Pay-Per-Click advertising, or PPC, has been one of the most efficient ways for businesses across Canada to reach intent-driven audiences on Google (and Bing) for the last 15 years.

However, the odds are your PPC agency or contractor isn’t doing right by you.

We’ve observed these 7 classic pitfalls while consulting for many clients. In our experience, up to 30% of Google Ads media spend is often gleefully wasted away. All due to the improper use of tactics and features.

Keep them honest. Ask the right questions.

Here are 7 big ways your PPC agency may be wasting money on Google paid search ads.

1. Driving Clicks not Results

Don’t fall in the trap of getting sold clicks by your agency.

Who cares? You want results.

You could get a million clicks without a sale or conversion. Or you could get five clicks and two sales.

Which would you prefer?

You first need proper website analytics and conversion tracking. When you do, get them to optimize to cost-per-acquisition (CPA), or even return on ad spend (ROAS). There are many better KPIs beyond that but most of those are not usually within reach. These advanced KPIs require a depth of business data integration beyond most small and medium companies.

Your PPC agency should optimize and report on your KPI, not traffic.

Most importantly, those reports should be directly actionable. You should be able to make key business decisions off what’s working and what’s not.

2. Irrelevant Search Terms

Ask for the last 3 (or 6!) months’ search terms report, and sort it by cost. Do a quick review of the top 100 search terms.

Does anything jump out at you? Add up the cost from irrelevant search terms and extrapolate to over a year.

You are likely spending more than you realize on irrelevant search terms. Some of them are probably even DAMAGING your brand image!

Make sure your agency is bidding on the proper match types and filtering through a robust negative keyword list. Your account specialist should be reviewing search terms on a frequent basis (especially in newer campaigns), and dynamically adding new exclusions as they see fit.

3. Reckless Automated Bidding

Automated bidding strategies can both be a blessing or a curse. Squeezing the right performance out of them is tricky and follows a specific set of rules. In other words? It’s an art.

Automation requires structure, patience and rigor. It is definitely not the “set it and forget it” solution it hints to be.

To be successful, you first need to define success. Having a performance baseline from a time-proven manually-managed campaign helps evaluating automated performance. Jumping straight into the automation deep-end without line-of-sight on benchmarked performance means you could be leaving results on the table should automation not deliver.

For new campaigns, consider running an A/B test where traffic is split 50-50 manual-automated. For mature campaigns, you should have the data in hand to evaluate as you go.

Then, to assess success, you need to be patient and feed the automation with volumes of data. You have to reach statistical confidence before pulling the plug.

Do not attempt to optimize to something you don’t have enough of. Optimizing to conversions when you get low or zero conversions will not accomplish anything. It might rather derail the algorithm as it tries harder and harder to reach an impossible conversion, and start wasting more and more money.

Google usually recommends a minimum of 30 conversions in the last 30 days for most conversion-based automation.

4. Not Putting the Extra Legwork into Going Responsive

Some advertisers are quick to jump to automation in terms of campaign bidding strategies (easy and lazy). Some others tend not to put in the work to proof their campaign structure in terms of ad variants.

Responsive ads were introduced 2 years ago. It is a dynamic, AI-driven format that builds ads on-the-fly with the specific assets that are provided. These assets include headlines and description lines.

There is little reason, other than time and effort, not to have responsive ads across your entire setup. You can even finetune and “lock-in” certain assets if brand safety and messaging is a must.

We recommend 1 responsive ad and 3 expanded text ads variants per ad group. It makes it easy to monitor performance over time and re-adjust as required.

In the end, having responsive ads in your account will allow your ad to creep in search queries where a low relevancy (Quality Score) would have kept you out. In other words, a dynamic and flexible ad format will bump up your opportunities for a higher impression share.

And open the door for more results.

5. Extra-Wide Ad Groups

Your ad groups shouldn’t go too wide in terms of keywords.

Rather, they should only include ultra-focused groups of keywords to maximize relevancy. How? The more focused the keyword selection, the closer the ads can match them.

Some industry minds even favour single keyword ad groups (SKAGs)! This only really works if the one keyword has enough search volumes. Low-volume keywords should definitely be paired with their close counterparts.

So, your ad groups should hopefully have no more than 5-8 keywords per ad group.

This is important because a wider ad group is less relevant and will negatively affect your Quality Score. You will pay more to force your less-relevant ads on people, and waste money while doing it.

6. Ignoring Audience Targeting

Google search ads have been transitioning over the years from being purely keyword-driven to being audience-driven. No longer have marketers had to solely target via intent.

Why should your agency do the same?

Audience targeting allows layering Affinity and In-Market audiences on top of your current search setup. The feature becomes especially useful in underperforming ad groups and ad groups that you aren’t maxing out in terms of impression share already.

Simply put: it allows you to hone in much more accurately on the users you want to reach, within the pool of users searching for your keyword.

Here at Hyena we’ve witnessed tremendous performance going after In-Market audiences in the insurance broker niche and elsewhere. The user has to pass two tests of intent: first the keyword, then the In-Market, signaling that Google has already qualitatively pegged them as intentful.

In many cases, this is low-hanging fruit at its best.

Pair it with Google Analytics’ audience reports for identifying relevant new audiences to test.

7. Decision Making Based on the Wrong Attribution

Attribution is the art of determining how much of a contribution each ad, touchpoint or channel has had in driving a conversion.

Last-click attribution has traditionally ruled supreme, until 3-4 years ago. This means that 100% of the conversion credit had been attributed to the last user touchpoint, more often than not a Paid Search ad.

This approach is outdated and dangerous.

It dramatically underestimates the contribution of up- and mid-funnel marketing efforts. It encourages moving marketing spend away from awareness and consideration-level campaigns.

Make sure your agency is optimizing and reporting through the lens of a more advanced attribution model. On bigger accounts, a data-driven custom model that leverages AI and machine learning is best. On smaller accounts, time decay or position-based models have their own merits.

Anything is better than the default last-click.

Your mix of marketing channels and ultimately, your bottom line results will thank you for it.

In conclusion, a lot of PPC agencies and contractors simply “get away” with doing a mediocre job and wasting their clients’ money.

Is it malicious? Probably not. Can you do better? Surely.

Start by asking them the right questions. Keep them on their toes.