Top 5 Mistakes When Running A PPC Campaign

When it comes to online marketing, SEO can take a while before you start to see any results and even then there’s no definitive ‘proper’ way to do it, social media can be very powerful but it can also be amazing at just sucking hours of your day away without you even realising it.

PPC is one of the few ways you can get some instant traffic and you can see right away if you’re doing it properly. Once it’s set up it’s just a case of bid management on a regular basis and you’re done. All that’s left to do is sit back and watch the traffic roll in. However it can get expensive and if you’re running a campaign in an industry like finance, insurance or technolongy it can get ridiculously expensive so how do you make sure you’re not spending any more than you have to?

Do Your Keyword Research

As with any online marketing your keyword research is critical and if you get it wrong when doing PPC it’s not just time you’re wasting it’s a lot of money too. You want to make sure your ads are only coming for the keywords that are applicable to your site. Your competitors ads might be showing for keywords you’re not bidding on but this doesn’t mean you should automatically be bidding on them too. Look at what you’re selling and make sure you’re only focusing on those words.

Use Your Match Types

One of the most common mistakes people make when setting up a new PPC campaign is setting everything as a broad match which is one of the quickest way to empty your marketing budget into Google’s back pocket. Most people leave everything as broad match because it’s the default setting and they don’t understand the other match types. If you’re bidding on the term ‘pink toilet seats’ as a broad match this means your ad could appear any time someone searches for anything to do with pink, toilets or seats (does your site have anything to do with blue garden seats?), if you’re bidding on this term as a phrase match it means the searcher has to have typed ‘pink toilet seat’ together somewhere in their original search, (your ad could still appear if someone searched ‘where can I buy pink toilet seats’). If you’re bidding on your term as an exact match is means your ad will only appear if someone only types in your keyword as you’ve bid on it.

Improve Your Quality Score

Your quality score will impact how much you’re paying each time someone clicks on your ad, how often your ad is applicable to appear and in what position it appears in. An ad with a low quality score might cost more, only show very intermittently and it might never show at position one no matter how much cash you throw at it. Google offer plenty of advice on how you can improve your quality score but it’s a bit like the organic ranking algorithm, just use common sense and make your campaign as user friendly as possible. Make your ad as relevant as possible to your keywords, make your landing page as relevant as possible to your campaign, use the right match types and keep your ad groups as small as possible.

Source Your Landing Page

One of the worst things you can do to your PPC campaign is having everything land on your home page. Each ad group will be targeting a different but very specific set of keywords so make sure each one goes to a specific landing page. If you can’t find one relevant enough for one of your ad groups then you either shouldn’t be bidding on those keywords or you need to create a new landing page specifically for this group. If you are creating a new landing page from scratch remember it needs to talk specifically to the people who have typed in a very specific set of key terms.

Don’t kill yourself for position 1

One of the quickest ways to use your entire daily budget is to aim for position one and not stop until you get there. By doing this you could quite easily end up paying more than your profit margin for the product just to get that one click. Some brands will be happy to pay more than that click is worth just to get their site to appear in the top position and going up against sites like Amazon is not a battle you’re going to be able to win. As internet traffic becomes savvier it’s actually the second or third position that gets more traffic as most people actually expect the top site returned to be a paid listing. If you’re getting traffic from position two or three just be happy with it and focus on another term.

This is a Guest Post by Jessica who is an SEO for Splash Direct where you can find everything for your bathroom from a concealed cistern to a shower curtain.