If you’re in the world of PPC marketing, you’re probably excited to get started. After all, you’ve likely heard it’s a great way to increase your sales, revenue, or website traffic. But the truth is unless you have a solid understanding of how PPC marketing works, you’re likely losing time, energy, money, and sales.
What is PPC?
Simply put, PPC is a pay-per-click advertising model. This means that any advertiser (in this case, your company) pays a set fee to have the ad shown in search results. Unlike organic methods of increasing your website traffic, the PPC model will help you buy website traffic depending on your keywords. Every time the ad is clicked, visitors reach your website, and the search engine charges you a small fee.
Understanding the common mistakes can save you money, time, and energy if you’re running a successful campaign. After all, you want to increase your sales and traffic. To help get you started, here are ten PPC mistakes beginners typically make and how to avoid them.
Sending Users to Generic Pages
Your landing page is an essential item in any PPC campaign. It’s the first thing your potential client will see, impacting relevance and quality overall. Always create a separate landing page for each ad. Customize the user’s experience based on what they’re looking for.
Protect Your Brand Name Whenever Possible
Keyword research is a simple way to scoop up the low competition, including your company. Bidding on ads for a competitor’s business name is a common tactic to steal the competition’s business. It’s essential to always include your business and brand name in your advertising efforts whenever possible.
Keep an Eye on Click Fraud
Click fraud occurs when someone is deliberately clicking on an advertisement when they have no intention of purchasing. 20% of all clicks in PPC campaigns are thought to be fraudulent. Always keep track of any unusual activity and report it, if necessary.
Constantly Aiming For the First Position
Trying to aim for the top position isn’t always the best approach when it comes to specific keywords. After all, the placement isn’t as crucial to your company as the conversion rate. That is, knowing a keyword will cost you $10 per click, and seeing no one buy anything is nothing more than a waste of money. Instead, focus on your return on investment (ROI).
If less competitive keywords attract higher amounts of visitors, it may be the better strategy. Likewise, if the third position is considerably less money than the first, it may be a wise idea to stick with that position over an extended time. You’ll still generate clicks without having to pay first-place pricing.
When you are new in PPC, you try to do your best to appear on the first page, often forgetting about CRO and whether the budget you have spent is worths it. You should make sure this results in good traffic and conversions. There are several softwares, which help you to manage your bidding budget. Adplorer has structured a bid management software, which controls the expenditures according to your settings so that the cumulative expenditures of your orders correspond to their cumulative budget to the day.
You can also use simple rules to flexibly define when Adplorer should end or pause an ongoing campaign.
Forgetting About Ad Extensions
Depending on the type of ad you’re running, there are multiple extensions you can add to your account. Sitelink extensions, callout extensions, location extensions, and price extensions can all add up to increased success. They’ll increase the size of the advertisement and take up more screen space. They’ll improve the click-through rate and customer engagement too.
Unfortunately, forgetting to add the extensions to your ad can be negatively impacting your success. These extensions are free to add to any ad, making them a big mistake when you don’t tap into them whenever possible.
Not Understanding the Difference Between Broad Match and Phrase Match
How your ad appears will be directly impacted by the terms you suggest. When you’re choosing your keyword matching tools, select the right option. A broad match will show the keyword when it’s present anywhere within the search query. A phrase match must include the exact keyword in the same order you mentioned. For example, if your keyword is Sugar Daddy, the broad match will allow any combination of those words. A phrase match would require users to type in that exact keyword to show your ad.
Not Optimizing Your Website
When running an ad campaign, review how your website looks to potential visitors. One of the biggest reasons for a high bounce rate is a slow website. Visitors will click on the ad to be taken to a dead or laggy site. Rather than fighting with the website, hitting the back button is an easier option. As such, always make sure your website is optimized and running at maximum speed.
Never Using Ad Schedules
Every ad will have a specific time of day it will do best. Sometimes this is early morning, and other ads will perform well in the late afternoon. Understanding this golden hour could make a considerable difference to your campaign’s success. Take advantage of these opportune times by stretching your budget throughout the day. To get started, arrange ad scheduling through your Google Ads. This allows you to customize the budget spent at specific times of the day. If you know most customers aren’t interested in your products at 2 am, turn off the ads during this time.
Forgetting Your Location When Running Ads
Chances are, you’ve got a specific location that you provide goods or services. It may be city-specific or a general region, but targeting cities outside your business area means you’re wasting money. After all, if you cannot provide services to California, defining your audience is critical. Once you’ve adjusted your location targeting settings, you’ll focus your attention on the areas you do service instead of throwing your money away.
Forgetting About Your Campaign
Unfortunately for many PPC beginners, letting an ad run continuously without monitoring is the easiest way to throw money away. You’ll want to ensure your ad becomes successful through careful tracking, ongoing edits and changes, and tracking performance. If your metrics aren’t up to standard, you’ll want to edit and tweak the current ad until it performs better.