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.