Let’s be honest. Every PPC campaign will have a small mistake here and there because campaigns are so open to customization that it is near on impossible to make the ‘perfect PPC campaign’. However, it is not usually the small minor mistakes in a campaign that results in it running inefficient and deeming it a failure – this occurs when big mistakes occur in campaigns. Therefore, without further ado, here are three of the biggest mistakes that are made in PPC campaigns so you can acknowledge them and prevent your campaign from having them too.
 
 

#1 Not Using Ad Extensions

Every advertisers should take up any opportunity to gain extra space on search engine results for free. However, you will find that a lot of campaigns out there still don’t, which is rather confusing. Ad extensions are a great addition and innovative idea to PPC to make adverts more contextual which ultimately results in a much better click through rate (CTR). The best thing about ad extensions is that there are so many different extensions an advertiser can use – this means there is always going to be at least one ad extension that you can use for your campaign. What more, they are free to use so there is literally no reason to not use them.
 
 

#2 Don’t Move Desktop Campaigns Straight to Mobile

With the mobile industry expanding, to what seems like, exponentially, it is also a necessity to have a dedicated mobile campaign for your desktop PPC campaign so you can maximize the marketing efforts of PPC to all different devices. However, the problem/mistakes occurs when advertisers literally use their desktop campaign as their mobile campaign, without making any alterations or optimizations.
This is a complete waste of money because there is no similarity between what will work for desktops as to what will work for mobiles devices. A great example of this is using a landing page from a desktop campaign as your mobile landing page, without realizing that the landing page uses flash and the vast majority of mobile devices out there do not run flash…
 
 

#3 Geo-targeting and Translating Content

For those that are running worldwide campaigns, an important feature to a PPC campaign is making sure you are translating content for different countries that speak different languages. For example, you do not want to target France with a Spanish advert and so on…
But, more to the point, how do you go about translating your advert to suit the different nationalities out there? The biggest mistake you could make is using an online translation tool, such as Google Translate. What people forget to realize is that online translation tools tend to translate words like for like, forgetting that how different languages are spoken also depends on the structure of the sentence too.
Therefore, if you find yourself having to translate content for different languages in PPC, put some budget aside to hire a translator to do it for you – that way, you can be sure your advert makes sense in any language you have chosen to have geo-targeted.