Mistakes in pay per click advertising are common and often very costly. Doing it right requires some vigilance and micromanaging. Here are 10 of the top mistakes people make in their PPC campaigns.
Too Few Ad Groups For Your Keywords
If you put all your keywords into just a few big and broad ad groups, it’s time to restructure your account. You are missing out on important flexibility that pay per click advertising allows. Tighter ad groups allows you more focused, relevant ads.
Ignoring Negative Keywords
Pay per click advertising has placed more importance than ever on click through rates and quality scores. It is vital to fine tune your impressions by getting rid of the non-relevant phrases that are lowering those CTRs. If you are selling an item such as “software for widgets” then be certain you also have those negative keywords like “-free” if you don’t have a free trial version. One way to find irrelevant keywords that are costing you is to check your log files of your site.
Weak Testing
Split-testing your ads is critical. Even the smallest of changes can boost results. In addition to testing your ad copy’s “call to action” or value statements, every ad has multiple variables to test. The titles, the two lines of copy, and display url all can be optimized. If you don’t have time for hands-on testing, a good professional pay per click management company can run daily split testing for you. You’d be surprised how well this can pay off.
Not Precisely Tracking Results
It’s not enough to know that you spend $6,000 dollars a month and get back $12,000 in profit. Your bottom-line numbers need to be precise. The PPC engines will give your click through rates, but you need to know your ROI or costs per action in detail. Tracking results can help you to spend only $5,000 a month to get you that same $12,000 in profit.
Not Tracking Results to the Keyword Level
Setting up good analytics yourself or hiring a professional pay per click management company can do the job. Not only do you get more bang for your buck by getting rid of poor performers, but getting tracking to the keyword-level makes all of your testing and work even more precise. You need to know your earnings per click. If one keyword has a 56 cent Earnings Per Click (EPC) and another had a $1.22 EPC, this is important knowledge. Adjusting your bids to an appropriate level can keep you from over spending…or allow you to throttle up your overall traffic for even more success. Don’t let poor keywords leak your accounts.
Keywords That Are Too Generic
Some broad and generic keywords can certainly push a ton of traffic to your site. They may even be very successful. Often, however, they can also do just the opposite — drain your funds with poor results. A user searching on one of these generic phrases is often doing research in an early part of the buying process. Knowing your keyword-level results and filtering out bad variations with negative keywords can help you get a true read on these generic keywords.
Avoiding the Dirty Work of Building Long-Tail Keywords
This follows the above item on generic keywords. Building a list and individual ads for the long-tail keywords can be a major time-sucker. It can also be profitable if the task is performed correctly. Those earnings per click will likely vary widely from a generic keyword like “mp3 player,” “sony mp3 player” and “sony 2GB S610 walkman video mp3 player.” One consumer is doing research, the other knows what they want and is most likely looking to purchase.
Not Monitoring Both Content and Search Campaigns
You can get stung by poor quality traffic or click fraud if you do not separate your content network advertising from your search network advertising and look at the results. If you don’t understand those above items, there is a good probability that you are very likely losing money. A better solution is to build separate campaigns for each and … track with precise analytics the results from each network. Again, not knowing is probably costing you now.
Not Attracting Local Clients Through Geo Targeting
Each of the major pay per click engines offer a way to tightly set up your campaigns. If you are working from a local pool of potential clients in your area, you need to take advantage of some of the area-specific targeting that the PPC engines offer. Fine tuning your campaigns to get the right people in your region to respond can be well worth the effort to your bottom line.
Not Frequently Monitoring Your Accounts
Not everyone has time to run split testing on a daily basis or frequently checking your EPCs (even though you should…because it’s costing you). That said, there are still a high amount of advertisers who seem to ignore their accounts for days … or even weeks … or (don’t tell me you’re doing this!) months. The big PPC search engines are increasingly cracking down on poor performing keywords, smacking advertisers with that “Inactive for Search” status for individual keywords. When this happens, you lose traffic, you lose profits. If you are investing heavily in PPC, you can’t just turn your back on your account for days at a time.
Healthy, efficient and vibrant PPC campaigns require work. The Terrible 10 of PPC Advertising that we listed above form a strong foundation for you consider when revamping or starting up your PPC advertising. Whether you hire out to a pay per click management company or can actively manage your PPC accounts at this level of detail…precision, effort and attention to detail can greatly impact your results.
Josh Prizer is a Senior Account Executive and search engine marketing consultant for Zero Company Performance Marketing, one of the premier pay per click companies worldwide. Check out their website to discover more about how to improve your pay per click ad results and performance.
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