We recently came across an article on the BoostCTR blog (written by a member of WordStream) with some statistics about the average AdWords advertiser, and their findings were a little concerning, considering how many businesses rely on PPC to find their leads and create sales. But the same numbers also provided some insight to how using PPC automation software can go a long way to solving the issues reported in the article.

The first glaring issue was that 17% of advertisers hadn’t done anything with their account besides let it run over the last 30 days. Essentially, those AdWords users didn’t take action on any of the data they were receiving, good or bad.

How automation can help: Automation helps to eliminate the need to make changes to your account every day, because that’s what the software is doing for you. Of course, you’ll still want to log-in to make sure everything is working, but there’s no need to spend hours within AdWords anymore unless you’re creating new ads, campaigns, or keywords.

Secondly, 20% of advertisers aren’t using negative keywords. What this means is that one in every five advertisers are very likely wasting money on broad match terms that are irrelevant to their product or service. Check out this post I wrote on the importance of using negative keywords to see what I mean in detail.

How automation can help: Bidding automation software will lower bids on irrelevant keywords (keywords that aren’t turning into conversions) until your ads no longer appear for that term. But that’s no excuse to not use negative keywords at all!

The third scary piece of data was that 25% of AdWords users only have 2 or fewer landing pages in their entire account. This, of course, is a problem because most advertisers are selling more than one product online. So to direct your ad to a page that’s unrelated to the item someone was searching for is quite unhelpful, and causes a huge drop-off in conversion rates.

How automation can help: Try using a landing page builder, and A/B test multiple versions of your landing page to find out which works better. It’s not fully automated, but using a program can make landing page creation a million times easier.

Here’s what scares me the most, not even half of AdWords advertisers have conversion tracking enabled. If you’re not using conversion tracking, how are you able to tell when a click turns into a sale (or whatever the desired action may be, depending on your goals)?

How automation can help: We’ve found that when our customers use the WordWatch conversion optimizer, they’re able to drop their CPA by as much as 52%, while increasing sales at the same time.

The moral of the story here is that neglecting your account is a bad idea, but that doesn’t mean you have to spend all day making sure everything is running smoothly. Adding a degree of automation can make maintenance a breeze.