Although I have already made an article highlighting 4 Mistakes To Not Make In PPC, I feel four is simply not enough (hence this article)! The fact is that there are, potentially, hundreds of mistakes an advertiser of PPC and Google AdWords can make. Some might be obvious and no-brainers while others you may not have even known about until now. For this reason, here are three additional mistakes that are commonly made in pay per click advertising and Google AdWords.

Search Campaigns on Display Networks

Most people will not even realise this that search campaigns and display campaigns are entirely different things. A search campaign will be running adverts above the organic search results on Google while the display campaigns will have adverts appearing on publisher websites in advertising boxes that use Google Adsense. For this reason, how you optimise the advert and the campaign generally will be very different since the two types of campaigns are appearing in different locations, with sizes and, potentially, different colours and fonts.

A mistake that is commonly made is that advertisers run campaigns that are designed for search results but mistakenly have the campaign also run on display networks. Google wants as much coverage as possible hence why they enable both networks for campaigns. There is a simply solution to this, though: deselect display network for your search campaign and vice versa.

Experimenting with More than One Variable

If you stay up to date with my articles on PPC.org, you will get the general idea that I like the idea of experimenting in PPC to improve a campaign. You could look at hundreds of articles online telling you how to best make a PPC campaign. But, at the end of the day, they are usually too vague to apply specifically to just your campaign. When you want to improve your campaign, the best thing to do is set some of your budget aside to experiment. Through experiment, you can monitor results to see how changing one variable at a time changes the performance of your campaign. A mistake to not make, though, is changing more than one variable at a time. If you change two or more variables at a time and the performance of your campaign changes, how do you know exactly which variable you changed caused this or, if not, both?

Bidding For Top Spot

When it comes to wanting the best results, there is a general stereotype that the higher your paid search advert is ranked, the more success you will get. I can kind of see the logic in this. The problem is that this is not always the case – many campaigns do just as well not at top #1 spot on paid advertising because they will usually have a much lower CPC which means more traffic for their money.

I am not saying you should never aim for #1 spot. Just be careful not to get into a bidding war for #1 spot because if you do you will find your budget will drain far too quickly due to the high CPC you have adopted which potentially is not worth the income of traffic.