Marketer's Braintrust

You are here: Home / Features / Checking PPC Campaigns for Broken Landing Pages

Checking PPC Campaigns for Broken Landing Pages

By

Believe it or not, a lot of folks running PPC campaigns are sending traffic to missing (as in 404 Not Found) landing pages. Although I’m sure this couldn’t possibly apply to you, just think of it as a problem that other people have, in spite of their best intentions.

Brad Geddes from Certified Knowledge has written up a nice, simple process that lets anyone easily check their entire Adwords campaign for broken links. As described by Brad, it’s easy to do the same with other PPC campaigns (like MSN Adcenter).

The basic process is pretty straightforward:

  1. Make sure your site actually returns a 404 Not Found response code when a non-existent page is requested. You should do this even if you don’t run PPC campaigns, because it’s a huge SEO and usability issue as well.
  2. Export your campaign data into a Microsoft Excel compatible CSV file
  3. Convert the URLs into hyperlinks, and export the resulting document into HTML
  4. Use a tool like Xenu Link Sleuth (Google it) to spider the HTML document for broken links

Windows is required for the process Brad describes – which should not be a big deal for most of the Mac folks I know, since it’s easy to clone a PC as a virtual machine using something like VMWare Fusion.

Anyway – if you run any large campaigns, it’s worth checking them over periodically. If you manage campaigns for clients, this is a great diagnostic to run when you first begin working with a new account.

Step by Step Guide to Checking your Entire PPC Account for Broken Links – Brad Geddes, Certified Knowledge

Comments

  1. Man is that true or what? I accidentally found some of my links to no longer be good as I had changed things in one place, but forgot to correct new linking in another place. Or had several sites using that old link.
    Like everything, it’s about constant maintenance! We don’t stop brushing our teeth, do we?

  2. I hate to say it, but your RSS feed has a 404 error message 🙁

    Love your stuff by the way and the webinars are great, missed Tuesday’s so looking forward to seeing that when I get the link for the replay. Really need to know what to do now for the best with the new dawn of linkbuilding.

    Keep up the good work 🙂

    Helen

    • Thanks Helen – we’re fixin’ to switch over to Genesis from Thesis, so that which is broken will be fixed shortly.