Nine PPC Mistakes You Can Fix to Grow Your Business
PPC is a complex marketplace. Each time you can make incremental changes to increase your PPC effectiveness, you can serve more relevant ads, receive higher quality clicks, and increase your overall profitability. Here are nine common PPC traps that are commonly seen among businesses.
Making assumptions about content match
Content match is a separate user engagement than search as it’s contextually relevant, but not search focused. This inherently doesn’t mean it’s better or worse than search - it means it’s different. Please treat the content network as a separate inventory source. Bid on it differently and measure it separately. (Google Breeze presentation)
Not setting goals before advertising
Every business has goals that make it successful. When beginning an advertising campaign, one should be setting advertising goals (CPA, page views per visit, ROI, whatever goes towards your business goals) and then making both bid and advertising decisions around those goals.
Changing bids when you should adjust quality score
There are two ways to change your ad’s position in a search result page: quality score and bid. The simplest way of changing your ad position is by changing your bid. However, it’s not always the most profitable. If you have a low quality score, making changes that address your quality means you could raise your ad position without paying more money.
Assuming you know the best ad copy and landing page - split test
There are basic rules that state that a product search query should send the visitor to the product page. However, these rules are often based upon laws of averages. Averages means there are those both above and below the average. Don’t just assume you understand the best ad copy or landing page for a visitor. Constantly split test ads and landing pages to ensure you are making the best decisions about user engagement possible.
Not geo targeting
Geo targeting is great for local businesses, and every local business should be employing geo targeting. However, many national companies should be employing it as well. Whether you use geo targeting to identify with people locally or want to test out an offer in one community before rolling it out to the country -using geo targeting will give you many options for both connecting with users, but also for testing out new products.
Stop bidding when your #1 in organic
Search advertising (SEO, PPC, etc) first starts with controlling real estate on a search page. Every time you stop bidding on a keyword, you lose a piece of real estate. There are many studies that have concluded that being in both the top organic and PPC slots can increase CTR, trust, and brand lift.
Not using negative keywords
Two important components of PPC advertising are conversion tracking and ad serving. Negative keywords will keep your ad from showing. Define what queries don’t make you money, or for which you don’t want your ad to show for, and then utilize negative keywords to help control your ad serving. It is important to implement conversion tracking when using negative keywords to ensure that the intended effect is helping you to increase your overall profitability.
Not creating a Unique Marketing Message that carries through from ad copy to landing page
As people, every time we do an action, we have an expectation. When a searcher reads an ad, they have an expectation of what the landing page will bring. A PPC click costs you real dollars, so ensure that you are meeting the user’s expectation by having a seamless transition from ad copy to landing page.
Not tracking conversions
Every business should know their conversion rate by keyword and ad copy. Not having this data means that you are blind to the effectiveness of your ad spend. One can not make effective decisions towards changing bids, keywords, or ad copy to meet your advertising goals unless you first understand your conversion rates, cost per conversion, and if the changes you make to your campaign are helping or hurting you grow your business.
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