For 20 minutes, I watched it go round and round.

It was a 3-sided rotating ad display and, on the third side, there was an ad for The Dildo King.

Now, I don’t know what sort of people normally stand at a bus stop in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin… but I can’t imagine too many of them are thinking, “That reminds me, I’ve got to buy a dildo.”

So, as ad targeting goes, I’m going to call it a failure.

But, before we get too cocky (no pun intended), the chances are, if you use PPC, you’re making some pretty big ad targeting mistakes, too.

The biggest of these is treating keywords as keywords.

Let me explain…

A keyword is a “basket” of searchers. Within that basket are people who are likely to buy and people who aren’t.

And, if you’re not breaking that keyword into multiple baskets – and adjusting bids accordingly – you’re probably throwing away a lot of money.

So, for example, if you’re in ecommerce, you’ll almost always find a click from a computer is worth more than a click from a mobile phone or a tablet.

You’ll probably also find that different locations – even different post codes – produce different conversion rates.

And that, often, different times or the day or days of the week will convert differently.

And, finally, whether someone has visited your website before will usually have a huge impact on their conversion rate.

Now, if you use Google’s CPA or ROAS bidding, Google will adjust your bids to try to reflect these different conversion rates.

(Google sometimes does this well, but often does it badly.)

But if automated bidding doesn’t work well for you – or you just prefer manual bidding – then you need to add bid adjustments.

Not sure how to do that?

Then maybe we should talk?

Just send me a message and we can get started.

All the best,

Steve Gibson