I Was Shocked To See The Quality Of Work From One Of The UK's Largest PPC Agencies
I recently received an enquiry from a busy private healthcare provider who was running a PPC Google Ads campaign through a large, well-known agency. For confidentiality reasons, I won't name names in this blog, but I feel it's essential to get across the importance of doing your homework when it comes to finding a Google Ads specialist.
I want to use this blog post to highlight some of the issues I found and how you can go about checking your PPC account yourself to ensure the work carried is both as frequent as expected and up to expected standards.
A little disclaimer: not all agencies are the same! I'm sure there are some excellent PPC Agencies out there, but this doesn't outweigh the need to ensure you know where you stand with your agency or freelancer. I may have stumbled upon a rare exception from this particular agency, or the quality of work could remain consistently poor across all of the accounts they manage - I don't know.
Frequency of Work
Did you know that the change history feature within the Google Ads platform will provide you with a full list of changes made by your agency or freelancer? If you're worried you're not getting what you're paying for, you might just benefit from checking this list. Smaller ad accounts should be audited once or twice per week, and larger accounts should be checked more frequently (daily to every other day).
The campaign I received from the large UK agency had been checked a mere three times in six months. From November of 2019 through to April 2020 the campaign had been worked on twice in November and once in January. The client was still being charged for work despite none taking place during most months of the year!
Results Consistency
This particular businesses campaign had actually dropped off completely mid-November due to disapproved ads. This means the client had received 0 clicks from his campaign between mid-November 2019 and them enquiring with us at the start of April 2020. Yes, the client was still being charged for their "ad account management" during this time. I'm not usually one to complain or judge other businesses services, but this shocked me. It looks like little effort had been made by the PPC management company to rectify this issue - no new campaign had been produced and from my understanding, no contact was made with Google to understand why the problem had occurred in the first place.
The account was also missing conversion actions. This means that phone calls and form submissions made a result of the client's ads were not being recorded, therefore making improving the campaign difficult. You can't work on optimising a campaign when you don't know which keywords, ads, search terms etc. are converting!
The Ads
Okay, so I think we've established by now that this campaign was shoddy (to say the least) so it's an inevitability the ads will have issues too. The ads were running on the newer style expanded text ads (excellent), but optimisation of space was poor. Google allocates two lines of description for your ads with 90 characters each, but most of the ads in the account were much less than the combined potential 180 characters.
Where possible, it's also important to A/B test both ad text and landing pages. This involves creating multiple ad variants and experiment campaigns to test and in turn, optimising your ad account.
Keywords
There were A LOT of keywords in this account - significantly more than is actually needed. When we create an account here at CC Digital 9 times out of 10, we stick to phrase and exact match keywords in order to only bring in the most relevant traffic. You can learn more about keyword match types here but simply put:
Exact match keywords will only show the ad for that exact search. Eg the exact match keyword [ppc agency lincolnshire] will only show the ad for ppc agency lincolnshire.
Phrase match keywords will show the ad provided the phrase is in the search term. Eg "ppc agency lincolnshire" would show for terms like "local ppc agency lincolnshire". It allows searchers to add things either side of the phrase.
Broad match keywords we use very carefully. Adding too many of these can make things messy and if you're not careful your ads might start to show for extremely irrelevant searches. “Broad match lets a keyword trigger your ad to show whenever someone searches for that phrase, similar phrases, singular or plural forms, misspellings, synonyms, stemmings (such as floor and flooring), related searches and other relevant variations."
Broad match keywords nearly always bring in irrelevant traffic so use these with care!
You can check what search terms your ad has shown for by reviewing your search terms report.
Conclusion
I hope the information provided here is helpful. Again, I'd like to reiterate that the purpose of this post is not to throw negative comments at other agencies but is to show you what can go wrong and how you yourself can check should you be worried.
If you're looking for help with your PPC Google Ads campaign, contact us today, and we'd be happy to chat.