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You’re Wasting Money!

Often times when a client starts up an SEM campaign and/or an audience targeting campaign (you may know it as behavioral targeting, extended reach, display ads, etc) they get incredibly excited to be stepping into the digital advertising world. That’s great! The problem is they get so excited that they start searching for their own ads. This is NOT in the client’s best interest & here’s why you should have them stop looking for their ads immediately. Let me break this into 2 parts.

SEM
When you search for terms that you’re buying just to see your ads, you’re wasting impressions. Your stats will show that you’ve had a lot more impressions than you’ve really had because the ones that you caused weren’t actual leads. This also leads to a lower click-through-rate because while they’re looking for & reading their ads, they’re (hopefully) not actually clicking on them. A lower CTR can also affect quality score (relative to an ad’s position) and a lower quality score means a lower ad position. All in all, searching for your own paid ads when you’re not a true lead, can and will hurt your campaign overall.

Audience Targeting
This one is trickier. Clients see their ad before they go live (someone had to create them & get them approved), but there’s something about seeing it on a website and actively targeting people that makes them feel better about spending their money on this advertising medium. Clients attempt to look for their ads by going to their website so they can be retargeted by the site retargeting tactic or trying to search and read articles about things that might make their ad show up for them. 99% of the time this doesn’t work. Where audience targeting is different than SEM is that with this medium you’re paying for IMPRESSIONS not clicks. If a client tries to be targeted for their ad & they become successful, they are now wasting impressions that could be better spent on an actual lead. They are literally wasting their money.

There are ways to see and change ads even after a campaign has gone live. With audience targeting someone creates the ads, so if your client wants to approve them, that’s when they can see what their ad will look like live. With SEM, you can either go into your AdWords account or other SEM dashboard & see your ads there or you can use the ad preview & diagnosis tool found in AdWords under tools.

No matter what, make sure your client’s money is being spent where, when, and with the people it should be by having them NOT search for their own ads live online.

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Shannon Allen

Written by Shannon Allen

Shannon Allen is the Chief Revenue Officer for Federated Digital Solutions. She has over 25 years of experience in sales and marketing and over 15 years more specifically working in the digital world. Her passion for digital marketing is what drives her to find the best digital solutions for clients as well as for FDS. Shannon believes that true marketing starts after the sale with strategic campaigns and detailed reporting to help all FDS clients with an ROI, so they see the value in digital marketing.

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