Mistakes of Pay Per Click Advertising: The Terrible 10
July 5, 2008
While it is easy to get started in pay per click advertising, it’s even easier to make very costly mistakes. Building a pay per click campaign the correct way means paying attention to detail and continual oversight and management. I’ve compiled a list of 10 typical mistakes that are found in PPC advertising campaigns.
Big, Bulky and Broad Ad Groups for Your Keywords
If you put all your keywords into just a few big and broad ad groups, it’s time to restructure your account. You are missing out on important flexibility that pay per click advertising allows. Tighter ad groups allows you more focussed, relevant ads.
Not Using Negative Keywords
Pay per click advertising has placed more importance than ever on click through rates and quality scores. It is vital to fine tune your impressions by getting rid of the non-relevant phrases that are lowering those CTRs. If you are selling an item such as “software for widgets” then be certain you also have those negative keywords like “-free” if you don’t have a free trial version. One way to find irrelevant keywords that are costing you is to check your log files of your site.
Not Enough Testing
Running split tests on your ads is essential. And, no item is too small to test. Of course, you will want to work on your various call to action statements, as well as your unique value statement, but keep in mind that there are other variables. There are small, but effective tweaks that can boost results by just testing titles, each line of copy and your display url. If running continual tests is time consuming, hook up with an experience pay per click management company. A good firm can offer you daily split testing and optimize your results very effectively.
Not Tracking Results
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 Results to the Keyword Level
Good analytics or a good pay per click management company will get your data down to the keyword level. Why pay for keywords that are not performing? That money could be better spent on keywords that are doing well or on other marketing expenses. If one keyword has an earning per click of 45 cents and another keyword has an earning per click of $1.45, you need to know. You can lower the bid on one and raise the bid on the other to drive more profits. If you aren’t doing this, you likely have under-performing keywords that are leaking your account daily.
Not Specific Enough Keywords
While some generic keywords can drive a lot of traffic and even be very profitable, they also can be filled with pitfalls. Negative keywords may not be enough to save you from going in the red on a generic keyword. Often, the users doing these searches are at a very early stage of the research and buying process. Again, this is another important reason to track results on a keyword basis.
Avoiding the Dirty Work of Building 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.
Failing to Geo-Target if You’re Local
Each of the major pay per click engines offer a way to tightly set up your campaigns. If you are working from a local pool of potential clients in your area, you need to take advantage of some of the area-specific targeting that the PPC engines offer. Fine tuning your campaigns to get the right people in your region to respond can be well worth the effort to your bottom line.
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.
Making mistakes like the Terrible 10 of PPC Advertising are common, but correcting them can have a huge impact on your bottom line. If you can manage your pay per click ads at a high level or if you can hire them out to a professional pay per click management company…the results for your increased precision and effort will pay off.
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