On the front of things, pay per click advertising looks a relatively simple form of online advertising for which anyone can use and gain contextual traffic from. As much as this is true, to truly take advantage of the flexibility and cost efficiency of PPC advertising, a PPC campaign has to be optimised correctly. If a PPC campaign has not be created in the right way, it can become a very risky and costly campaign which will not help the advertiser out in anyway. For this reason, here are three common PPC mistakes advertisers make that will cost you money.
 

#1 Vague Keywords

Implementing vague keywords as your targeting tool into your PPC campaign has many negatives that will cost you a lot of money. Considering PPC advertising works on supply and demand, the demand for keywords that are vague is through the roof in general (since the likelihood is that more advertisers are targeting vague keywords than niche keywords). For this reason, the actual CPC of the vague keywords will be far higher than niche keywords. Not only is this bad, but you will generally find that the traffic vague keywords adopts is not targeted enough for your campaign, causing a lot of your traffic to simply click off the landing page upon visiting it.
 
 

#2 A Lazy Landing Page

Every PPC campaign should have a well optimised landing page that is specifically designed to target the type of traffic you are aiming at in your advertising campaign. However, it is far too common to see poor landing pages, be it homepages or landing pages with lots of content, as the landing page of choice for advertisers. Yes, homepages could work as landing pages. But, this only happens in very specific circumstances: when the homepage is actually good enough to be the landing page.
 
 

#3 Not Performing Continuous Testing

At the end of the day, articles such as the ones on PPC.org and the information provided by Google can only provide so much help and information regarding PPC advertising (which, on the whole, is quite a lot)! However, to truly optimise your PPC campaign, it is vital to perform numerous amounts of tests throughout your campaign to determine what works best for your specific campaign. An example of this is with split testing PPC search adverts and landing pages. By running multiple versions of your PPC search advert and landing page with minor tweaks being the difference between each will help you determine which alteration to the PPC search advert and landing page works best at gaining you the highest click through rate for your PPC search advert and conversion rate for your landing page.
The great thing about split testing is the fact that it does not really hinder the progress and success rate of your campaign, since the alterations made are usually very minor making very small differences to the CTR and conversion rate.