PPC ads can take your business to new heights, but you have to implement them in a sensible way.
93% of Americans research businesses online before trying their products or services, and 65% of customers will click on a suitable PPC ad. If you own a small business, investing in PPC ads is a no-brainer, but they’re only as effective as the amount of work you put into them.
Plenty of people make PPC mistakes that cost them time and money. In this post, we’re going to outline some of the most common PPC management mistakes so that you can avoid them. Managing PPC campaigns requires a lot of attention and digital marketing knowledge, but the benefits of PPC campaigns when they’re well-managed are undeniable.
Keep reading, and you’ll be able to craft and manage the perfect PPC campaign while avoiding the mistakes that befall many negligent business owners.
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Your Landing Page Is All Wrong
An appealing paid ad can be massive in grabbing the attention of a wide range of customers. Getting them to click on the ad is only the first part of a successful PPC campaign. Where they end up when they click is what will determine the rest.
Landing pages really matter here. If you have a really specific and detailed PPC ad that leads to your home page or some other page that has little to do with your ad, you’re just going to confuse customers. In the end, your bounce rate will increase, and you’ll lose a lot of money on your ads.
Don’t send customers to your “contact us” page or your home page. Define the goals of your PPC ads so that you can generate specific ad copy to send customers down a specific path.
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No PPC Ad Testing
A/B testing is essential in managing PPC campaigns. Not doing split testing means that you’re assuming you nailed the ad copy on your first try, which is almost never the case. You know the old adage about making assumptions.
If you want to maximize traffic and conversions on your PPC campaigns, you’ve got to create multiple ads. Having different ads with wildly different copy can be good in figuring out what works, but you can be really subtle with your A/B testing.
Sometimes it’s tiny changes that make the biggest difference. Taking what works from each ad set allows you to adjust and boost PPC ad performance in the future.
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Using Broad Keywords
A lot of business owners want to hedge their bets by choosing really broad keywords, but this doesn’t work. If your ads are going to stand out and create genuine leads, you’ve got to take big swings on more specific keywords and adjust frequently until something hits.
Broad keywords make it incredibly difficult to stand out from the hundreds of other brands using the exact same approach. Say you’re doing PPC management for auto repair, for instance. Simply trying to rank for “auto repair” isn’t going to move the needle.
Try something more specific to what you are. If you’re a dent removal service in Seattle, rank for “Seattle dent removal service”, which is more targeted and more likely to get legitimate leads.
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Not Using Negative Keywords
Obviously, keywords play an important role in the success or failure of your PPC campaigns. What many businesses fail to do is single out the keywords that they don’t want to rank for – “negative keywords”.
Your Seattle dent removal service, for instance, won’t want to rank for anything having to do with engine or transmission repair. “Engine repair” and “transmission repair” are negative keywords. Including them in your PPC campaign will ensure that you don’t rank for these types of searches.
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Setting and Forgetting
If your PPC ads are going to be successful, they need to be monitored, analyzed, and adjusted on a near-constant basis. Setting up a campaign to be successful takes a long time, so there’s a temptation to take a step back once you’ve launched one.
Look at your PPC ad campaign as an ongoing process where setup and launch are the first steps. The next step is to watch the results come using tools like Google Adwords, which makes it easy to do.
You can’t measure a PPC campaign’s success when you set and forget. It can take weeks or even months of tinkering to optimize a campaign. Defining your KPIs and tinkering with your ads until they’re delivering leads to the greatest PPC success.
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Not Defining Specific Goals
Another huge mistake is the act of launching a directionless PPC campaign. There should be a long process leading up to your PPC campaign where you outline your objectives and how your ads will achieve them.
Not doing this destroys your campaign’s ROI and leaves you wondering where to go next. Without reference points to assess ad performance, you’ll be lost in a world of greater ad spending without much to show for it.
Be uber-specific with your goals. How many leads are you trying to get? Who are the people you want to get those leads from?
These things are easily measurable, making it easier to adjust your campaign to better achieve them.
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Automated Bidding
Automated bidding gives Google permission to spend whatever it wants for your selected keywords. This might seem like a convenient solution to your PPC woes, but it’s going to increase your ad spending more than you want to know.
Obviously, Google wants you to spend more money, which is why they recommend automated bidding. Manual bidding might require a bit more work on your end, but it’s better to have more control over your spending.
Don’t Make These Common PPC Management Mistakes
If you can avoid these common PPC management mistakes, you’ll give yourself a fighting chance in the competitive world of PPC advertising. The key thing to take away is that PPC campaigns require your constant attention to work properly. Take every measure we’ve discussed here, and you’ll put yourself in a much better position than most of your competitors.
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