The Terrible 10 of Pay Per Click Advertising
Vigilance, micromanaging and attention to detail can help you avoid some common and costly mistakes of PPC advertising. What are those mistakes? Here are the terrible 10 that are typical to most pay per click campaigns.
Too Many Keywords Per Ad Group
It’s important to target your ad to be as relevant as possible. Don’t group all your keywords into one or two ad groups. Break them out. Keep them tight. This gives you more control over ad variables so that you can be as relevant as possible.
Ignoring Negative Keywords
Negative keywords reduce unwanted impressions, and more importantly, unwanted click throughs. However, with increasing priority given to “quality scores” and click through rates in the PPC engines, it’s key to trim the fat from your keyword campaigns. If your company sells “widget management software” then be sure that you have keywords like “-serial” or “-free” assigned as negative keywords (unless, of course, you offer it for free in some manner). You can find good negative keywords in your log files or when you build your lists.
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.
Poor or Non-Existent Tracking
If you do get into testing ads and fine-tuning your keyword lists, it’s only as effective as your tracking. Any PPC search engine will give you your ad spends and click through rates, but what about the bottom-line success? Knowing that you made $14,000 off of a $7,000 ad spend is fine, but if you dig deeper with your tracking you might be able to make that same $14,000 with only $6,000 a month in spend. That savings ads up.
Not Tracking Down to the Keyword-Level
Proper and exact analytics or using an experienced pay per click management company is essential to get the data you need. If you have keywords that are not performing and leaking your account on a daily basis, you are throwing money away. Getting results to the keyword level allows you to adjust bids for maximum effect. If you have one keyword with a $1.34 earnings per click and another at 37 cents, this is key information that allows you to maximize profits. Lower one bid if you are above your “EPC” and raise another to eek out more profits from that sweet-spot keyword. Don’t waste money on a daily basis.
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.
Ignoring the Many 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 Pulling Apart 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. If you don’t understand those above items, there is a good probability that you are not separating the two in your accounts right now … and 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
If you draw most of your business from a local area, the big three PPC engines allow you to geo-target your keywords to that area. This will bring the local market to your doorstep on non-local keyword phrases. This can be hugely profitable.
Not Continually Monitoring Your Campaigns
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.
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