallest reach. Phrase match (define) comes next in terms of conversion but will expand the reach of your ads. Broad match (define) will have the greatest reach but lowest conversion rate. Broad match should be used as a way for you to continue to find relevant queries in the search engine and use those to create new Ad Groups, ads, and landing pages that can deliver relevant experiences.

Step 3: Satisfying. Here is where you focus on creating compelling ad copy and landing pages to match the searcher’s actual queries. Most companies spend too few of their resources on this step. When you focus your resources on satisfying a searcher’s query, you will tend to be rewarded with higher click-though rates on your ads, higher Quality Scores on your keywords, and higher conversion rates. All of this will act as multipliers on the rest of your efforts. Many companies overlook this step because they don’t take the time to understand the economics of having poor Quality Scores or haven’t come up with an effective process to scale testing and targeting effectively on their landing pages. Unfortunately, this part of the process can’t be completely done by a machine and needs human intelligence and creativity to get the best results.

Where in the search management process are you devoting most of your resources? How effectively have you aligned your PPC management process to the search visitor’s journey?

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you might even kiss your money good bye. Google AdWords is one of the most remarkable advertising vehicles in the history of marketing. No matter how simple 95 characters seems to be, there is no denying the complexity of executing well. Of course, the fact that not all the rules or all the data are presented well doesn’t make it any easier. What amazes me is how most people don’t take full control over what they do control.

My associates and I have been doing several Pay Per Click (PPC) audits for clients the last few weeks and consistently we find companies have many of the same core issues:

1. Account structure – remember that they are called ad groups not keyword groups. Too many companies groups keywords together that don’t belong together; they don’t realize you can’t create an ad that is relevant for each of the keywords in the group and this can become a bigger issue if the right match types aren’t properly used.

2. Keyword, Ad and Landing Page Quality & Relevance – because the structure is off, and companies don’t maintain their campaigns well enough, the ads become irrelevant for the search queries that trigger the ads based on the keywords that were chosen. If the ads are off, I can guarantee that the landing pages are off.

3. Looking at the wrong data – It surprises me how reports are distributed and used. If all members of your team aren’t all looking at the right data you can’t make the right decisions to get the most out of your campaigns.  You can’t be making business optimization decisions if you don’t have the right data and innumeracy leads many ‘data-driven’ executives to bad decisions. They forget that statistics lie and liars use statistics.

Please don’t forget to control what you can.

The first step is understanding the PPC searcher’s buying journey and managing and optimizing the parts you can. Why aren’t you regularly optimizing your PPC campaigns from keyword management, to account structuring, to improved ads to testing and improving your landing pages? Is it lack of knowledge? Lack of resources? Lack of direction?

Why would you want to continue the drama and not enjoy lots of happy endings?