Mistakes To Avoid while Conducting PPC

Since Google initially released AdWords (now Google Ads) in 2000, pay-per-click (PPC) marketing has seen significant development. Google Ads is still one of the most popular online advertising platforms 19 years later.

Over $116,000,000,000 in claimed ad revenue came from Google in 2018, but they weren’t the only ones making money. By using Google Ads, many advertisers and business owners have successfully increased their own earnings and view it as a key component of their advertising strategies.

Since its first release, the original AdWords product has undergone significant development, becoming more sophisticated as a result of the inclusion of numerous features, ad types, targeting strategies, and other elements. Despite being a great tool for increasing your lead volume, this complexity may be off-putting to those who are unfamiliar with PPC.

If you’re thinking about launching a PPC campaign, keep reading to find out about common blunders and issues you should stay clear of.

Mistakes to Avoid while Conducting PPC – Easy Guide

1. Lack Of (Specific) Goals

Before you begin, consider this absurd question: What is the purpose of this PPC campaign??

Although “more leads” or “more revenue” are admirable objectives, let’s go a little deeper.

You want more leads, for sure, but what kind of leads? Who would make a good lead? Who is your intended audience? (For instance, if you own a car repair shop, you could want leads for oil changes but not for transmission repairs.)

Additionally, think about the area of your company you’re promoting for. What particular services is your ideal lead seeking? What search terms would someone use to find one of your services if they were interested?

How many leads you intend to generate should also be considered. What is a reasonable lead cost? How much money do you typically make working a job? How much money are you prepared to part with as you experiment to see what works and what doesn’t?

Understanding the answers to these questions will help you run your campaign more effectively.

2. Not Tracking Goals

Having objectives and tracking them are two separate things.

Even if you’ve made up your mind to get more leads, how can you be sure you’re actually getting any? How many leads are you currently receiving? How often do you close deals?

Make sure you can track everything so you can analyse your campaign’s performance with accuracy. This entails monitoring incoming phone calls to your store or place of business as well as website form submissions. Keep track of both in-store visits and offline leads.

Some individuals merely monitor site impressions and clicks, however without monitoring conversions (engagements), you won’t be able to manage or evaluate your campaign effectively.

You need to be completely aware of who is contacting your company and where they are coming from. You won’t be able to assess the success or failure of your campaign if you don’t accomplish this.

3. Not Knowing Customer Lifetime Value

Many business owners are unaware of the value of a lead or customer to their company. Are you making a profit of more than $100 for each lead you purchase at a cost of $100? How much money will one lead make in their lifetime?

Real numbers are advised here. (If you can’t measure everything, pick an average value that will still allow you to gauge the success of your campaign.)

How can you determine whether your return on advertising spend (ROAS) is reasonable if you don’t know what your customer lifetime value (CLTV) is?

Follow your PPC lead down the funnel, keep tabs on whether they made a purchase, and track the cost and profitability of that purchase.

4. Not Managing (Optimizing) The Campaign

PPC advertising is not a “set it and forget it” kind of strategy. Online advertising campaigns need to be monitored, controlled, optimised, and adjusted as necessary in contrast to static advertising like print ads or billboards.

You may always make adjustments and tweaks to raise the effectiveness of your campaigns. You should routinely review your keywords and search terms, test out new ads, and experiment with various bid strategies.

Ensure that you frequently monitor the performance and budgets of your campaign and make necessary adjustments in light of your findings.

5. Trying To Do Too Much

New PPC users frequently run into the issue of trying to bid on every search, even ones that might not be quite relevant to their company. You don’t want to spend $500 to market a $50 service, after all.

Focus your keywords on that area of your business if you only want leads for that area of your company. You don’t need to target every single keyword that someone might use to search for your business or every single aspect of it.

In PPC, sometimes less is more. It is preferable to have a small group of great keywords rather than hundreds of keywords where just a few receive traffic and/or conversions. You don’t want to be a mile wide and an inch deep.

Your campaign budget will stretch much further if you only target keyword terms with a purchase intent rather than terms focused on researching your product or service. You can also target people who are researching, but if your budget is limited, stick to keywords with high purchase intent.

6. Having A Bad Website

When conducting a PPC campaign, you may be overly concerned with your keywords and ad wording. However, keep in mind that your website is the last destination for searches.

What is the point of paying for traffic to drive visitors to your website if they have a bad experience there? Make sure your website is speedy, optimised, and attractive, and that it draws visitors deeper into the funnel and ultimately converts them.

If you have a terrible website, no matter how “excellent” your PPC campaign is, your leads will not convert.

7. Quitting Too Early

A PPC campaign is analogous to obtaining hot water from a faucet: When you activate a PPC campaign, it may take a few moments to warm up. PPC necessitates a lot of trial and error; you must test many things to determine what works. You may have a concept of which keywords will perform well, but they may be very different from what you expect.

Believe in the process and stick with it! Allow your PPC campaign time to gather and acquire the data necessary for optimization. If you’re not getting the results you desire and are ready to give up, give us a call to see if we can assist.

8. Are You Trying To Do It Yourself?

Learning Google Ads can be enjoyable, but it can also be costly. Any mistakes you make will cost you dearly.

Consider creating campaigns, advertising, and keywords. You put in a lot of effort, and everything looks wonderful. You spend $20 per day, but after a week or two, you haven’t received any leads. Then, upon searching, you discover that your ad is leading to a dead page! You were paying for all of these clicks to lead to a non-existent page! Isn’t it sad?

Or, you know you need to update your ads but can’t find the time, and before you know it, you’re still running a Black Friday ad during the holidays. Yikes!

Learning Google Ads by yourself is not the greatest option. You’ll get better results if you speak with someone who handles these campaigns on a daily basis and has the time to manage them effectively.

9. Incorrectly using match types

Basically, you want to employ broad match to reach a larger audience, and exact match to ensure that you only deliver qualified traffic to your site. Phrase match strikes a good blend of these traits, and it can be as beneficial as the other options depending on your objectives.

However, it is critical to understand which option is best for you. If you’re just seeking for more traffic, broad match can be really useful. However, if you’re seeking for conversions, exact match is your best bet.

If you don’t identify those goals early on, you risk wasting a lot of money by targeting the wrong population. When this occurs, you will not receive the desired ROI.

10. Not using geographic targeting

Geographic targeting (sometimes known as “geo-targeting”) allows you to tailor your advertisements to a specific geographic location. This is especially useful for small businesses who want to draw customers just within a specified radius of their physical location. It’s also useful for multinational firms that wish to focus their budget on a single country.

By showing up for searchers on the other side of the planet, you might lose a lot of money and ruin your quality score if you overlook geo-targeting. You might also unintentionally raise the cost of specific terms, which is how some keywords become so expensive. Overall, you risk causing harm to yourself and other businesses.

You can begin geo-targeting your advertising with Google Ads’ regular choices. Refine your ad display to a specific region to avoid overpaying for clicks or artificially inflating prices for businesses in other areas. Furthermore, when you’re in a smaller area, you’ll get more qualified leads when people click on your ad, which will improve your quality score and save you money.

11. Forgetting negative keywords

Negative keywords are terms that you do not want to appear in your adverts. This is useful for broad and phrase match keywords when a few words can completely change the meaning of a keyword.

If you sell men’s running shoes, for example, you can include the negative term “women’s running shoes” to ensure that those searches do not activate your ad. That way, you won’t be shown an ad you don’t want, and the user won’t see irrelevant results. It’s a win-win situation!

Negative keywords, in general, will remove unnecessary searches and increase your quality score, allowing you to save money in the long term. They will also assist you in establishing a positive online reputation because you will only attract visitors who are likely to become customers.

12. Not using long-tail keywords

Long-tail keywords are search queries that contain long sentences and may indicate user desire to convert. Because shorter keywords are more competitive and dominated by industry leaders, they are generally more targeted, more inexpensive, and safer for firms to use.

Long-tail keywords assist you target a specific consumer base, which may seem counter-intuitive if you want to attract as many visitors as possible to your site. However, the consumers you do attract with these specific phrases are more likely to convert and support your business.

In general, this means that while you may not receive a lot of traffic, you will receive a lot of quality traffic based on a user’s intent to buy. After all, those are the folks you’re trying to impress.

13. Not Using Negative Keywords

If you’re going to pay for each click on your ad, you should be sure you’re only getting the highest-quality clicks. Google has refined its numerous match types over time, so they now trigger more terms than ever before. Some of them are irrelevant and should be avoided.

Unless you tell Google not to, it will display advertising for terms like “free” and “cheap.” This means that if you’re using the phrase match keyword type in your campaigns, keywords like “free” and “cheap” could be activating your adverts.

The last thing you want is someone clicking on your adverts who has no intention of spending money. Making use of Google’s negative keywords

14. Always Aiming For Position #1

Everyone wants to be number one, whether they manage their own PPC ads or those of their clients. However, as appealing as it may be, going for the coveted number one slot is a typical PPC mistake.

On paper, being number one and above everyone else appears to be a fantastic advantage. It’s a fantastic metric to present your client and to congratulate yourself on. However, achieving that top rank may necessitate a significant amount of effort, time, and money that could be better spent elsewhere.

15. Not Knowing The Customer’s Lifetime Value

Another common blunder made by sponsored search marketers is failing to completely comprehend their customers’ lifetime worth. To run a profitable and successful campaign, you must be aware of your analytics and numbers.

How do you determine how much you should spend per acquisition if you don’t know how much your average customer is worth? How do you determine how much to bid per click if you don’t know your cost per acquisition?

Figures and metrics are critical components of a successful PPC campaign. If you make a mistake with the figures and wind up paying too much, you risk losing money. On the other hand, if you spend too little, you may not get the most out of paid advertisements. Knowing all of your key metrics and figures ahead of time is the foundation of any successful campaign.

16. Not Taking Advantage Of Google Ads Scripts

Because your time is valuable, automating as many of the simple tasks as possible can save you a significant amount of time.

Life is too short to spend all of your time on the time-consuming tiny duties of paid search management. With so many little daily repeating duties for PPC managers, getting any actual work done can be difficult.

Fortunately, Google provides a fantastic scripts function that allows many monotonous and time-consuming processes to be automated using bespoke Google Ads scripts.

Because your time is valuable, automating as many of the simple tasks as possible can save you a significant amount of time and allow you to focus on the more important things.

17. Not Using Ad Schedules

A classic PPC mistake is failing to capitalise on these busy times and spreading your ad budget evenly throughout the day. Google campaigns are designed to show ads all day by default, which isn’t ideal in most circumstances. If you routinely receive high-quality leads at a specific time of day, you may consider increasing your bids and spending.

To accomplish this, use ad scheduling in Google Ads, which allows marketers to boost or decrease bid modifiers at specific intervals. You can even deactivate advertisements totally at particular periods for best optimization.

This implies that instead of spreading out the daily budget evenly throughout the day, you may concentrate on those high-value items.

18. Using Smart Search Campaigns

Google has created numerous additional campaign kinds throughout the years, the most noteworthy of which is the “smart campaign.” Smart campaigns are currently accessible in three varieties: smart search campaigns, display campaigns, and shopping campaigns.

Smart shopping campaigns are often effective, but smart search and display advertising should be avoided at all costs.

Smart search campaigns, which are frequently aimed at beginners, attempt to take the management out of conducting sponsored search ads. They may control many components of the campaign, such as bidding, keywords, and ad scheduling, by utilising AI and machine learning.

If you are currently employing smart search campaigns or are considering creating one, it is important to pause and hire someone to manage your advertisements.

19. Not Using Location Targeting

If you’re a Seattle-based company, you probably only want to target folks in Seattle. Running advertising in different states and towns may appear to be a wonderful way to enhance brand exposure, but in reality, you will lose money.

To target certain nations and territories in Google Ads, you must modify your campaigns’ location targeting settings. However, you’d be amazed how many paid search marketers fail to set this up properly. As a result, advertisements are displayed in cities and states where the company does not even operate!

Location targeting not only ensures that your ads are seen by the right people, but you can also include the user’s location in the ad to catch their attention.

20. Having A Slow Website

You’ve spent hours researching keywords and developing ad copy, and you’ve added all the ad extensions, only to discover that customers are leaving your website in droves! Who is the perpetrator? A sluggish website that drives away all of your potential consumers!

If you’re going to spend possibly thousands of dollars per month on Google advertisements, you should at the very least invest in reliable web hosting.

According to Google statistics, if your landing page takes 5 seconds to load, the bounce rate increases by 90% when compared to a page that loads in 1 second. If you want to get the most out of your PPC spend, having a fast website is essential.

Google may refund you for people who exit before the page loaded, but what about users who go because submitting a form takes too long?

Every marketer should perform a test to ensure that their website loads quickly on both mobile and desktop platforms. It not only increases conversions from PPC ads, but it also ensures that anybody who visits your site has a positive user experience.

21. Not Optimizing Your Landing Pages

The landing page is a critical component of any PPC campaign. Not only does it have a significant impact on a campaign’s relevancy and quality score, but it is ultimately responsible for your conversions.

You can attract traffic to almost any page on your website, but getting consumers to convert is a different story. A common PPC error is to devote all of your attention on the campaign and advertising rather than the landing page.

Every ad you place should ideally point to a unique and relevant landing page that customers will interact with. If you mention a sale in the ad, the landing page should also reflect it. If it isn’t on the page and the user expects it to be, the likelihood of a bounce increases dramatically.

A/B testing is an excellent way to guarantee that you’re getting the most out of any landing page. This entails running two versions concurrently to discover which performs better. You’d be surprised how a different headline or coloured button can significantly enhance your conversion rate.