We recently had a rather irate client on the phone to one of our account managers questioning why they were not seeing their ad in the search listings. They had been “searching and searching” but were not seeing their ad. Within about 10 seconds the account manager entered the search query, had seen the ad is question (at the desired position) and had deduced that the client had not been able to view the ad because they had simply searched for it too many times. Essentially, the client’s actions were causing a negative effect on the campaign. This made me think of a number of ways that clients can help SEO Agencies manage their PPC search marketing campaign more effectively.

In order to run a successful PPC search campaign it is imperative that there is a clear line of communication between the SEO agency (i.e an account manager) and the client. This is crucial to the success of the campaign for a number of reasons.

It is inevitable that products or services will become discontinued or unavailable at some point in a campaign’s life cycle. In the event of this occurring, it is necessary for the client to immediately get in contact with their SEO agency. This will enable the search terms related to the discontinued or unavailable products or services to either be deleted or paused. This will mean that no clicks or costs will be accrued for the product or service that has no chance of leading to a conversion. Similarly, it is also important for the client to notify the agency of any new products or services newly offered.

If the client is running any additional marketing initiatives, either in the future or at present, alongside search engine marketing it is important to let your agency know. The marketing initiative undertaken will inevitably cause some amount of “buzz” and a large amount of people will perform searches to either find out more about the company in question or the product or service being advertised. If your online spend is only small, it is important to maximise your spend during, and after these key periods in order to capture the full impact of this increased traffic.

If the client wants to make sure that their ads are at a certain position and is performing countless searches a day, it is CRUCIAL that they use the Ad Preview tool (mentioned in a previous post) https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool
The key reasons for this are as follows:

Google recently made a change to the way ads are shown, allowing each individual search query to be responded to uniquely or differently. For example, if a client was to search for their ad multiple times, the system may “adapt” the search results in order to (supposedly) relate to your needs. The thinking behind this is that if you do not click on the ads that are shown a number of times, they are deemed less relevant to the search query. This may cause ads to drop to lower positions than before.

Each time an ad is shown an impression is accrued. An ad’s relevance is determined largely by its CTR. Click through Rate is calculated as Clicks/Impressions x 100. So, if a large majority of impressions are recorded for a search term, but only a small number of clicks are generated, the individual ad’s CTR will be very low, which will then effect the quality score of the search term. A low quality score means that you may have to pay a considerably higher CPC to attain your desired average position, than your competitors.

This process is usually a relatively straight forward and dare-I-even-say “fair” way to attribute a cost to a keyword when left to the relevancy principal. However, when a faux search is made (i.e checking the average position of an ad), this will significantly increase the volume of impressions generated for a certain keyword. As these searches are made with the intention of checking, rather than actually searching, no clicks will be accrued thereby lowering the CTR of an ad, which will directly lead the CPC paid for the individual keyword to be raised, and may even lower the ad to lower positions (based on the paragraphs above).

So, to conclude, the success of a brilliantly optimised, high converting paid search campaign can never be wholly be attributed to either Agency or Client. Instead both must understand each others goals, and the steps that they can both take to achieve them.