Pay per click advertising is a form of online advertising being used in its millions to send potential customers to targeted landing pages. It is a popular form of advertising, if not the most. The idea to pay a small price to get someone to click on your advert to get onto your landing page is a simple and effective concept. However, PPC is not always as simple as it sounds. It is not always as simple as getting your potential customers to click onto a landing page. There are many factors which contribute to the overall success of a PPC campaign. For this reason, here are three mistakes in PPC that will not help your campaign’s success effectively costing you money.
 
 

Use of No Call to Actions

Call to actions are a necessity for all PPC campaigns out there. Where you plan to include your call to actions is entirely your choice. For the majority, a call to action in the advert and on the landing page will do nicely to helping you gain a high CTR and conversion rate.
Therefore, if you are not including call to actions in your advert or especially your landing page, you are not optimising your advert/landing page to its fullest. After all, if you are not asking the web user to do anything, why have you directed them onto your landing page at a cost? You want them to do something so tell them!
 
 

Landing Page Choice

I tend to look at the landing page as the ‘make or break’ part of the campaign since this is where the conversion happens which will make you money. Therefore, it is extremely important that you guide your PPC traffic onto the right web page to make you the most money. Guiding web users onto pages such as the homepage (allowed for Amazon’s case), contact pages, pages with lots of content but no images etc. will result in a low conversion rate.
 
 

Badly Chosen Keywords

Keywords are what makes your traffic contextual. You need to make sure you choose keywords that:

• Bring in traffic that is genuinely interested on your campaign’s topic.
• Have a relatively low CPC so that your campaign is cost effective.

However, in reality, you will have to find a balance between the two above points: the best keywords will bring the best traffic in at a low price.
The mistake is that advertisers either pay extreme amounts of money (such as $55) for unrelated keywords to their campaign. A lot of time needs to be spent on coming up with the best keywords for your campaign. Usually, this can be achieved through a brainstorming session.
 
Generating a pay per click campaign that is successful is never going to be an easy job – if it was, everyone would have one! To be honest, everyone does have a campaign because they think it is going to be easy. In general, most campaigns are successful. But, to truly make a  campaign really successful, make sure you are not doing the above mistakes.