There is no shame in accepting the fact that we make mistakes and we do it almost on a regular basis. Even NASA makes mistakes. In fact, if you are not making mistakes, I can dare say you are not pushing yourself that hard. The best way to learn is to make mistakes but sometimes, these small mistakes can cost you huge, especially when you are running a PPC campaign. Since you are going to pay for each single click, a small mistake can be snowballed into a major crisis and this can cost you huge. So, unless you do not mind seeing your hard earned money goes wasted, you need to be careful about the most common PPC mistakes that I am going to narrate here.
Do not Burn the Budget
It happened with me when I was to manage a PPC account of a big corporate company and I made a tiny little typo while I was setting up the budget. Nothing serious; I had mistakenly added a zero extra. I was told to set the daily budget limit to $500 but somehow, I have added a zero extra to that and therefore, you can imagine how I was greeted by my senior the very next day. It is really embarrassing when you find yourself solely responsible for wasting the money and resource of the company who has entrusted you with the responsibility of managing accounts.
But believe me this is a common mistake and if you are not paying attention [and in case, a lovely lady sits just next to you and hogging all your attention] to detail, you are going to pay a big price sooner or later. The great thing about PPC, which you are well aware of, is that you can control how much you are going to spend on the budget. You can set the budget limit as you wish but the problem creeps in when you commit silly mistakes like failing to add a new budget to MDS.
Now, avoiding this type of problem is quite easy. All you got to do is to be attentive while defining the budget and that’s all. Double check the amount before you click on the Add button and everything will be just fine.
You are Bidding it Wrong My Friend
It happened to me more than once. I remember the day when my senior asked me to do some keywords research and when I was done with that I was told to set the keywords bid for them. I have done almost everything right there. This time around, I have not added an extra zero to the amount; instead I had done something more horrible and devastating. I forget to add a point. I was told to set the keyword budget in-between $.30 to $.90. But for some strange reason, I forget to add that tiny point and therefore, the next morning when I started my laptop and checked the account, there was something awesome waiting for me. Yeah, those keywords had done their job. There was not a single penny left in the account.
You may find this funny but this is something that can happen to anyone who is always busy managing other important things like increasing conversions, driving more traffic and all that. And what if I reverse the story. I mean to say, things could turn for the worse, if you find that you have set the budget to $.90 when it should be $90. So, you need to be aware of what budget you are setting on the keyword level.
Network Targeting Mistake
This happens with almost every single PPC marketer at certain point of their career. I have made a terrible mistake when I was trying to launch a Display network campaign from my client. There were some text adverts running, they were performing fine, and do you know what I did? Yup, I thought it would be wise to select – ‘Display Network Only’ from the Network drop down menu. You can imagine what would have happened to me the next day. Yes, all those text campaigns got disabled and I got a good thrashing from my boss.
So, these are the common mistakes that you should be steered clear of while running a PPC campaign.
