We are already a month into 2017 and it is looking to continue where 2016 left off in terms of PPC advertising: more and more advertisers increasing their budget to use PPC as source of traffic. This is understandable considering the numerous benefits pay per click advertising has over other traditional forms of advertising. With this in mind, it is important for those, both new and exisiting PPC advertisers, to use PPC advertising to its full potential in 2017. This can be further achieved through making sure to not do the following PPC mistakes in 2017.
 
 

#1 Broad Keyword Targeting

Contextuality is the backbone to PPC advertising. It is all about finding targeted specific traffic and then displaying the most contextual adverts for them, to increase the likilhood of both a click onto the advert and a conversion.
Broad keywords reduces the contextuality of a PPC campaign. For example, if you wanted to sell sports cars, then targeting using broad keywords such as ‘buy car’ will not only send you traffic wanting to buy sports cars but traffic wanting to buy a whole range of different types of cars. Therefore, specific keywords are the way to go in terms of reducing the cost of your campaign and getting better results.
 
 

#2 Using a Homepage as a Landing Page

There are a few exceptions when a homepage can be beneficial to use as a landing page for a PPC campaign, such as for Amazon. However, for the majority of PPC advertisers out there, it is far better to make a specific landing page for your PPC campaign rather than the homepage. Having a homepage as the landing page makes it harder for the web user to bring you a conversion, since usually directing PPC traffic to a homepage results in the web user still being at least two clicks away from a conversion (one to click onto the specific webpage for the conversion on the landing page and one for the actual conversion itself).
 
 

#3 Lack of Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are keywords for which you do not want to bid for specifically in PPC. Take the selling of sports car examples. It would be a good idea to include negative keywords such as ‘SUV’, ‘estate’, ‘family car’ and more as negative keywords so that traffic that reaches the landing page discludes people wanting to buy a car other than a sports car.
From this, what negative keywords are good at doing is making your PPC campaign that bit more contextual or prevent poor performing keywords from being targeted by your campaign. You may find that the conversion rate for people that search ‘buy sports car’ is low because they are just roaming the web and have not decided on the make or model of the sports car to specifically buy. Therefore, including ‘buy sports car’ as a negative keyword will free up more of budget to bid on better performing keywords.