When you are creating a PPC marketing campaign, it is a good idea to look at some common mistakes that others are making in their PPC management. Mistakes cost you money because they can make it difficult to get traffic to your site or result in people visiting your site who never turn into buyers. Ultimately, everything you do with your PPC campaigns should be driving customers to your site who will buy your products. Here’s a look at some of the mistakes being made that are making PPC campaigns ineffective or not as effective as they could be.
Not Linking to the Right Page on Your Website
It’s common for most marketers to link their PPC ads to their home page, thinking that getting customers on their site is the main goal. However, if you want to convert visits to purchases, you have to be a little more creative. The landing page a person gets to by clicking your ad should relate to the search term. For example, if your keyword was “women’s tennis rackets,” then you need to be sending them to a page showing women’s tennis rackets, not a home page that is offering a bunch of different sports equipment.
When you only use your home page, you are adding a lot of work for the customer. They then have to search on your site to find the product they want. Many times, people will just walk away instead of trying to do this. So, you end up paying for traffic that isn’t converting to sales.
Not Measuring the Effectiveness
It is a big mistake to run a Google Adwords campaign and not check up on the results of it. If you just let a campaign run, you could be losing money. You have to stay on top of things. This means watching your conversion rates and ensuring that all your keywords are working. You should make adjustments as needed. Get rid of those keywords that aren’t bringing in any traffic or not bringing you new customers who are buying. You can also make adjustments to see if that helps boost the effectiveness of your keywords.
Not Making Use of Negative Keywords
You have the option of using negative keywords to exclude those words that don’t work for your company. For example, if you don’t sell designer items, then you can exclude the word “designer” from your keywords. This will keep people who are looking for designer items from seeing your ads, clicking through and costing you money because they certainly aren’t going to turn into a customer.
Not Narrowing Down the Keywords in your Ad Groups
Putting too many keywords in your ad groups is a mistake because it doesn’t allow you to create targeted materials for the keywords. You want to try to make your keywords as targeted as possible with ads that will reach the customers who will buy and landing pages that will get them to buy. If you are grouping too many words together, you run the risk of losing the value of some of those keywords. Instead, only group keywords that are closely related.
Not Choosing the Right Match Setting
You can set your keywords as a broad, phrase or exact match. Obviously, an exact match would be the exact keyword and only that exact phrase typed in the search engine bringing up your ad. A phrase match just means the exact phrase shows up somewhere in the search. A broad match is that the keywords show up in some manner in the search. A broad search will get you more matches, but it isn’t as targeted as the other two options. However, an exact match is very limiting, which would decrease the effectiveness of your campaigns. Choosing which match setting to use is really going to be based on how precise and targeted you want your ads to be.
By knowing these common mistakes, you’ll be much better at avoiding them. When you avoid them, you increase your chances for campaign effectiveness.
