You’ve got your online enterprise established - in fact it’s going really well. You get in touch with an ad company to set up a PPC campaign for you because you no longer have the time/expertise to handle it yourself … and as a result you find you’re spending more and don’t seem to be getting very much for your money.

It’s a common story for many e-commerce entrepreneurs and it can seem impossible to break free of a vicious cycle. You lose confidence in your Advertising Company and move to another, who suggest you ‘surge’ your spend to regain your position and up goes the budget but the campaign doesn’t seem to create the extra customers you were promised.

Sound familiar?

There is a solution, but let’s start by understanding the problem.

How ad companies organise your PPC

For most advertising companies, there’s an expectation that a degree of client churn is built into their activity. They simply assume that for every client that moves on, they’ll pick up a new one from some other ad firm who’s equally disappointed with their results. The focus for ad company execs is not so much on achieving great ppc for their clients as on getting maximum budget from those clients for as long as possible. In other words, they often aren’t really interested in establishing long term relationships.

If you think you might be working with a churning advertising company, there are a couple of key indicators. When your concerns are met with vague assurances that ‘the metrics aren’t in yet’, you’re dealing with an organisation that works much slower than the market, meaning you’re always going to be behind the curve when it comes to effective decisions. If you raise the issue of click fraud or engagement fraud and you aren’t met with an immediate plan to deal with these threats on an hour by hour basis, you’re probably losing most of your budget to fraudulent activity.

Regrettably, many well established PPC Campaign Management teams have based their apparent success on Google analytics rather than on successful conversion metric. This leads to ever greater advertising budgets for PPC, which in turn generates more PPC fraud, and the main beneficiary is the ad company, not their client.

What goes wrong with PPC campaigns?

There are a number of things that can have a negative impact on your pay per click campaign and understanding them will help you make the best choices for your business. The biggest and nastiest by far is click fraud.

Click Fraud

Mastering the nature of click fraud can help your business grow rapidly and sustainably. Click fraud is a behavior used by competitor organizations to limit competition between advertisers. A rival can use click fraud to exhaust your advertising budget so that they are left as the sole or primary advertiser. It can be insidious and complicated to manage because there are three different routes to undertaking click fraud:

• Grunt hire click fraud - this is when a rival employs subsistence wage ‘grunts’ to click on your adverts all day long.
• Script click fraud or bot click fraud- a written computer script can automatically make multiple clicks on a rival’s ads.
• Viral click fraud - this, the most difficult form to identify as it relies on a computer virus hijacking computers around the world and causing them to click adverts.

Both grunt hire and script click fraud are relatively easy to discover - always assuming that your ad company is committed to helping you discover if you have been the victim of fraud. However, all too many ad companies simply aren’t committed to helping their clients escape the endless cycle of click fraud. This is a business destroying failure because the terrible truth about click fraud is that it can swallow up your daily ad budget long before you your real clients are able to find you.

Rival activity isn’t even the only reason that click fraud exists. Fraudulent revenue can easily be generated by using bots, grunts or virus control to create substantial amounts of commission for networks displaying your ads.

Inadequate management of PPC

A great place to start is to move your focus from CPL (cost per lead) to ROI. Looking at clicks isn’t as helpful a process as looking at conversions and while most of us know that, intellectually, far fewer of us understand how to achieve metrics that lead to success. TEA Software has a dedicated focus on differentiating website traffic - it offers a threat score for every visitor to your website and an engagement score for genuine visitors. This allows the software to identify fake traffic. But identification is only the beginning of the process: actionable data allows a business owner to alter their own behavior so that they can get the return on their advertising spend that they deserve. Many ad companies will try to use CPL to blind you to financial reality, so it’s important to know exactly what is providing revenue and what is simply providing activity.

Failure to monitor user activity

So much online activity happens instantaneously that it can feel as if you lack control over it. This isn’t true. Weeding out click fraud starts with effective recognition of behavior patterns. If bots are being used to create false clicks, you need software that can immediately identify them and protect your business from their actions. TEA software guarantees to spot bot activity within moments and can then block client Google Adwords to ensure budget is not swallowed by bot action. But there’s more that can be done. Each quarter the TEA system automatically raises a click fraud report with Google, so clients are refunded click-fraud expenditure. Bots are a problem, but automation is the solution. TEA Software fights fire with fire to boost return on investment, restore budgets and neutralize the effect of bot activity.

Over-reliance on Adwords

It’s a sad fact that many supposed ‘experts’ in PPC are actually experts in creating statistics for customer consumption. Rather than committing their time and energy into observing and analysing the behavior of visitors who convert, they simply use the Google conversions system to ‘optimize’ client campaigns. This really misses the key point of running a PPC campaign, which is to tailor bids to actually converting traffic so that your advertising budget is spent on exactly the kind of visitors who convert, not on the kind who simply browse. The TEA software recognizes and learns from current visitors in real time and then predicts how future visitors will behave to streamline spend so that it generates maximum return.

Working too long term

Many inadequate advertising companies will fend of client departure by saying ‘you haven’t given it long enough’. In most cases nothing could be further than the truth - you’ve probably already given it too long. If your ad company suggests you hold on for another month, or even another quarter, it may be time to look for a bid management system that works in a timeframe that online commerce recognizes - hours rather than days, weeks rather than months. That’s why TEA software offers a remarkable guarantee. Use the system with its unmatched AI core, and see results in 30 days or get your money back.

Forgetting about copy

There’s one thing that TEA software can’t do for you - it can’t ensure you have outstanding ad copy, but then, nor can most PPC Campaign Management teams! There’s something horribly similar and deadening about most PPC ad copy, and that’s why it can be important, once you’ve got everything else in place, to take another look at your advertising copy and ask yourself if you’ve fallen into the rut of looking like every other PPC advertiser. Of course you need to stick to the rules, so that you generate copy that works in the PPC slots, but when you’ve fine-tuned the other aspects of your PPC campaign, it’s a good time to add some creativity to your ad generation so that you benefit from standing out from the crowd. Remember that pain points come first, solutions second and audience knowledge is king. Calling on the information provided by the TEA software can give you the fine insights into your successful conversions that help you hone advertising copy that really works. A final point on clever copy - don’t forget that seasonal approaches can give the extra boost to conversions that move you from being a successful business to an outstanding one.