Automation in some way, shape, or form has existed in digital advertising almost since the beginning. But today, it is being given more control, less oversight, and what controls you have for it are buried where you have to actively hunt for them.
The Wrong Goal
One of the most common issues to encounter with automation in PPC advertising is when you are giving the system the wrong signals. An obvious example is using automated bidding within Google Ads to target a conversion. Maximise Conversions or Target CPA can be very powerful, but you have to be sure you’re targeting the right goals.
One example of this was a client whose primary goal for a campaign was “Add to cart” actions. Sounds sensible, if someone actually adds a product to their cart, then they probably want to buy it, right? Well, no. Their cart abandonment rate was sky high, so those add to cart conversions weren’t conversions at all.
We simply changed that “Add to cart” goal to be observation only and had the campaign’s sole primary conversion action to be actual completed orders. At first glance, the number of conversions for the campaign seemed to plummet like a stone, while the CPAs increased massively. But on closer inspection, the number of completed orders shot up by 1,700%.
Interestingly, impressions and clicks both dropped, as Google’s algorithm stopped chasing timewasters, and although the CPC increased as the desired users were in more competitive auctions, the ROAS increase made that well worth it.
Unreliable Data
Another pitfall is when there is something off with the data you’re feeding back into the system. You may have the ideal goal for your campaign, but the information you’re collecting and returning to Google just isn’t accurate.
All sorts of things can get in the way and make your data unreliable. Your consent not handled properly, attribution problems, or poorly configured triggers for your GTM events are all problems that your testing during setup can miss. Problems can even creep in long after the initial setup from the most innocuous changes.
The solution is to keep an eye on everything. Comparing your Google or Meta Ads data with your actual sales — do they match up? Are your clicks in Google Ads reflected accurately in Analytics? Do the number of phone calls reported from click-to-call ads reflect reality?
Our example here was not a case of data going missing, but of events being overreported. A B2B lead generation campaign was using a form submission event as a goal. But it had been set up with a very simple and imprecise trigger within GTM that was capturing all form submissions, including uses of the search facility on the website. This meant users who had absolutely no intention of utilising the client’s services were being reported to Google as leads.
This didn’t just spoil the reporting for the account, as it created a huge problem for the bidding algorithm, so it had no idea who it should be trying to advertise to. Google’s algorithms use countless individual signals to try to figure out if someone is the right fit for your ads, not just if they typed in something that fits one of your keywords. To get it right, the most important signals need to be right, and those most important signals are who has previously converted.
The fix was simple enough, a condition to the GTM trigger that meant it only fired when the form being submitted was the contact form. Again, this resulted in a drastic reduction in the reported conversions, but the client went from one or two leads a week to over twenty within a month of us making the change.
Sitelinks That Aren’t Yours
Google Ads has had Sitelinks since 2009. Helpful little links below your ad, which help potential customers find more information or possibly alternative products/services if the main ad isn’t exactly what they’re looking for. To improve your ads, Google started automatically creating new sitelinks based on your website and its best guess.
That’s fine, in most cases. One example we encountered where this wasn’t a good idea involved a client who was a franchisee. We used their official pages within the main corporate website as the landing pages for their account. That was working fine and, aside from some minor logistical hiccups during set-up, the account was running like any other.
Then Google started (without telling anyone what it was doing) creating automatically generated sitelinks pointing to other pages on the website. The problem was that, as a franchise business, most of those other pages had absolutely nothing to do with our client.
These automatically created sitelinks had sent around 5% of the client’s clicks to pages which weren’t actually promoting their business, and this wasn’t picked up until a quarterly review of the account. The unwanted sitelinks were swiftly removed, and the (very hidden) option to stop Google from making up sitelinks was taken.
AI-Generated Assets Telling Lies
Perhaps the scariest horror story is when automated systems in PPC start lying to your customers on your behalf. Sitelinks aren’t the only ad assets that Google will generate automatically, it can also conjure up callouts.
If you’re not familiar with the term, callout assets are short bits of text that Google can include with your ad to give more context. Something like “Free Shipping” would be a typical callout. Google’s automated systems try to take information from your website and from the search terms that trigger your ads to make new callouts. Unfortunately, it’s not always accurate.
One of our clients in the financial services sector almost came a cropper from this when Google decided to make up a callout for their account, which was not only incorrect, it was technically offering something illegal. Google decided that our client’s carefully constructed PPC account, designed to advertise their sole product to the British public really needed to include a callout saying, “No credit check.”
Unfortunately, this client’s sole financial product is one that requires, by law, a credit check. That is clearly spelled out on our client’s website. It is clearly spelled out in the regulations set out by the FCA (with whom our client is registered). This one was, thankfully, caught very quickly, but the potential damage this could have caused was serious. Once again, these assets had been created without warning or notice. As soon as they were identified the offending assets were swiftly removed and we turned off the setting for generating them.
The Potential Damage and The Solution
In most of these cases, the damage was wasted ad spend, for the last it was potentially worse with the chance of regulatory and reputational damage. But, whether the problem was feeding the wrong information into the automated systems or the automated systems themselves making unforced errors, the problem required attention to detail and management by someone who knows what they are doing.
Active PPC management is something that every company should invest in. Even if you feel confident to run your account on a day-to-day basis, having an expert come in once a quarter to give the account a once over can save you a lot of headaches.
