When we begin working with a new PPC client, we often take over their existing PPC advertising campaign. Unfortunately, too often than not, even campaigns that have been created by other agencies often contain simple mistakes. As I’m normally tasked with looking over these campaigns, I’ll give a quick run through of the top 5 PPC mistakes and easy ways to solve them.   1)     Too many of too few campaigns in one account: I recently saw a Google account containing more than 20 different PPC advertising campaigns, despite the fact that the company was only advertising 3 different holiday destinations. Although it makes sense to break your account down into manageable campaigns, more than 20 campaigns in one login is probably a little excessive. This set up must have confused even those who were managing the account, as they had created ad groups with the same name in more than one campaign. Likewise, having hundreds of very different products advertised within one campaign is also not a good idea, as it makes finding your ad groups and managing spend difficult.   My advice would be to try to split campaigns out logically e.g. each country or region having its own campaign, or basing it on budgeting or sales priority.   2)     No conversion Tracking: Google has its own conversion tracking, so all you need to do is set this up in your campaign and place the code on the relevant pages on your site.   3)     No negative keywords: Very important, especially if you are using broad match keywords. For example, if you’re working on a PPC campaign advertising luxury holidays in Turkey, you don’t want your ads to appear if someone types in “Turkey Package Holiday” or even worse just “cheap holiday deals”. Whilst doing keyword research, make a note of any of the phrases that are appearing that you don’t want to advertise on. (To show what I mean, I’ve typed in “Turkey Holiday” into Google’s keyword research tool and found Turkey keywords with cheap, weather, map and rental cropping up, which might not be relevant to the product.) To keep your list of negative keywords up to date you should run regular search query reports to find out exactly what people are typing into Google and add irrelevant searches to your list of negative keywords.   4)     Odd choice of keywords: Some PPC Advertising campaigns we’ve taken over look as if they were created without doing any keyword research. A few of my favourite, odd keywords are “BBQ area”, “Chef available” and bizarrely just the word “fascinating” (all in a luxury Italian holiday company’s campaign). I can’t imagine someone typing one of these words into Google and expecting to be shown a luxury Italian Holiday.   Another, similar mistake is placing keywords in the wrong ad groups. In a PPC advertising campaign that we’ve recently taken over from another agency, I noticed the word “kefalonia” in the ad group Emelisse Hotel. Although the hotel could well be in Kefalonia, it is unlikely that most people typing it into Google are actually looking for the Emelisse Hotel. It is also quite likely that some people typing in Kefalonia are not even looking to buy a holiday, so all this keyword is going to do is produce a lot of impressions and lower the quality score for the ad group. My suggestion would be to use Google’s keyword research tool to get fresh research and group keywords as logically as possible.   5)     All ads pointing to the homepage:  Whilst I understand that sometimes a keyword doesn’t specify a particular product, a campaign where all the ads are pointing to the homepage tends to start alarm bells. If a customer is sent to a page which bears no relevance to the keyword they typed in, they are unlikely to stay on it long enough to make a purchase. So if the ad group is Majorca holidays, make sure that the ad is pointing to the Majorca page, not the homepage of a site so the customer has to click around.   Hope these tips are helpful in making your PPC campaigns a great success!