8 Common PPC Campaign Mistakes
Hiring someone to handle your PPC campaign is an expense that may seem hard to justify. Yet running effective PPC campaigns is not as simple as it looks in YouTube tutorials. Marketing Charts estimates a full quarter most PPC budget is wasted due to poor practices. Moz.com indicates companies can make 70 percent more revenue simply by fixing common PPC campaign mistakes.
1. Focusing Too Strong on the Top Spot
Ranking high is good, but earning the #1 spot on paid campaigns is costly and may not bring the ROI you expect. The high bidding required for the top spot, especially for broad keywords like “medicine” or “yoga”, negates the additional income it will bring. We recommend working toward the #3 spot.
2. Not Optimizing for Mobile
Have you enabled call extensions on your mobile campaigns? Are you running mobile-preferred ads? If you aren’t, you are missing out on a potential 8 percent increase in click-through rate.
3. Poor Landing Page Quality
The quality of the ad is just the first piece of the PPC puzzle. You also need to connect that ad to high quality, high conversion landing page, and you need to track conversions to ensure it’s working. Marketing Charts believes less than half of the landing pages have conversion tracking installed, so the majority of companies struggle to know if landing pages are converting.
4. Improper Keyword Optimization
Keywords are essential to a proper PPC campaign Unfortunately, many businesses struggle with properly optimizing for keywords. Only four out of 10 surveyed by Marketing Charts used modified broad match keywords. Poor keyword optimization will prevent your ads from being seen.
5. Failing to Spend the Time
Managing PPC campaigns properly is a commitment. Adding negative keywords, performing ad optimization, and checking analytics takes time. Many business owners and marketing managers simply do not have the time it requires to stay on top of PPC campaigns.
6. Failing to Exclude Fraud Networks
All of the search engines have a network through which they distribute paid ads. Sometimes these networks are fraudulent, and you can identify them when you see a high bounce rate. We recommend adding these to your excluded sites list.
7. Ignoring Negative Keywords
Negative keywords, like “free” or “cheap,” are keywords people may search when they search your broad keywords. These searchers tend to be hollow because they are less likely to convert. Instead of paying for visitors who do not want to buy from you, add these words to your “negative keyword folder.”
8. Forgetting Brand Name Keywords
How many times does your target customer use your competition’s brand or company name? Bid on these branded keywords, and you may find that they bring excellent returns, especially if your offerings are similar or better.
Conclusion
Running a PPC campaign is challenging, and often takes more time than the average business owner or marketing manager has. Running your PPC campaigns without a team that is highly experienced can have adverse effects on your search engine marketing. Typically this drives the cost per conversion way up and wastes marketing budget on useless keywords & search queries.
To do it well, consider hiring an agency with PPC experts, so you can have more time to focus on the aspects of your business where your strengths shine.
Colling Media is a Phoenix, AZ-based full-service advertising specializing in Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising.
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