How to avoid paying for useless clicks

All PPC advertisers get a lot of clicks that never convert to leads or sales. Many of these “empty” clicks are easy to explain, and even easier to avoid. By focusing on the way people use search engines, you can avoid many of the most expensive pitfalls.

When you advertise in search engines, you get a lot of clicks from people that don’t end up buying anything from you. This is normal and usually happens when people solve their problem without your help.

But all advertisers get really useless clicks that could have been avoided, and shouldn’t have been paid for. Consider the following more or less legitimate reasons for empty clicks:

You are not in the right league. If you promote $40 rooms in two-star hotels, say so in your ad or you may get a lot of clicks from people expecting to pay $180 and get a room with a view. If you sell $40 ringtones for cell phones, show your price in the ad – most teenagers expect to pay $3 or less.
You bid on broad match keywords without the appropriate negative keywords. If you sell tickets to Paris, Texas, you should use negative keywords to avoid getting visitors looking for tickets to Paris, France. Most advertisers have a set of default negative keywords like “free”, “sex”, “christian” or “gay” (unless they offer a relevant website, of course).
Your keywords match frequent searches by people that cannot do business with you. If you’re a dentist, you may have devoted a large section of your website for information about the various dental procedures you perform. If you bid on keywords like “oral surgery”, you will attract lots of interested visitors wanting to know more. In most cases a dentist should only bid on search terms that include the name of a city, and you may even be forced to pinpoint your location down to the district or even street to increase your conversion rate. Also, don’t forget to filter visitors by location in your campaign settings!
Quite often, people search for particular websites or companies. If you sell insurance in the city of Oxford, England, by bidding on the search term “oxford insurance”, you will find that it is also the name of an insurance company in Massachusetts, USA. So people search on the company name, see your ad and click on it. Once they realize they came to the wrong place, they hit the Back key in their browser and continue their search.
You are bidding on part of a URL. Most PPC advertisers find it slightly peculiar that people enter URL:s like “www.oxfordinsurance.com” into a search engine instead of directly into their browser’s address bar. In the search engine statistics, you will see a lot of phraseswithoutspaces. Bid on these, and you could match searches for someone else’s URL.
You are bidding on ambiguous keywords that have more than one meaning. If you sell tickets to Europe, you may find that “eurotrip” appears as a keyword in the search engine statistics. Don’t bid on it – it’s the name of a movie. If you try to sell insurance in the city of Viper, Kentucky, you may get a lot of searches from owners of a Dodge Viper – it’s a car model. (You may also get visitors looking for a way to insure a snake, but that is probably less likely.)

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as just avoiding all these types of clicks. Experience shows that some of the keyword types above may become very profitable for you, depending on the situation. If you promote hotel rooms in the small beach resort Diamante in Italy, and see people search for “diamante hilton”, you may actually want to bid on that search term (if the search engine allows you to). There isn’t, and probably never will be, a Hilton in Diamante. Here’s your chance to come to the rescue and promote one of your own hotels instead.

The only way to know for sure if a keyword is profitable or not is to implement visitor tracking that tracks the profitability of each traffic source separately. For PPC advertising, you need to know the profitability all the way down to the keyword level.

You may be in for quite a surprise. The keywords that bring you the most revenue may not be the keywords that bring you the most visitors. Movie editors have a saying that they use for directors that just cannot let go of a favorite scene: “Kill your darlings”. The same advice may become very profitable for the advertiser that can stand deleting a few favorite – but unprofitable – keywords now and then.

What can we do for you?

One of the most advanced visitor tracking systems on the market is Dynamic Site Stats. It feeds conversion data directly to the bid management component in PPC BidMax, forming a 24 x 7 continuous bid refinement mechanism that never sleeps, constantly adapting your bids to variations in demand and always on the watch for useless clicks.