Let’s all be honest. There is not one advertiser out there that has not made a mistake in pay per click advertising. For beginners, I like to think as PPC as a learning iterative process where advertisers will naturally learn from their mistakes and improve their campaigns from their new-found knowledge. Even through using this process in PPC, advertisers are still making awful mistakes (and I mean terrible mistakes)! For this reason, here are three of, what I feel to be, the biggest and most terrible mistakes advertisers are still making in PPC that will affect the whole performance of their campaign. At least the good thing associated with these mistakes are that they have easy fixes.

Typos

By wrongly spelling a word or putting the wrong punctuation will seriously affect the performance of your campaign. It makes it look poorly optimised and unprofessional which, in turn, will turn the web user away from clicking onto your advert or converting on your landing page. The thing with typos is that it makes the web user think ‘if this advert or landing page has a typo on it, how do I know the product/service/conversion is going to be of the quality I was expecting?

Faulty Landing Pages

I have encountered a few landing pages that have failed to load once I clicked onto the search advert. An example of this was Seat (the car manufacturer’s) campaign who had a terrible campaign for the reason that they were paying for every click to a notice which said ‘Error An unexpected error has occurred. We apologise for your inconvenience’.

This is, by far, the biggest mistake any advertiser in PPC could perform. It is a complete waste of money having enticed the web user with your advert and paid for the traffic for them to reach an error page as the landing page.

Bidding Wars

eBay is such a popular website because when it first started out, some second hand products were actually going for more than they were worth new – this is because of bidding wars. Once you enter a bidding war, it is hard to control your expenditure. The same principle applies to PPC. If you are struggling to get ad impressions, you may be inclined to increase your maximum CPC. However, increasing it too much and your campaign will start becoming less financially efficient. Therefore, its swings and roundabouts: the right balance between the cost per click and ad impressions is vital to the whole campaign’s performance.