I admit before I start this article there are many mistakes people make in PPC. It is always good to get rid of any small mistakes or bad habits in PPC as it will help to improve the success rate of your campaign. However, it is the systematic errors, the errors you don’t know about that will have the biggest effect to your campaign. I have met with, conversed with PPC advertisers and been an advertiser of PPC myself. I have suffered from these mistakes. However, I have learned and I hope by sharing this article with you will stop you making one of if not the biggest mistake in PPC.
Like with everything, there are do’s and don’ts in PPC such as:

• Do experiment.
• Do create an effective advert.
• Don’t guess.
• Don’t have a rubbish landing page.

The remaining bullet points can be found in an article, ‘The Do’s and Don’ts of PPC Marketing‘. These are all valid points but if you continue to do the systematic error I am going to talk about, it is pretty much pointless doing the above.
 

Don’t Ever Expect

 
Three words that can significantly improve your PPC campaign’s results. ‘How?’ you might ask. PPC or ‘pay per click’ is a market where advertisers have to outbid other advertisers to gain ad spaces on websites that have Adsense enabled (as well as being topic related to the advert). After that, it is out of the advertisers hands whether he has created a good enough advert for a reader to click on and potentially make him a conversion. My point I am trying to make is that there are many different independent factors that will affect your campaign.

There are many different independent factors that will affect your campaign.

That sentence alone can answer why I chose ‘Don’t Ever Expect’ as the biggest PPC mistake. You can never expect every one of the many independent factors to go the way you want it to go. As well as that, in the current climate we are in where we are heading for a double recession and confidence amongst stock markets, share prices and general business is low, you should always…

Expect the Unexpected.

If there is one thing you can take away from this article, it is them three words: expect the unexpected. Let’s give an example. You have created a successful campaign bringing in a high percentage of conversions and you decide to invest alot more time and money into the campaign to make it that bit better. Then, all of a sudden, the readers that click on your adverts are producing a much lower conversion rate than before. If you had expected the unexpected, you would have chose not to invest everything into your PPC campaign and gone the safe route instead.

Expecting the Unexpected relates to reducing risk of a PPC campaign to a minimum making your success rate increase.