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This is the 3rd post in the SEM Intermediate Series, a collection of posts intended for search engine marketing professionals looking for guidance in monitoring and adjusting the key performance indicators (KPIs) that determine the success of a PPC campaign. This series is a continuation of the SEM Beginner Series.
So you’ve planned out your keywords, carefully constructed your ads and sent your campaigns live on adCenter, but after a few days time, you’re not seeing much of an uptick in your site’s visitor logs. The entire point of setting up and running a pay-per click (PPC) campaign is to bring traffic to your web site; it’s no wonder you’re feeling frustrated to find that your efforts are not having the result you had hoped for. Read on for some steps you can take to troubleshoot and resolve low traffic issues.
Technical Difficulties
Before you start making adjustments to your campaign, you should first ensure that you have no dead links in your campaigns, that destination URLs were uploaded correctly (this is especially important if you’re using params) and that you don’t have a laundry list of unaddressed editorial disapprovals. These are the most common issues that can result in low traffic, so you should start your troubleshooting checks by verifying none of these things are the culprit.
Increase Keyword Coverage
Low traffic could be a sign that your campaigns could benefit from keyword expansion. If you haven’t tried out Microsoft Advertising Intelligence, a keyword expansion and monetization tool that works within Excel, you may want to consider giving it a try (you can also expand keywords within adCenter). In order to maintain a good performance history, our keywords should be as relevant as possible to your ads and to the landing pages they point to; try to resist the temptation to add some more general terms just for the sake of increasing traffic.
Improve Positioning
If you take a look at your adCenter reports and notice that the majority of your ads are showing below 4th position, this could be a part of your low traffic problem. If users don’t see your ad, they can’t click on it. For tips on improving your ad’s position within adCenter, visit last week’s post, SEM Intermediate Series: Strategies for Improving Ad Position in Microsoft adCenter.
Try Using Broad Match
If after trying the above approaches you’re still not happy with the volume of traffic coming to your site from your adCenter campaigns, another option you can explore is to incorporate Broad match (if you aren’t doing so already). While Phrase and Exact match can be helpful for improving relevancy, Broad match is a bit more general and could earn you some additional clicks.
Remove Targeting
Unless you’re running a campaign for a brick-and-mortar storefront that’s only relevant to searchers nearby or if you don’t ship products beyond your immediate area, removing any geo-targeting you’ve put in place can help increase traffic as you’re not limiting your ad’s exposure.
Do you have any other tips or tricks on increasing traffic that I haven’t covered here? Please leave a comment below, or you can start a discussion about your specific issue in our forums.
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Traffic? How about conversions? The last thing I want to do for any of my clients is what was suggested above. Removing targeting and making your keyword list more broad sounds like an opportunity to Spend more money, not make more for your clients. Targeted keywords and geo-location is what will give you high-quality clicks. Quality not quantity.
Double-checking Technical Difficulties is a good suggestion. The rest...I don't think so.
Jordon,
Thanks for your feedback.
The above information is intended to help those who are new to SEM troubleshoot potential issues in their campaign, it is not a suggestion that all of the above be implemented simultaneously in a single campaign or across the board for all advertisers.
Campaigns being run by a small business owner differ greatly from an agency rep who's managing the online marketing strategy of a global corporation… success can look very different to each. High conversions and solid ROI may be the goal of Mr. Small Biz, but Ms. Agency’s golden metric could be page views for a branding campaign. In an effort to make suggestions on improving low traffic accessible to all our readers, I'm refraining from specifying scenarios in which each of the above strategy might be helpful; I'm counting on the individual campaign managers to review their performance metrics and determine which suggestion might make the most sense for their campaigns.
As for conversions, that topic is coming up soon in the SEM Intermediate Series. Thanks for reading!
I agree with Jordan here. My biggest lessons were when I lost money in PPC. Getting more clicks is not the answer for my clients. All the want to see is more money in their bank accounts. So I use a lot of exact and phrase match. If I do use broad match, I normally keep the keywords to 3 words so it's more relevant. A one word broad match keyword will make someone BROKE! Also keep in mind keyword normalization. That was almost a death sentence to my campaigns. "Airfare from Las Vegas to Chicago" is the same as "Airfare Las Vegas Chicago". The sense of direction is ignored. Since Adcenter uses normalization, my campaigns were COMPETING AGAINST EACH OTHER!!! I recommend that Adcenter remove the keywords "to" and "from" from the extraneous keyword list.