There are millions of advertisers that use PPC for, most likely, a million different reasons, making it oneof, if not the, most used form of advertising in the world. With this, it would not come as a surprise to know that there are lots of mistakes being made in PPC, that are both reducing the performance of campaigns as well as costing the advertiser quite a bit of money too. Here are some common PPC mistakes that should be eradicate from PPC campaigns to help you save more of your PPC budget to gaining high quality traffic.
Forgetting to Continually Optimize
Some PPC advertisers tend to create a PPC campaign and then let it run its course until they decide to stop. Although this will still gain good results, it is highly inefficient considering PPC campaigns tend to work best when they are optimized time and time again, as the campaign grows with age.
This does mean there will be extra work, apart from the initial setting up of the PPC campaign. However, from gaining indepth analytics and statistics from your campaign after it has run for a little while, you can further optimize your campaign to fine tune it further and further. By the time you finish with it, it should be like a well oiled engine.
‘Lazy’ Landing Pages
Landing pages are one of the most crucial points to a PPC campaign. Think of a PPC campaign as a domino effect with the ‘last domino to fall’ being the landing page conversion. If you have done everything right except the landing page, then it would all be for nothing.
The problem is that many advertisers look at creating landing pages as costly and time intensive. However, it is almost an absolute necessity to create dedicated landing pages that are specifically optimized for the traffic you have gained through PPC. A common ‘lazy’ landing page that I have seen a few times in the ‘Analyse A Real PPC Campaign‘ series on PPC.org are the homepages, which are simply not optimized to the traffic they are seeing, where the web user would have to make a few extra clicks to find the a page that could resemble a ‘half optimized’ landing page.
Lack of Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are one of the best ways to reduce the cost of your PPC campaign, since they prevent your advert from showing on the keywords which you know, for a fact, will gain a very low conversion rate or a conversion at all.
For this reason, try and include a range of negative keywords which:
- You could see as being poorly converting for your campaign.
- You know, for sure, will not be converting at all for you.
- After testing, and seeing the performance of different keywords, you can then look to fade out the poorest performing keywords, analyse why they are performing poorly and either replace them or concentrate more on the best performing keywords.