The Terrible 10 of Pay Per Click Advertising
Mistakes in Pay per click advertising are common and often very costly. Doing it right requires some vigilance and micromanaging. Here are 10 of the top mistakes people make in their PPC campaigns.
Too Many Keywords Per Ad Group
Creating relevant, targeted ads are important. Avoid placing all your keywords into a couple massive ad groups. Build them tighter. With tight ad groups you can control more of your ad customization to increase relevancy.
Ignoring Negative Keywords
With quality scores and click through rates playing a bigger role in your Pay per click ad rank, it’s more important to weed out the keywords that push up your impressions and don’t result in desired clicks. If you sell “widget software” make sure you have negative keywords such a “-free” or “-serial.” Also, check your log files for your site to look for bad keywords that you are spending money on right now.
Not Doing Enough Testing
Split-testing your ads is critical. Even the smallest of changes can boost results. In addition to testing your ad copy’s “call to action” or value statements, every ad has multiple variables to test. The titles, the two lines of copy, and display url all can be optimized. If you don’t have time for hands-on testing, a good professional Pay per click management company can run daily split testing for you. You’d be surprised how well this can pay off.
Not Precisely Tracking Results
Of course, testing your ads and fine tuning your keyword lists only works well if you are tracking results. The search engines will tell you what your click-through rates are … but you need bottom-line results. You need to know your return on investment or what your cost per action is. It’s not enough to know that you spend $5,000 and get back $10,000. You might be able to spend only $3,000 and get that same $10,000.
Not Getting Keyword-Level Tracking
Good analytics or a good Pay per click management company will get your data down to the keyword level. Why pay for keywords that are not performing? That money could be better spent on keywords that are doing well or on other marketing expenses. If one keyword has an earning per click of 45 cents and another keyword has an earning per click of $1.45, you need to know. You can lower the bid on one and raise the bid on the other to drive more profits. If you aren’t doing this, you likely have under-performing keywords that are leaking your account daily.
Keywords That Are Too Generic
Negative keywords may not be enough to keep you from trouble on too generic a keyword. While these generic keywords are often more highly searched and can even be among your best…they can also be riddled with bad traffic. Users who perform a search on a generic keyword may often be at a very early stage in the purchase process. Are you able to turn an effective profit on them? Once again, this is yet another reason why you need keyword-level traffic. It’s especially vital on a generic keyword.
Avoiding the Dirty Work of Building Long-Tail Keywords
To follow up on the generic keyword topic, creating your long-tail keyword lists and the relevant accompanying ads may be a major time-consuming process. Do it right and you can also find it to be very profitable. The nature of keywords is that they vary from phrase to phrase. A keyword like “cell phone” can differ in results from a keyword such as “motorola cell phone”, which in turn can vastly differ from a more long-tail keyword like “motorola w375 unlocked cell phone.” One user is likely still doing research, while the user in the last example knows what they want … and may be ready to make that purchase.
Not Pulling Apart Content and Search Campaigns
An easy way to get scorched on poor performing traffic or even click fraud is to not separate your search network ads from your content network ads. Chances are that if you don’t know what the difference is, then they are likely not separated in your account — and bad keywords are leaking your funds daily. You are better off to build different campaigns for your keywords on the content and search networks.
Not Attracting Local Clients Through Geo Targeting
Each of the major Pay per click engines offer a way to tightly set up your campaigns. If you are working from a local pool of potential clients in your area, you need to take advantage of some of the area-specific targeting that the PPC engines offer. Fine tuning your campaigns to get the right people in your region to respond can be well worth the effort to your bottom line.
Not Continually Monitoring Your Campaigns
Not everyone has time to run split testing on a daily basis or frequently checking your EPCs (even though you should…because it’s costing you). That said, there are still a high amount of advertisers who seem to ignore their accounts for days … or even weeks … or (don’t tell me you’re doing this!) months. The big PPC search engines are increasingly cracking down on poor performing keywords, smacking advertisers with that “Inactive for Search” status for individual keywords. When this happens, you lose traffic, you lose profits. If you are investing heavily in PPC, you can’t just turn your back on your account for days at a time.
Healthy, efficient and vibrant PPC campaigns require work. The Terrible 10 of PPC Advertising that we listed above form a strong foundation for you consider when revamping or starting up your PPC advertising. Whether you hire out to a Pay per click management company or can actively manage your PPC accounts at this level of detail…precision, effort and attention to detail can greatly impact your results.
Tags: PPC Advertising