Are you Making PPC Mistakes with Your PPC Campaign?
Google Ads (AdWords) can be a minefield to the inexperienced. It is the most complicated and (done correctly) effective form of advertising. But the truth is there are lots of hidden settings and unknown features which will be eating a certain amount of your budget. This can stop you from getting the most value from your campaign. This is one of the reasons that people struggle to make a profitable campaign. There are just so many PPC mistakes for the inexperienced to make!
In this article, we are going to run through the most common mistakes. We are also going to tell you how to fix these PPC mistakes!
PPC Mistakes
No 1. Walking away From an Active Campaign
Setting up a campaign is a lot of work. Dealing with keywords, page quality, setting up your tracking, etc. All of this takes time. But what many people do is that once they have everything up and running they leave it to work away by itself.
They don’t realise that the setting up is just the beginning. For a successful campaign, there are a few following areas that must be concentrated on.
Firstly, Monitoring your PPC campaign Daily
Any PPC specialist will check a campaign on a daily basis. They do this to monitor for various issues such as
- Low Converting campaigns
- Low Click-Through Rates (CTRs)
- Noticeable increases in Cost Per Click (CPC)
- Keywords that have very low conversion rates
- Keywords with no relation to your campaign that need to be added to the negative keywords
- Anything else that might set alarm bells off
It only makes sense to have a daily checkup when you are spending money on your campaign every day, doesn’t it?
Secondly, improving your campaign performance.
You do this by
- Moving your best-converting keywords into their own ad group to improve CTR
- Creating new ads to perform split tests
- Applying negative keywords to the various ad groups to ensure the most apt ad is showing
These are generally done on a weekly schedule as you get sufficient data.
Lastly, Ongoing Planning for your Campaign Strategy
This is more taking a large scale view of your present campaigns. You need to decide on what is working and what needs a major overhaul or should be dropped altogether. The more money you are spending the easier it can be to make these decisions. You don’t want to let campaigns that are performing very poorly continue.
Here is what you should be doing when making large scale changes
- Expand your keywords once you have a well-performing core
- If a campaign is performing see if you can set up similar campaigns for different keyword groups
- Don’t be afraid to try new campaign types
By being willing to try new approaches you should be able to continuously improve the performance of your campaigns. Working on a campaign doesn’t stop after launch. This is probably of all the PPC mistakes we will show you the most common. We have worke on a PPC campaign where the company hadn’t even looked at the PPC campaign in 4 years.
No 2 Forgetting to Use Negative Keywords
A major loss of your budget will probably be caused by irrelevant searches. These are searches that the searcher will never be interested in what you are offering but your keyword IS in their search. An example would be if your keyword was ‘guitar’ and the search was for ‘what colour was Elvis’s guitar?’. This search is not going to get you a sale but it may cost you the CPC rate. By adding negative keywords to your campaign you can help prevent this. Google will know you don’t want any of your ads showing up for these negative keywords so you won’t lose money on related search terms. The more negative search terms you can add to your campaign BEFORE it goes live the more you will save!
No 3 Forgetting About the Search Term Report
The ‘Search Term’ report is made up of all searches that were used where your ad was displayed and clicked upon. Super important yet often forgotten about. Embedded in the report may be a series of great search terms that you are only hitting upon by accident. You can make a new campaign to better focus on them. Alternatively, you may be getting in a bunch of searches that you don’t want at all. You ad these into your negative keywords preventing them from being used anymore to display your ads saving you money.
Q. Where is the Search Term report?
A. Easy to find. Go to your Google Ads account and from there Campaigns – Keywords – Search Terms.
No 4 Weak Bidding Strategies
More than likely, your campaign is set up with an automatic bidding strategy. This is because it is the default setting. Google wants you to do this as it is a bidding platform and Google wants to make as much money as possible. When you leave it at default this means that Google can bid whatever it likes, and it does.
It is very easy to check if your campaign is manual or automatic.
Step 1
Go to your Google Ads account.
Step 2
Click into your campaign.
Step 3
Click into settings. This is located in the left-hand column.
Step 4
Locate the ‘Bidding’ Section
It only takes a few minutes to set up your manual bidding but it can save you thousands over the course of a campaign.
No 5 Adding Too Many Keywords to an Ad Group
If you have too many keywords in an Ad group your ads can’t be specific enough to cover them all. Take my industry for instance. I wouldn’t want SEO Services, PPC management, web design services all in the same group. It would make much more sense to give each of these different services I offer their own Ad group and ads. I would be much more likely to be able to create an ad that would stand a better chance of getting a conversion when it matches exactly what a searcher is looking for.
No 6 Not Making Use of Landing Pages
Many people just send searchers straight to their website. Why can this be a mistake? The page they are being sent to doesn’t always match the ad they have clicked on. Maybe the company has 20 services on the same page and the one the searcher was looking for is not conveniently placed to view. Lost sale right there. Sending a person who you have paid Google to have your site to a page like that leads to a low conversion rate and a lot of extra expense on your budget.
Q What is the solution?
A.Landing Pages.
An extremely focused landing page is by far more likely to convert. It shows the viewer what they were expecting to see without having anything extra on the page to distract them. Is a landing page difficult to make? No! In fact, you can make a page using the elements that you were planning for the viewer to see on the website page.
The main things to remember when building a landing page are
- It matches the Ad you are running
- Is focused on getting the user to complete a single action
- The design needs to be easy on the eye and easy to use.
If you follow these steps you should have no problem raising your conversion rate.
No 7 Keep Everything Consistent
Consistency is one of the first things you are taught when building a website. Style, colour schemes, and tone should be kept consistent right through a website. Not doing so tends to turn people off and they will leave. The same is true for your campaign. You want the keywords#, ads, and landing page to follow on from one to the next with a consistent feel to them. Otherwise, you are going to have a high bounce rate.
When examining your campaign for consistency you need to ask yourself
- Do my keywords match what I am selling?
- Are my keywords included in my ads?
- Does the tone and content of my landing page follow on from my ad?
If you have answered no to any or all of these we recommend that you should go back and do some more work on them. It is all about increasing your CTR and reducing your CPC. We all know how having a higher quality landing page reduces your CPC. That is what we are trying to do here.
In Conclusion
These are the most common ppc mistakes we come across when taking over a PPC campaign. By making the changes recommended you can often turn around a losing campaign into one that can give a good ROI.
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