Search engine marketing can boost your digital presence in multiple ways. It lets you maximize brand awareness and put your website in front of the right audiences faster. However, running a successful PPC campaign can be harder than it looks.
Here is a brief list of common PPC mistakes to avoid in 2020.
Not Using Negative Keywords
When optimizing your ads for keywords, remember that you are going to pay for each click on your link. Precisely because of that, you should focus on targeting your most profitable keywords only. To prevent your ad from appearing for irrelevant searches, you need to use negative keywords.
Negative keywords allow you to exclude irrelevant search terms from your campaign. That way, you will be able to get your ad noticed by the right audience and boost your ROI.
When choosing negative keywords, always look for ones that are similar to your keywords but may cater to customers seeking different products. Say you are designing kids’ furniture. In this case, you may want to add negative phrases for “office furniture” or “outdoor furniture.”
Also, keep in mind that your ad may still rank for the close variations of your negative keyword. For example, if your negative keyword is “office furniture,” your ad may still show for keywords like “furniture for offices near me.”
Not Optimizing your Landing Pages
Just because your ad drives lots of traffic does not mean it will convert. Creating fast, informative, and engaging landing pages is a critical aspect of managing PPC campaigns that convert.
Once a user clicks on the ad promoting your latest eBook, they expect to land on a page that will provide more details on this piece of content and let them download it. If the landing page is irrelevant or poorly optimized, most users will bounce.
To create an optimized PPC landing page, you should:
- have a catchy and informative headline
- include trust signals, such as social proof elements, contact information or security badges
- choose pleasant and on-brand color schemes
- add short forms optimized for both desktop and mobile devices
- create custom call-to-action buttons
To improve your landing pages, keep A/B testing them. By comparing different versions of the same page, you will see which one performs better. Sometimes, changing the color of your CTA button or tweaking your headline would help you boost conversions.
Not Creating a Dedicated Landing Page
A quality landing page is critical for the success of your campaign. As mentioned above, when a user clicks on the ad, they expect it to take them to the relevant page. Therefore, one of the biggest mistakes PPC marketers make is not creating dedicated landing pages for their ads and sending ad traffic to their homepage.
Instead of pointing your users to generic pages or trying to cover a wide range of keywords, make sure you create specific landing pages for your ad campaigns. That way, you will keep your users engaged and persuade them to convert faster.
Not Narrowing your Audiences
Not narrowing your ad reach means your ads will be shown to the wrong audiences that are not interested in your products.
To prevent that, you would first need to create your buyer personas. Use your data to understand who your target audience is –their location, age, gender, marital status, income, education, preferences, hobbies, and fears.
Let’s take the example of geotargeting. Targeting audiences from other cities or states may sound like an effective way to boost brand visibility, but in reality, you are going to lose your money. If you are running a local fishing gear store in Sydney, you should target fishing enthusiasts in Sydney. That way, you will put your ad in front of the right audience group – one that is eager to visit your brick-and-mortar store and buy from you.
Setting your Campaign and Forgetting about It
Most marketers believe that, once they have set up a PPC campaign, there is nothing left to do. Unfortunately, that is not true. Writing killer ad text, optimizing for the right keywords, and organizing your ad groups is just half the job done. The other half is continuously measuring ad performance and tweaking your ads to boost your ROI. That could be anything, from adding or removing negative keywords to optimizing your ad variations and landing pages.
To measure the success of your campaigns, you first need to set reasonable, achievable, and measurable goals. Based on them, you will choose the right metrics to track. The key PPC metrics you should measure include:
- Clicks
- The click-through rate
- The Quality Score
- The cost per click
- The cost per conversions
- The conversion rate
- The impression share
- The average ad position
Over to You
Running a profitable PPC campaign requires commitment and lots of strategizing. Targeting too broad keywords, not identifying negative keywords, not having optimized landing pages for each ad copy, and not measuring ad performance are the most common mistakes marketers make. By avoiding them, you will boost your ad exposure and maximize your ROI.
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