What is the main reason for pay per click advertising campaigns to fail? It is for a poorly optimised campaign. Why do advertisers 
create poorly optimised campaigns? Well, they don’t mean to but they end up creating poorly optimised campaigns as they are littered with mistakes. Hopefully, your campaign is not filled with mistakes as the more mistakes you have in your campaign, the more money it is going to cost you to run the campaign while gaining the minimum results you want. This is why I have listed some of the biggest mistakes advertisers make in PPC so that if you are one of these culprits, at least you can identify that you are making a mistake, learn from it and improve your campaign to make it that bit more successful.
- A lack of a call to action – Every successful PPC text advert that I have analysed on my ‘Analyse A Real PPC Campaign’ always has some sort of call to action in the advert to encourage the web user into clicking on the advert. Take Nokia, Apple and Amazon – the list goes on. It can be as simple as ‘Learn more’ to ‘Buy the latest smartphone today!’. A call to action just gives the web user that extra reason to click on your advert.
- Using your homepage as your landing page – For 95% of the PPC campaigns out there, you should not send your PPC traffic to your homepage. Instead, create a well optimised landing page based around the type of conversion you want to achieve (the resources to creating a good landing page are all here on PPC.org!). The only exception to this rule is that if you are a company such as Amazon where you want to let the web user browse through all the different categories and products you have to sell. Other than that, create a landing page!
- Going for #1 on search results – Many advertisers like to be number one on the search results and therefore adopt an extremely high CPC to get this. However, does it always have the best results to get top spot? It makes clear that your advert is an advert when you top whereas the last spot on paid search results is closest to the organic results (and therefore, might be more invisible to being paid search to the web user). Don’t think that if you bid higher, you will get better results. Some of the times this is true. However, some of the times it isn’t as well.
- Keywords are too broad – General keywords tend to have a high CPC which makes for an expensive campaign. If you want to produce a financially efficient campaign, look for niche keywords which have the potential to be extremely cheap but provide your landing page just as contextual traffic.
The above PPC mistakes are just a selection which I think too many advertisers are still doing. I do think it is wise to look over your whole campaign and try to identify all the mistakes you have made in your campaign, write them down and resolve them so you don’t do them in future. I can only suggest mistakes you have made. The truth is that only you can find out the actual mistakes you have made.
