Your PPC Sucks

photo credit: stuartpilbrow

According to Debenhams PPC targeting, Women’s shoes posses a rather pungent smell and they have a sale?! Does anyone hear negatives? Thanks to Russel for submitting this PPC advert!

The ‘Stinky Feet Remedy’ is nicely targeted, even ‘Odour Shoes’ at Amazon I can deal with (for the moment) but Debenhams Blue Cross Sale?!  Talk about a waste of ad title!  Are searchers suppose to magically appreciate a link between the Debenhams blue cross sale and smelly shoes? Maybe you guys are targeting a niche market of smelly feet appreciators?! Whatever the case, it all “Ends Sun” Boo!

This advert is far too generic. The only keyword matching from the search query to the ad copy is within the display URL that  falls under ‘womens shoes’.  Is this a blatant indication that women have smelly feet or have Debenhams failed on a number of PPC issues such as negatives, advert copy, targeting and common sense?!

You know we don’t like PPC adverts with no relevance to the searched keyword. Well done guys. Just sticking shoes and women in at the end of the URL isn’t going to make it any more relevant. Lets run a Search Query Performance Report (SQPR) and make our adgroups a little more targeted please. If you don’t, you’ll end up with adverts that bear little relevancy to the searchers query.  Wave goodbye to your spend.

Right enough ranting,  we’re off to the Blue Cross Sale to smell some stinky women’s shoes! Catch you all next time!

We received this post from Owen the other day – Thanks a lot Owen for this one!

This PPC advert really underlines the importance of having an end date to seasonal or time limited adverts, unless you want to end up on our page of course.

For those who don’t know there is a very simple way of ensuring that your ads are not showing after the campaign has ended. Simply go to your campaign settings and set your end date to say the 1st of January in this case. If Ambassador Brighton had done this – last year – they would have been able to celebrate 2010.

We wonder if they are stuck in some kind of a time loop somewhere and keep repeating the year 2009 over and over again. If they are, this advert is fully excused, but we don’t really believe in such things as time loops Ambassador Brighton is hereby the proud owner of a Yourppcucks.com blogpost dedicated especially to them and their lack of time management (the ad is still showing btw). Congratulations!

Watch your end dates guys!

Interesting first sentence introducing main point, followed by introduction to rest of blog.

Main blog content containing the bulk of the topic information, including some sort of discussion. Summary of discussion and recommendation.

Snappy ending sentence.

Wow, wasn’t that bloody insightful?!

Didn’t think so. Templates aren’t for actual reader consumption, so why would you create the following advert?

Well, there’s only two possibilities;

A) You’ve hired some very cheap but dreadfully inexperienced sheep to create your PPC adverts (Baaa)

or

B) You’ve stormed the stupidity castle and launched your adverts without realising your advert is about as targeted as blind mans aim (we would like to state that this is on personal experience; we have yet to meet a blind individual who has beaten a fully-sighted individual on a range of stringent and gruelling aim tests without aid.  We will  recall this statement as soon as we encounter such an individual).

Templates are a great starting point for creating PPC copy, but you do actually have to change them.

What’s the solution?

Well, we would strongly recommend against hiring farm-yard animals for your paid advertising. It’s not cost effective and it’s slightly cruel!  We would also urge you to manually review your adverts, as it pays to be careful.

By giving your adverts a ’sense check’ you can drive down your overall CPC, improve your CTR and not end up on the wrong side of Yourppcsucks’ wrath. Ouch.

A big thank you to Alex Cohen at Click Equations for providing us with this fantastically bad PPC catch!  Sorry about delay Alex.

Here’s an embarrassing ad that Matt submitted to us (thanks).

This bad PPC advert exemplifies why a lack of negative keyword research, market research and laziness can land you a blog post on yourppcsucks.  Pat on the back people!

Here’s a step-by-step explanation of how you can emulate Easyjet’s terrible brand advert.

Step one: Create a brand campaign, throw in some brand variations that that ‘guys’ around the office use.

Step two:  Don’t bother using any negatives – they’re for product adverts.  No one dislikes us anyway, we’re orange.

Step three:  Search Query.. what?

Hey presto, you now have a badly targeted PPC advert! Hurray. Woop Woop.

So what can our lucky guests get from this advert? Well,  your beloved brand keywords could be linked to a range of insults that will provide hilarity at the expensive of your hard earned brand. Furthermore, you may further encourage more people to further hate/dislike/loath your brand. Oh, and you’ll waste your time and money.

Nevertheless, you can still over-charge on aeroplane peanuts and laugh at the silly small people who dislike your company.

photo credit: WexDub

Alternatively, next time you create a brand campaign, you could have a look around the internet for positive and negative brand phrases used! Or, you could create a brand advert that targets unhappy searchers (rock the boat moment?!).

Oh Yes,  it’s the classic ‘copy and paste everything from your search query performance report’ mistake.  This lovely short cut does you wonders in terms of wasted spend, damaged brand and general mockery from the PPC world.

Before you scurry off to check your keyword lists, take a second to review some embarrasing relevancy ads.  Hate to go on about dynamic text, but for the love of PPC, don’t add keywords like ‘other unique queries’!

Money Experts are serious about saving you some money and wasting their own. They’ve even included ‘2 other unique queries’ in the display URL. Boom – that’s dedication.

Plumber Joe,  “Sorry but it’s a burst pipe. I”ll need to buy 1 other unique queries, should take a couple of days.”  Phew – thanks plumbworld!

Next time you conduct a search query performance report, please just look at the keywords before you add them!

Whispers of revolution are in the air – the UK is gripped as we enter the countdown to the general election.  Who’s going to be PM? Could Babbling Brown retain the reigns?  Has David Cameron listened to enough ‘artic monkeys’ to win? Maybe Nick Clegg is on your mind?  Oh and fancy some Thai food from a Thai supermarket?!

Hat off to Marmite, they’re actually holding some form of election.

But Raan Thai – you guys aren’t even pretending to hold any form of vote! Maybe they’re forming a dictatorship,  hell bent on delivering to Ireland!

Watch your keyword match types!

This piece of PPC genius shows an advert for Millwall football club (UK soccer team) being displayed on searches for ”Leeds United” football club (Another UK Soccer team).  To make matters worse, Leeds United had recently lost to Millwall 2-0!

Hurray – YOUR PPC ROCKS!

The thought of this Millwall advert being displayed to unhappy Leeds supporters can certainly make you smile, if only at the innovation and creativeness of  some individuals within the world of PPC!

I am unsure what conversion rate Millwall could achieve, other than to irritate Leeds fans.  I am willing to bet the bounce rate was high!  It must have been worth it for bragging and mockery alone.

Keep up the good work people!