I love where I work. I love the challenge, I love the work, and I especially love it when we beat projections for a client by the 20th of the month (which happens more than you think).
My biggest frustration (which it shouldn’t be) is when I find work from other agencies that we get hired to clean up. It completely changed the way we look at talent from a hiring standpoint. We always believed that the worst team members to have are the ones that think they know what they’re doing but really don’t. We believe that training someone who doesn’t have experience is better than taking someone with the wrong experience.

I also keep finding the same common mistakes in accounts that leave my head scratching as to ‘why’? I listed them below to make sure that if you see these too, definitely know that you’ll have a problem to grow your business profitably.

1. No conversion tracking: I learned very early on that ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’. it’s SO TRUE when it comes to digital advertising. The sad part is that it is easily measurable. All you need is to get the codes up on the confirmation page for 90+% of the advertising platforms (Google, Bing, etc.).
When I see this, I already know that when I ask ‘how do we know if this is working?’, the answer comes back as ‘I think it is because look how much I’m spending’.
The truth is that when conversion tracking is working, there is no guessing. Numbers don’t lie.

2. Segmentation by match type: when I review an Adwords account, many times I see that the current manager has either all different match types of the same keywords within the same Adgroup, or separated by Adgroup but all in the same campaign.
This baffled me for the first few times I saw it until I asked a potential hire on an interview about match type segmentation. His answer was that he was told to do this and he didn’t really understand why he’s doing it.
When looking at the Adwords platform, one main point is that we don’t want to compete with ourselves and also we want to manage our spend where we know it will convert. Having keywords in the same Adgroup only increases CPCs and having them separated into 2 different Adgroups within the same campaign does really nothing for budget allocation.
Simply, if you have clicks that cost you $2 that convert at 1% and clicks that cost you $1.50 and convert at 5%, which one would you want more of? Obviously that one that converts at 5% ($200 CPA or $30 CPA). Now, if you have a $500 daily budget, the $200 CPA will only give you 2.5 conversions per day vs. 16.6 conversions per day of the more expensive click.

3. Running ads on standard delivery with even rotations: this is another Adwords frustration of mine. If you hire an agency to grow your business, they should be testing ads to make sure that consumers are converting well with them. Many times we find that ads haven’t been touched in a few years and also they are set to ‘Rotate Evenly’. So an Adgroup may have 2 ads, one with a 9% CTR and the other with a 1% CTR and they are set to rotate evenly for 2 whole years. This basically means that if you actually looked at the metrics of the ads after a little bit of time after they launched and saw that one ad was 9X better than the other, then you turn off the bad ad then that would be great. But it happens more than you think.

There are many more things that we find that are ‘low hanging fruit’ to make accounts nearly double in revenue in the first 2 months. I just hope that by reading this article, you’ll make sure you aren’t suffering from any of these specific issues.
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Thanks

Rafael Chemtob