Your PPC Sucks

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.

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!

I’m not sure exactly who is to blame here – is it Ask.com or the PPC advertiser?

Either way it sucks!

It’s still there in the UK if you get a chance.  The search works fine for the same advertiser the other way round “22^nd march” so I’m still not sure if this is an engine issue or an advertiser issue…

Anyone shed any light on the situation?!

I am speechless. Everything conventional and smart in a PPC optimizer would indicate it’s BAD for business to not write body text for your advertisement. Is it a PPC Blooper?  An embarrassing mistake?

OtherWorldEnterprises.Com had this advertisement running on Adwords:

What is really perplexing is that they took the time to add a Title, and a Display URL  ……..

AND they took the time to click into the two lines of body text and add two periods? Google Adwords does require actual text to be there to save the ad, so I am sure someone was just in a rush.

Tip Of The Day: Even if you are going to test an advertisement temporarily take an extra 15 seconds to write two quick lines of text. Otherwise you get an advertisement available to the public that with a broad keyword can get a few thousand impressions. Then what happens is I find the blooper and post it on www.yourPPCsucks.com and YOU fire the person in charge of your PPC campaign.

It’s plain and simple. Google obviously must be perceived to have a ‘trusty’ index of information for people to turn to it for all of their needs. Regardless off how legal or screwed up they are, Google returns information all the time. But I can’t quite admit they should advertise on every ad and search, all the time.

So for the search “Kill A Cop” as of 3/30/2009 and where I am in the US ( the ambiguous everywhere….. apparently though, where I am not is fixing Pay Per Click Bloopers) – these are the ads that showed up for such a query:

HAHAHA. “Kill A Cop. – Move your career forward with an accredited online degree!” ?

Assassination school was never so public.  But hey, at least you can advance/move your career even during an economic recession!

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE run a ‘keyword query report’ in Adwords reporting services once in a while and see what searches are triggering your advertisements. Dynamic keyword insertion is lazy anyway. The Ad should have problem read “Become A Cop”, right?

NOPE. I can’t get these ads to show up for the searches for “cop” and “a cop”. The only time I can get them to come up is just for the search term exactly “Kill A Cop” !! Holy Crap! Why?

Special thanks to the twitter user @joshtauber for the keyword search submission!

There are two awesome parts to this screwed up advertisement:

#1) They misspelled ‘wrinkle‘ with ‘wrinkl‘ – Granted, mistakes happen, sometimes people even run out of room. Though, there are still two more spaces available still in the title line.

#2) Domain name choice? Seriously? ExposedWrinkleCreams.info was the domain name of choice? Holy Crap: the .com is still available still!  I should get www.yourPPCsucks.info pretty soon – they are hot hot hot!

Thanks to Nathan J, for the submission!

Completely uncalled for YouTube! Shame on you too, shopping.yahoo.com for even creating such an advertisement and thinking ANYONE would ever want to see it.

I don’t ever click on ad’s from a YouTube.Com video anyway. Unless of course I was trying to close the ad and accidentally missed the small little X. Then it just wastes the money of the advertiser and Google makes more bling.  Yahoo.com has just plain embarrassing ppc.

Another prime example of a company with so much money – they can spend half of it on a competitors contextual adveritsing platform and make that same competitor even more money. You are sinking yourself Yahoo.

*Ad was user submission: Thanks Ben!

We all know you can find just about ANYTHING on the internet. What you may not know, is despite Google’s strict rules prohibiting the sale of illegal drugs via Adwords, eBay.Com and Local.com have found a way to solicit Meth. Crystal.

The hard stuff. Ice. Crank. White Crunch. Crizzy. Devil Dust.

It doesn’t help that eBbay.co.uk’s advertisement says “Feed your passion on eBay.com.uk!”

Utah Meth? Isn’t that the last state you’d think would be advertising Meth? ( Or maybe the conservative religious base is just a cover! )

Assignment America!

Search for “Buy Meth” in your homestate, let’s see who is advertising on it. Send me a screen shot.

Let’s start this post with answering a common question that will come to mind. No, I don’t know why anyone was searching for ‘leg amputees‘ on Google. But, a user gave me a link to the results page and I had to write a post about it.

“So, honey – when does our new leg amputee come in? You know we have to keep up with the Jones’s!”

What I really want to know is, what word was Shopzilla.com bidding on? Leg or Amputees?

Neither. They are actually bidding on the term “Leg Amputees” exactly. Naturally, I HAD to see the landing page so I clicked through. (is that click fraud? . . . sorry)

They did a great job building up my excitement! “You’re about to discover great deals on…. Leg Amputees”. Yes! I can’t wait!

.  .  .  . sad panda. It was disappointing. Nothing. They don’t actually sell any leg amputees.

Screw you Shopzilla!

I am sure you share in my disappointment, and I am sorry you can’t actually buy a leg amputee, but I have good new for those with a very specific kind of fetish: (still using the same search term ‘leg amputees’).

I love the internet, it does so much for all of us.