The keywords you target for your PPC campaign to bid for and display are crucial to your campaign’s success. After all, it is the keywords that you target that will dictate what type of traffic is going to view and have the potential to click onto your PPC search advert to reach your landing page. Taking this into consideration, here are 4 common mistakes PPC advertisers make with their keyword targeting in 2018 that you can use to assess and improve your own campaigns.

Too Vague

In general, the more vague the keywords you target, the higher the CPC. This means your budget will be eaten into far quicker with vague keywords, whilst generally producing less contextual traffic. For example, if you were looking to sell only birthday cards, then using ‘cards’ as a keyword to target will show you people that would like all sorts of cards, even just the ‘card’ material. The more specific the keywords, the higher the likelihood that you will reach your target market.

Lack of Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are keywords for which you do not want your PPC campaign bidding for. You want to miss these keywords and ignore them from interfacing with your campaign/s. This is extremely important to a PPC campaign, since it prevents traffic that is not interested in your campaign’s contents from ever seeing it, preventing the chance of wasting your budget. An example of negative keywords would be ‘piano music’ if you had a PPC campaign looking to sell digital pianos. From including ‘piano music’ as a negative keyword will prevent web traffic that are looking to buy piano music, both on a CD, MP3 or video, as well as sheet music, from seeing your campaign for selling pianos, which they are likely to not be interested in.

Always Update/Improve Your Keywords

When you add keywords to target to your PPC campaign, some advertisers leave the keywords alone and let the PPC campaign run. However, the most successful PPC campaigns are those that continually update their keywords. This is because they discontinue the poor performing keywords, whilst also learning (through trial and error) what the other keywords are that work best with their campaign. It is a continuous improvement process.

Assess the Cost Effectiveness of Keywords

You may feel obligated to include certain high CPC keywords in your campaign since this is one of the few ways to gain good traffic to your advert. However, forget the CPC – what is important is the return on investment (ROI). This stat allows you to understand how profitable it is to pay for a keyword in exchange for a conversion. Based on this, choose the keywords that provide the highest ROI, even if the keywords are ridiculously high in CPC: it is counteracted by the conversions produced from such keyword targeted traffic.