A well-crafted PPC advertising is one of the fastest ways to generate customers for your business. The ads are only charged when the user clicks on them, hence the name pay-per-click (PPC). Running a PPC campaign isn’t necessarily easy, and being a first-timer in PPC can seem confusing and inaccessible. You might end up wasting money when running PPC and end up believing it is not what’s best for your company.
However, in most cases, people are making mistakes that can easily be fixed. This article will help you understand the industry’s best practices and tips to help you avoid common mistakes that people make with their PPC campaigns. To set your PPC campaign for success, avoid these mistakes.
Doing It Yourself
Although the basics of PPC are simple, teaching yourself and managing a successful PPC ad isn’t. Even experienced experts are still learning and growing as Google is constantly introducing new ads and formats. Many advertisers cannot devote the time and effort to stay abreast of these campaigns; having a PPC management agency that handles these campaigns daily gives you better results and value for your money.
They will make sure you get valuable opportunities to grow your business through PPC and leave you to focus on attending to your customers.
Not Focusing on Customer’s Lifetime Value
Knowing the customer lifetime value (CLV) helps the business to develop strategies that track the customers’ experience across the whole relationship. Knowing your average CLV will help you understand how much you should be bidding, spending per click, and making profits or losses.
CLV is an important metric that helps you increase the value of your existing customers and acquire new customers while maintaining profit margins. The higher the number, the greater the profits. It will also cost less to keep existing customers than it does to acquire new ones.
Using Broad Match Keywords
It is important to know which keywords drive the lowest cost-per-sale, produce the most revenue and create the greatest return on investment. If you want leads to a specific section of your business, you should focus your keywords on that section.
Your goal should be to identify targeted keywords that can attract users. Don’t go after every single type of keyword that someone would search for, as this could result in irrelevant searches and result in wasted clicks. Focus on keywords that lead to purchase intent rather than researching your product and services to avoid spending more on your campaign budget, especially if your budget is limited.
Having a Poor Website
Your website is the ultimate place where searchers will end up. Having a poor website will drop your search ranking in websites and cut down on conversions. If your customers do not convert, what is the point of paying for traffic to send people there? Make sure your website is fast, optimized, mobile-friendly, looks good, brings searches further into the funnel, and ultimately converts.
Not Following Up On Your Campaign
Building a PPC campaign is a lot of work, so once it’s up and running, you may be tempted to let it run on its own. PPC needs consistent monitoring, analyzing, and updating to reach its goals. There are always optimizations and changes you can make to improve campaign performance.
Tying out different bid strategies, reviewing keywords, search terms, and testing new ads are just a few things you should do regularly. You are paying for the ads daily, so make sure you are checking on your campaign performance and budgets often, and adjust your campaign based on your results
Always Wanting to Be Number One
Everybody wants to be in position one, but in PPC, this means that you are going to be spending more money. Ranking high on the search engines guarantees you more clicks and increased traffic, but it can put a strain on your budget. You can still get great conversion rates and CTRs by having ads placed further down the page, which also costs a lot less in the long run.
Not Defining the Target Audience
It is crucial to determine who your ads are for. Failure to define your target audience will lead your campaign to people who do not care, which is not helpful to your marketing strategy. It also means no one will click on your landing pages which will do little to drive your quality score and increase conversions. Always write down the characteristics of your target audience and put into consideration how the target audience works for the PPC platform you are using.
Not Having a Consistent Message
The message, tone, and branding that you portray to your audience through your ads, keywords, landing pages, and other content on the page need to be consistent. You don’t want to confuse your audience by displaying different versions of your brand and what you offer and have them bouncing from your site. For consistency, have the same design on all your platforms and keep your visitors on track by replicating the ad copy on the landing page.
Failing to Optimize the Landing Page
A landing page acts as a follow-up to the promise that you gave your audience in the content. It is the web page where visitors land after clicking on a link or ad, designed to collect their information and convert them into leads. The language and tone of the landing page should match that of the ad, written in a clear and easy-to-understand manner.
An optimized landing page should have an eye-catching headline, a mobile-friendly experience, and an easy call-to-action form that leaves the visitors sure of the step to take on the page.
Not Making Use of Negative Keywords
Many companies already know the importance of using keywords in their campaigns, but few are aware that they can use negative keywords too. Negative keywords tell Google the type of search terms you wouldn’t wish to appear in your results. Using negative keywords in PPC improves your ads’ relevance, ensuring that only the right people get to see them.
Not Geo-targeting
People tend to find geo-targeted ads more appealing. When brands personalize ads, it makes people feel like the brand was speaking to them directly, which is irresistibly attractive. Google allows you to set up geo-targeted advertisements by state or location, helping you focus on the area with the right customers and restricting areas that are not beneficial to you. With geo-targeting, businesses get to increase their return on investment.
Endnote
PPC ads can be highly successful and offer a high return on investment when executed correctly. They enable you to connect with people at the exact time that they are actively searching for what your business offers. You might need to use trial and error with the PPC campaign to land a formula that works best to deliver the kind of results and ROI that you desire for your business.
