Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing a ton of research on the web for some different projects. During my research I’ve come across a staggering amount of sites that are running ppc ads, but when you click on that ad their site is actually down.
So lets think about this one for a minute. These advertisers are actually paying to be in the sponsored results but clearly either they aren’t monitoring your ads or haven’t made a proper investment in quality web hosting. It actually made me think of how much of this probably goes on all the time. I guess when you think about it with the mass amounts of people looking to get their business on the web, then the result is probably going to be a lot of inexperienced people trying to do it all themselves. The biggest problem here is the fact that not only have you paid for that visitor, but you’ve also lost a prospective customer that could have turned into a lifetime customer. So ultimately the overall costs can be much higher than what you pay per click when you look at the bigger overall picture.
The Simple Solution
Well here are my suggestions on how to keep from wasting money sending your prospective customers to site that’s down.
- Site Monitoring Service – Sign up with website monitoring service to monitor your site and notify at any time of any outage. I’ve used Watchmouse in the past and I’ve had great experience with them, but there are also a ton of other free or low cost site monitoring services you can use. Just do some searching out there and you’d be surprised as to what you’ll find. This is a small investment to make to ensure that your site is always online.
- Get a Reliable Webhost – Get a good company to host your website with. If your current host isn’t working out then do some searching and get some reviews of some reliable web hosting companies. I personally currently use Hostgator and I’ve had great success with them. Their support is great and I’ve always had great customer support with them and they’ve got some great pricing as well.
- Monitoring Your Pay Per Click Ads – Don’t just launch campaigns and then never check up on them. It’s pretty easy to make a mistake when launching PPC campaigns and all you’ve got to do is the monitor your campaigns and making sure that everything is just like it should be. If you run PPC Ads then you should be monitoring them on a daily basis anyway.
So hopefully these tips can provide some helpful information for those currently running PPC ads that may be experiencing these problems.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Good thinking Clarke. I’ve never gotten involved in any PPC advertising, and it surprises me that someone would pay for those clicks and not have a solid reliable sales page on the other end.
My guess is this…..many folks running PPC campaigns have multiple campaigns going at once, playing a numbers game. As a result, they overlook some important details.
Yeah it can definitely be overwhelming if you’ve got a lot of campaigns running. I know that I’ve been extremely upset in the past to find out that paid traffic was going to a page that had an error coming up.
When it comes to PPC there are a lot of factors that come into play so you definitely have to be careful to not overlook anything important.