Everyone who is now an experienced PPC advertiser would have once been a rookie PPC advertiser who had near to no knowledge in pay per click advertising. Naturally, for most people, the knowledge of PPC will come with experience with the process of learning from your mistakes. However, if experienced advertisers know what these mistakes are that they made when they were inexperienced, surely they should tell the new inexperienced advertisers as a word of warning? This is exactly what this article is going to do. Below are some of the mistakes new PPC advertisers may make.
Focusing Just On Getting Clicks
It is true that one of pay per click advertising’s main selling points is that you pay per click and not pay per ad impression (meaning more value for money). With this stereotype over PPC, new advertisers then think that their whole focus of their campaign should be on getting clicks on their adverts. This is important, however, it should not be the most important. A campaign works like a set of falling dominoes: if one domino in the chain doesn’t fall over, your whole campaign may have the potential to fail.
Using Vague Keywords
When creating your campaign, it is extremely important that you do a bit of research into what keywords you will use for your campaign. After all, it is your keywords that is the contextuality link in PPC. Therefore, have a look at what keywords competitors are using (by typing them into Google and see what adverts pops up) and use Google keywords tool to make sure you are picking the best keywords at the cheapest price.
Forgetting To Track Your Progress
This happens to quite alot of advertisers. It only takes a minute to implement Google Analytics onto your landing page and from doing this, you will be able to open your whole campaign to an area called ‘statistical improvement’. You will be able to look at the statistics from Analytics and then look to improve these areas.
Getting Into Bidding Wars
When people are first introduced to betting, they will usually spend a bit more than they want to. When people are first introduced to auctions such as eBay, they will end up spending more than they want to. When new advertisers are introduced to PPC for the first time, there is a strong chance they will get into PPC bidding wars because they want traffic fast to get their campaign up and running as soon as possible. However, always remember that in PPC, it is all about making money. Whatever you do in PPC, ask yourself ‘how will this help to make me and my campaign money?’ If you cannot answer this, then you might think twice about what you were about to do (which may have been to increase your CPC to ridiculous amounts).
This is not to say that if you are a new advertiser, you will encounter these problems or mistakes. Instead, I see this article as a quick way to gain experience in PPC – when/if you do find yourself in the above positions, from the ‘experience’ you have gained from reading this article, you will know better how to react and reduce the deficit of loss.