I have recently done a few articles on how to improve a PPC campaign’s performance such as 2 Mobile PPC Tips and 3 Of The Best PPC Tips. However, as much as these will help many people, sometimes all you want to know is the mistakes that people make in PPC so you can learn from the mistakes and prevent yourself from doing the same errors. Therefore, here are some of the mistakes not to make in PPC that, time and time again, advertisers continuously do in PPC.

 

 

Using Your Homepage as a Landing Page

There are a few exceptions to this, I admit, such as Amazon. However, for the vast majority of advertisers out there, it is utterly lazy to send visitors to your homepage. What is the point of targeting specific traffic to a homepage? It does not make sense.

The only time you should ever use your homepage as a landing page is when your campaign is not specific at all (like Amazon’s). For example, if you are simply trying to promote your own book store, that is when you send the visitor to your homepage: not when you are promoting a specific book.

 

 

Vague Keywords

Vague keywords will not do you any favours in PPC. Having keywords that are too broad will only cause your budget to dwindle away (since broad keywords will adopt high CPCs) and also send not-as-targeted traffic to your landing page.

In essence, you should stick to specific keywords, niche and negative keywords since these are the keywords that tend to be most effective for advertisers.

 

 

Forgetting Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are a necessity for PPC campaigns. By preventing your advert from appearing on search results for unrelated keywords will mean more contextual web users will see your advert improving the whole performance of your campaign.

For example, if Ferrari wanted to make a campaign, if they forgot to include any negative keywords in their campaign, anyone who searches to buy a ‘cheap car’ may see Ferrari’s campaign. Therefore, by including the negative keyword ‘cheap’ in their campaign will stop these web users, who never looked like they were going to buy a Ferrari, from seeing and clicking on the advert.

 

 

Tracking Performance

At the end of the day, I cannot tell you every mistake you will make in PPC. But, you can. Many advertisers tend to forget to track the results of their campaign as they see it as a lot of effort for not much reward – wrong! By tracking results will enable you to see the flaws of your campaign and improve it further. As well as this, it will help you see any areas you have made errors since statistics do not lie!