Building AdWords campaigns, especially for large accounts, can be a tedious affair that leaves little time or willpower to write custom ads across hundreds of segmented ad groups. Thankfully, there are various tools and tricks one can use to create ads in bulk, saving hours in account management time. However these methods can set up your ads for potentially hilarious, nonsensical and down right out of place combinations across the web, something that internet giant’s eBay and Amazon have learnt the hard way. One would assume that all self-respecting account managers try to avoid these slip-ups at all costs, yet you still see ads creeping up that are the obvious spawn of incorrect targeting, ill-conceived dynamic keyword insertion or lack of negative keywords.
NO NEGATIVE KEYWORDS
Searching for information on new AdWords campaign formats resulted in two prime examples of why one should make sure to negative out keywords as, in this instance, the mistake would be largely noticed by other AdWords advertisers. Running on huge, super generic keyword lists can lead to ads offering things one simply can’t buy! Although usually simple to fix, it still remains that these ads can result in negative exposure or exorbitant costs. While arguably not as earth shattering as noticing a blatant error after 100 000 copies of a popular magazine print ad a client forked top dollar over for has been delivered to all major retailers, account managers and clients should treat these instances as such. Perhaps just a pedantic personal perception of the impact a PPC ad text can have, I would still loathe having to explain a situation like this to a similar minded client. For a few great examples of some notable ad text fails you can also look here.
