Pay Per Click (PPC) is one of the most exciting forms of online advertising: its results are instantaneous, meaning that you can quickly gather a wealth of useful information and with its advanced targeting methods, you have more control over who you’re marketing to.
If not managed correctly, PPC can become very expensive for little or no return: mistakes are easy to make and can be costly.
We’ve listed below the 5 most common PPC mistakes that result in a loss of conversions. Check these against your account and hopefully it’ll help to not only save you money, but increase your return on investment.
1. Boring Ad Creative
Boring and dull ad creative is the worst mistake you can make. Remember; as an advertiser you’re trying to persuade the user to click your ad rather than that of your competitors. Ads need to be punchy, have very clear calls to action, draw users to the site, sell the USP and show potential customers why the brand should be trusted. That’s a lot of information to fit into a very small number of characters and can take a lot of trial and error to achieve.
Don’t fall into a trap of using the same ad text for each campaign – tailor the ad to your targeted keywords and service as much as possible.
Ad creative is the most difficult part of the account to get right, yet it’s most important aspect as the ads are the first thing that potential customers see. Using an Account Manager can help with this, as they’ll be able to devise the perfect ad creative.
2. Missing The Target
Adwords gives you the ability to target potential customers even down to postcode level, meaning that you can tailor ads to a very specific audience. Why would you ignore this feature?
Not only can targeting lead to an uplift in relevant visits and a reduction in bounce rate; but the data gathered from geo-targeting allows you to adjust bids based on geo area. For example, if a UK wide retailer finds they receive the highest number of transactions in Blackpool, with geo-targeting you can capitalise on this by increasing all the bids in Blackpool by 10%.
For a local business, geo-targeting means that ads can be shown to potential customers in your geo-area rather than showing ads to the whole of the UK. Therefore, precious budget isn’t wasted on unwanted clicks, where the service can’t be fulfilled.
3. The Keyword Conundrum
When adding keywords you should take the match type into consideration, as this can make a big difference to the traffic driven by ads and the account spend.
Any keywords added to the account are automatically ‘Broad Match’, meaning that your ads will show for your keyword plus any additional words in the search query. Broad Match keywords will generally lead to a higher ‘spend’, as you’ll receive unrelated clicks as your ads show more often for more search queries. Check this against the other match types available to ensure you’re using the correct match for your campaign.
4. Ignoring The Tools
Adwords has a number of tools available so that you can get the most out of your account; from the Keyword Planner to a number of Ad Extensions. These tools are all free to use and can dramatically improve your ads and clicks!
The Extensions can do a number of things – from increasing the size of your ads with Sitelinks to showing your business address and marker on Google Maps through the Locations Extension. All of these extensions increase your share of the Google Search results page and so can help to lead to more clicks, whilst kicking your competitors to the curb.
5. Failing To Measure Conversions
With an eCommerce site, it’s easy to measure the success of your PPC campaign. With a service driven site, you must ensure that you have Goals set up in Analytics that you can then pull into Adwords. Taking advantage of the Click to Call Extension is a great idea too, as calls lasting over a certain period will be classed as a conversion.
Without these measurements in place, it’s almost impossible to see where improvements should be made to your account and how profitable it is.
