5 Common PPC Marketing Mistakes to Watch Out For
If you’re like many advertisers, you’re probably wondering what are the basics of PPC marketing and spending a lot of your time and money on making sure that you and your business are seen by the right audience at the right time and place.
But if we’re being honest, it doesn’t always go to plan.
That’s why there are several common PPC marketing mistakes that can pop up at any stage of the campaign management process.
If this sounds familiar, don’t worry: We’ve gathered six of the most common PPC marketing mistakes to watch out for — along with some tips on how to avoid them.
Not Matching Keywords to Landing Pages
One of the biggest mistakes that advertisers make when they are starting their PPC marketing campaigns is not matching their keywords to landing pages. Many of the keywords you use in your campaign should point to specific landing pages. The landing page should be focused around the keyword set that it is targeting.
If you don’t match your keywords to your landing pages, you are going to have a very difficult time getting conversions from your ads. This is because people are going to land on a page that is not relevant to what they are looking for and will leave your site, which means that you have just wasted money on that ad click.
Not Using Negative Keywords
When you start out with PPC marketing, you aren’t going to know what type of search terms people are using within your industry. This can cause your ads to get matched up with irrelevant searches and cost you money in clicks.
To keep this from happening, make sure that you always add negative keywords into your campaign. In fact, Google AdWords even has a tool called the “Negative Keyword Tool” which can help you find other negative keywords.
Not having a goal
This one is easy to overlook, especially when you’re making an impulse decision to set up a PPC ad campaign. Why do you want to run ads? Are you looking to boost sales? Increase brand awareness? Generate leads? A clear goal will help you decide which platforms to advertise on, what your budget should be and what message your ads should convey. Not having one can lead to wasted time and money with little or no return on investment (ROI).
Neglecting your landing page
PPC ads aren’t just about attracting users; they’re about keeping them once they’ve clicked through from your ad. If your landing page doesn’t reflect the messaging in your ad or provide the information users were expecting, they will click out of it. You can avoid this by making sure that the messaging on your website matches the messaging.
Thinking You Can Just Set It and Forget It
If there’s one thing, we want to impress upon you, it’s this: PPC marketing requires active management. You can’t just set up some campaigns, add some keywords and let them run indefinitely. Even if your ads start off strong and bring in lots of traffic with high conversion rates at first, they will soon lose their effectiveness if you don’t continue to optimize them over time.
