Image Credit: Sonhovirtual.com
If you are just launching your first PPC campaign (pay per click campaign), you might be surrounded by several tactics and a plethora of conflicting pieces of advice, which can certainly be overwhelming. It is easy to make mistakes which can result in poor performing campaigns and a waste of money. Also, if you’re a startup, you typically might be drowning in a sea of problems, the majority relating to money.
So, when it comes to using paid search to gain traction for your startups, you shouldn’t thoughtlessly throw an amount from your budget in PPC while crossing your fingers and hoping for a high ROI. You have to have a sharp idea as to what to do and what to avoid doing.
To help yourself, make sure that you’re running the best Pay Per Click campaigns possible. Here are the top mistakes you should be avoiding –
Using Irrelevant Keywords
The one obvious mistake that many advertisers make on their Adwords campaign is not targeting the right keywords. To increase the success rate of your PPC campaign, your clicks, and conversions, pay attention to the keywords you are targeting.
A study revealed that only 2.8% of participants thought that ads on a website were relevant.
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A general keyword like “project management” might have lots of searches and entice plenty of clicks, but those clicks on your ad aren’t the ones likely to buy – they may just be looking for general information on project management. A better keyword would be something like “project management services” or “project management solutions”.
Not Tracking Conversions
Consider an example – you assign your team of 5 people to bring in 5 customers at the end of two weeks. They all put in their individual efforts and you get 5 new customers by the end of two weeks. But, you don’t know who got what? Did each of them contribute equally? Or was it just one person or two? You wouldn’t be having all of them in your team if you knew that two out of the five people got no business for you.
This is exactly like bidding on keywords in a Pay Per Click campaign without tracking conversions. If you track conversions for all the keywords used in your campaigns, you will be able to get away with the ones with poor performance and concentrate your money on keywords that are getting you results.
Not Optimizing the Landing Page for Relevancy
AdWords isn’t only a game of who can throw in the most money for a keyword. If that was the case, startups and small businesses could never compete. Rankings of the ads are determined by the AdRank, which depends on your cost-per-click (CPC) bid and your advert’s Quality Score (QS). And the biggest determining factors of QS is the landing page relevancy.
Source: Bing Ads
You only have a few seconds to catch your potential customer’s attention. If they don’t see on the landing page what they saw in the ad, they will leave. This will not only result in a lost lead but you will end up having an increased bounce rate and thereby a lower Quality Score.
Not Using Ad Scheduling
Most advertisers leave their PPC campaigns running 24/7 wanting to get more traffic and clicks. However, it’s not only about getting more impressions and clicks but getting the most conversions as well. If your business operates only Monday-Friday, there is no point in running the ad leading your users to contact you when your business is closed.
Finding the perfect time for your advert to be shown might seem hard, but once you’ve found the right time, you can increase your ad spend on those days and time, and see the difference in your campaign’s performance.
Poorly Managing Your Exclusion Lists
Sure, you might be collecting a lot of user data but are you putting it to good use? Probably not! Leverage your data to create an exclusion list for a much more effective acquisition strategy.
Say, your sales team closed a deal with a client, you definitely would want to exclude that client’s employees from your advert lists. You can create an IP-based exclusion list and upload it to your Pay Per Click campaign to stop displaying your ads to those people who belong to a client company.
This way, you can re-target them with other products or services and focus your campaign on new acquisitions.
Not Barring Negative Keywords
Many online marketers make the mistake of overlooking the importance of putting together negative keywords in a list and then ask why their advert campaigns aren’t converting.
So, consider that you have to sell a project management tool you have designed. If you target broad keywords – “project management tool”, there is a chance your advert appears for a search for “free project management tool”. And so, your negative keyword here would be “free” and by barring it, you ensure that people looking for a free tool do not click on your ad. Because that would be a waste of your money.
Just as targeting the relevant keywords is important, it’s also important to find out which keywords you don’t want to target.
Conclusion
Effective PPC ads boil down to targeting right keywords, tracking your conversions ardently, managing exclusions and negative keywords, and reducing your cost per customer acquisition. To see how you can save enormous money and yet get higher conversions, get in touch with PPC experts.
Experienced agencies like SRV Media can help you know what exactly works and what does not and make your every penny count. Who wouldn’t want that?
(Disclaimer: This is a guest post submitted on Techstory by Vikram Kumar. All the contents and images in the article have been provided to Techstory by the author of the article. Techstory is not responsible or liable for any content in this article.)
About the Author: Mr. Vikram Kumar is the Co-founder, and Director of SRV Media and Easebuzz. SRV Media is a renowned digital marketing firm in India. Easebuzz is an online payment solution that mainly caters to the small and medium enterprises.
SRV media provides a one-stop solution to digital marketing requirements with services like search engine optimization, social media marketing, design & branding, mobile applications, website development, and more.
