Account managers everywhere are finding it more and more difficult to keep up with their job. We have to manage ad dollars and performance fluctuations alongside seasonal shifts in query volumes and a multitude of platform changes that bring with them uncertainty and volatility as the PPC ecosystem changes and evolves.
Among the recent enhanced hoopla advertisers must remember to keep true to the basic premise of PPC, relevance! This is even more important then ever as anything out of order that hits enhanced campaign settings may really wreak havoc on the bottom line.
I recently came across an ad for Omaha Steaks that really made me think about how devastating mistakes in targeting can potentially be once campaigns are migrated. This ad showed up on a search for ‘vegan meals delivered’. Woops! This is definitely a case of broad match gone wrong with no negative keywords to protect the traffic. I don’t think users looking for vegan meal delivery are at all interested in having juicy porterhouses or ribeyes delivered to their door step.
This hiccup in targeting may not be too costly if the advertiser is targeting only desktops global search volume right now is less than 400 searches…but what if this mistake hit enhanced campaign settings?
Device targeting is now blurred between desktops and tablets which means this broad keyword mis-steak (see what I did there) is now opened up to target both desktops and tablets without much control, which means more potential ad spend leakage for the advertiser. If there are many instances of this or if this is happening on higher volume keywords this advertiser can really be in trouble!
So, heads up and a friendly reminder to all AdWords account managers. Time to do some housekeeping prior to or alongside your enhanced campaign migrations!
As for Omaha Steaks, maybe they’ll give me a call to clean up their ad spend. Hopefully they’ll at least take my advice and add vegan, vegans, vegetarian, and vegetarians as negative keywords in all of their campaigns unless they’ve added veggie burgers to their product offering.
