Biggest Mistakes With PPC Campaigns
Pay per click (PPC) can be the most highly targeted advertising available, but many companies do not properly leverage these ads for the best results. Make sure your firm is not making these biggest mistakes with PPC campaigns.
1. Not properly managing negative keywords.
At the core of your PPC campaign lie the keywords you choose to target in your campaign. Many times advertisers will use a broad match that connects keywords to synonyms and misspelled versions of keywords. Many of these broad match terms will contain words that demonstrate the searcher is not a potential customer.
For example, you may sell flowers but not flower pots. You choose a broad match so you hit phrases like “buy flower bouquet.” Your broad match might also draw in searches for “flower pots” on the keyword “flower.” If you mark “pots” as a negative keyword, this will increase your click through rate (CTR) and your conversions because your ad will appear before fewer non-interested searchers.
Negative keywords help you hone your ad placement, and you can find good suggestions of words to eliminate in many places. Start by reviewing the keywords on which your ads have placed. Look for obvious mismatches between the searcher’s goals and your ad’s offering. Check your Google Analytics reports as well to see keywords that do not reflect your goals.
2. Not running ads on your brand name.
Some companies promote their brand elsewhere and reserve PPC for non-branded advertising. This dilutes the value of non-search brand advertising by not letting prospects choose your branded ads. Along with your generic keywords, you should run ads for your brand that make the most of any recognition out there.
3. Not creating highly targeted landing pages for your ad groups.
It’s hard to believe, but some companies are still running PPC programs that send traffic to the home page. Once you have paid for a visitor to enter your site, you should do everything you can to walk the visitor through the goal you have set for your campaign.
Dumping potential customers on your home page and relying on them to find their way through is a waste of your ad spend and may adversely affect your quality score, leading to greater costs and lower ad placement.
Each of your ad groups should target a specific group of keywords clustered around a tightly focused goal. By creating different landing pages for different ad groups when appropriate, you can optimize each landing page for highly specific searchers.
4. Not separating your search and content PPC campaigns.
Searchers are often in buying mode. The ads you run on keywords will target goal oriented buyers. On the other hand, content consumers are often in research mode. They are less likely to respond to “buy now” offers.
You will want to run a different series of ads to appear in content campaigns, and you will want to measure your metrics separate from your search campaigns to keep the data pure. That way you will be able to optimize each ad type for its audience.
5. Not testing for continuous improvement.
It is tempting to believe that you have fully optimized a site and its ad campaigns, and now you can just sit back and push buttons to make money. Unfortunately, nothing remains the same. Prevailing attitudes change as new memes rise and economic fortunes fall. Only with continuous split testing can you ensure your keywords and text ads stay relevant for searchers over time.
PPC ads deliver measurable returns with detailed metrics. Companies that take the time to understand and perfect their PPC campaigns enjoy a much higher return on their ad investments.
Jeff Gross has been blogging and writing about SEO and internet marketing for several years now. He likes to share his knowledge and experience with others, and help them with their online presence. Jeff is also the owner of nPromote, a well established SEO company in NY.
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9 Responses to “Biggest Mistakes With PPC Campaigns”
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With regards to point 1, would it not be just as effective to only bid on “exact” match and not broad or phrase with the same result. Bidding on the negative keywords would leave a lot to chance with a keyword not accounted for lowering your CTR.
Jeff,
Thank your for your interesting article. I’m just trying to get my head around adwords and understand how to extract the maximum benefits from PPC.
Anyway most of your article makes sense, but I’m confused in regards to step 4. can you expand on the difference of targeting searchers vs. content consumers with PPC, and how the ads would differ.
Thanks,
Steve
I’m going to take a crack at it and say that the point his making is related to the keywords used in the campaign.
For example: “buy seo report” would be a search campaign that would have an actionable tagline for example. Buy a seo report for $xxx while “what is an seo report” is a content campaign because the searcher is not necessarily looking to purchase right now.
I came to know some important information regarding the biggest mistakes in the PPC campaign by reading this post. It would be more helpful to me as an SEM. Thanks for sharing this post.
Well written post. Pay per click has taken the online world by storm and it is important that website owners know the essentials about this before they engage in it. The issues that you have discussed on this post can really be of help to people who are venturing into pay per click.
Thanks for the interesting article. I didn’t understand why anyone should pay for brand terms in PPC when the brands normally rank well in the organic search. Am I misisng something?
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@Baadier Sydow – exact match is good in some situations where you know all variations of keyword phrases. A while ago when I was in affiliate business I used to bid on exact match of TV model and that was only keyword I was interested in. Now that I have clients with huge PPC budgets in the niches with thousands of relevant keyword phrases, in such situation using negative match has much more sense.
@Steve – With PPC on adwords you can place your ads on Google, above or right of organic (natural) results. That is called PPC for search. However, you can also have your campaign on content network, where your ads will be placed on various blogs and websites that have opted to receive Google Ads. Even though both of these options are called PPC they have very little in common. When people Google some phrases they are usually much more specific what they need, so we say they are in “buying mode”. If you would search for “samsung ln52x452 tv” on Google that would mean you are very interested in that product and if you click on the my paid Ad there is a good chance that $2 I spent on your click might get me lets say $100 in sales. If I pay too many $2 clicks and I don’t make any $ than my campaign would be unprofitable. On content network, people are reading blogs about the various topics and they are not that much into buying. They just want to read. So when they click on the ad, they want to check something that grabbed their attention, but it doesn’t mean that they will buy something. So you use content network when you need different type of results. Content network is good for getting cheaper less targeted clicks and for building awareness. Some local bid website similar to ebay used Adwords content network to build awareness for their website and they manage to do it with 1/10th of the cost for standard awareness campaign through classic methods like buying banners on high profile portals etc.
@mallika – True, brands normally rank well in organic search but the reason why brands also bid for their brand names is because you spend a little on clicks that would go to your website anyway, but you increase your CTR because people will usually click on your ad even if there is 6 other ads shown on Google. CTR in many ways is one of the most factors that affect Quality Score on Adwords, which than affects the price of your clicks. You pay a little more for clicks but your campaign gets better Click Through Rate (CTR). Also, some test have been done that claim if you have no.1 spot on both organic results and paid results that you will have higher CTR on organic results than in case where you don’t have paid results (ads) shown. Most of people will click on your webstite but don’t forget there is also 9 more other results on page 1, in some cases there are multiple companies and brands with same or similar name where you need to position your brand above their brands.
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