Avoid These 14 Pay Per Click Mistakes

As much as there is plenty of information and help out there to make sure mistakes are not made in pay per click advertising, it is still far too common for my liking to see campaigns making mistakes and, sometimes, obvious ones at that too. My ‘Analyse A Real PPC Campaign‘ series on PPC.org has many examples where PPC campaigns have made mistakes, be it large or small. To save on budget and to improve the return on investment (ROI) of a PPC campaign, it is a good idea to iron out all of the mistakes, small and large, so that your campaign is running as efficiently as possible. Here are 14 pay per click mistakes to avoid.

1. Landing page error – Double check the URL you point web users to actually works.
2. Vague targeting – If you target too vaguely with keywords, then your CPC will increase as competition increases for vague keywords. This will eat into your budget.
3. Lack of negative keywords – There will always be negative keywords to include in a campaign, no matter what you are promoting. If you don’t use negative keywords, some of your budget will be going to waste on web users with no interest in converting.
4. Incorrect targeting – It is important to understand your target market. If you use the wrong keywords to target your audience, then it will result in a low conversion rate.
5. Lack of location targeting – Depending on the business will depend on how you target based on the web user’s location. Make sure you put some thought into where your target audience is and how to target them from that.
6. Bidding wars – It is a bad idea to get into a bidding war to reach the #1 spot.
7. Lack of direction – It is important to make sure your search advert and landing page are following the same direction with content and conversion.
8. Lack of ad extension – Depending on your conversion will depend on if you can use an ad extension to miss out the landing page altogether.
9. A/B testing based on conversion rate. Some A/B tests are conducted using CTR as the resultant variable. However, the conversion rate is a far better choice.
10. Lack of bidding on brand names – Keywords can be very expensive. Sometimes, it is cheaper to bid on competitor’s brand names to get contextual traffic.
11. Lack of keywords in search advert – It is important to relate to what the web user searched by including 1-3 keywords in your ad copy.
12. No landing page analytics – It is important to understand how web users are browsing your landing page. Programs such as Google Analytics can provide lots of information on this.
13. Lack of bidding for your own brand name – It is important to bid for your own brand name to make sure web users reach your website before competitors and to ward off any paid competition.
14. Lack of call to actions – Call to actions give web users direction as to what you want them to do for your PPC campaign. It is advisable to stick 1-3 call to actions in an advert, with 1 being in the title and 1-2 in the description.