Many small businesses are leveraging Pay-Per-Click (PPC) to gain leads and sales, but many are making mistakes.
We talked to a number of PPC experts to find out which mistakes are most common, and how to remedy them.
We’ll be discussing this topic, and others about PPC in our fireside chat via Google Hangout on July 29. Don't forget to RSVP!
1. Lack of Maintenance
People tend to set it and forget it when it comes to their PPC. They underestimate the value of testing their campaigns, because they assume what works once will always work. This isn't the case.
Rachel Pennington, Campaign Manager, eZanga.com
Lack of maintenance can break your PPC campaign. Your campaigns keep evolving. Not reviewing your campaign performance and making changes based on performance quickly can break your campaign.
Tom Bukevicius, President, Supero Media Corporation
2. Not Bidding on Brand Keywords
The biggest error that a company can make while doing PPC marketing is not bidding on their brand keywords. We use Unbounce to create landing pages and when I searched Unbounce on Google the other day, I saw Instapage bidding on their brand keyword with Unbounce's ad missing. People searching for your brand keyword are not the normal searchers. The probability of them converting is way higher than anybody else.
Sheyrans Jain, Digital Marketing Manager at EduPristine
3. Not Having Negative Keyword Lists
Using keywords that are too broad or too generic without having a negative keyword list. This means that your ads could be displaying for keywords that are irrelevent to your business causing you to waste money on clicks that aren't going to convert.
Tim Kelsey, Director of Client Marketing Services, Pronto Marketing
4. Spending Money on Irrelevant Keywords
If you are spending money on keywords that are resulting in irrelevant clicks or high cost per lead conversions then you should pause those specific keywords or ad groups. If you don't filter out negative keywords to stop your ad from appearing in irrelevant search results, you will get clicks to your site for the wrong keywords, which will result in bouncing from your site, having a low AdRank or quality score for your ads, and wasting money.
Matt Boaman, VP of Product Development and SEO, EZSolution
5. Neglecting to Use Targeted Landing Pages
Sending ads clicks only to your homepage. While sending ad traffic to your homepage isn't necessarily a bad thing, if that's the only place you are sending traffic, you could be missing out on conversion paths that could send more leads your way. Ideally, campaigns should be laser focused so users search for a specific keyword, see your ad about that keyword and land on a page covering that topic.
Tim Kelsey, Director of Client Marketing Services, Pronto Marketing
6. Lack of A/B Testing
Not A/B testing. Large scale A/B testing can be too time consuming for business owners to handle on their own, but at the very least, you should test slight variations in your ad text to see which version drives more clicks and more conversion. Over time, these small improvements can add up to big results.
Tim Kelsey, Director of Client Marketing Services, Pronto Marketing
You should split test keywords with three ads that rotate every day and look at the CTR. If the click through-rate (CTR) is lower than 1% on all ads, there's generally a problem with your campaign. Usually the ads are underperforming or the wrong keywords are being targeted. Conversely, if you have one ad that is performing a lot better than the rest, then the underperforming ads should be paused so the better performing ad is always displayed.
