Top 10 PPC Mistakes:
1. Keyword Research - without researching keywords thoroughly you will miss out on potential traffic and potential business. You will also miss out on traffic at lower CPCs.
2. Ads - poor ad texts decrease the quality score and the amount of traffic that they receive. Ad texts need to be compelling in order to maximise traffic and conversions.
3. Account Structure – poor account structure yields a poor quality score which means you pay maximum price for your traffic. Getting the best account structure means that you will achieve the best quality score, allowing advertising to pay cheaper CPC for the same positioning, thus giving the ability to get more traffic for the same spend.
4. Negatives – having no negative keywords means that you will appear for many associated terms if you are on broad or phrase match within Google. Use negatives to channel the targeting on the account and therefore maximising the return that you achieve from your spend.
5. Budget settings – by limiting the amount of budget that a PPC campaign spends, the more the appearance of ads becomes intermittent. If you are spending 2/3 of your recommended budget per day and will not allow to go above that then your ads will only appear for 2/3 of the potential search terms per day. This will be of serious detriment to your advertising and on the conversions/sales that the PPC will yield.
6. Location Targeting – always check the country that you are targeting. Always make sure that your targeting is specific as it can be; even a localised campaign within the Google interface is good enough for a local company.
7. Understanding of the buying cycle – use web analytics to aid in the tracking of website activity and maximise the sales that come through from all of the traffic landing on the website. 82% of companies don’t use an Analytics package – your website is your shop; if you don’t know it inside and out then you will fail. Understand what parts of the website and the advertising that searchers are and aren’t interested in.
8. Timings – understand the times of high traffic and high conversions/sales. Utilise the knowledge of search and buying trends according to b2b or b2c industries. Utilise setting of advertising times to maximise performance.
9. Landing pages – never send your traffic to your homepage! If a user can’t find anything with two or three clicks they will invariably click off and it will be a wasted click. Structure your website accordingly and send traffic only to specific pages.
10. Conversion tracking – not utilising conversion tracking makes PPC advertising none transparent. Utilising conversion tracking means that you can relate sales and enquiries directly to your advertising spend; thus closing the ROI loop.
