When everything is set up right, pay-per-click advertising can immediately deliver some of the best returns of any digital marketing channel. You can instantly appear at the top of search results for keywords and phrases your ideal customers use when looking for your products and services. And you only pay when someone clicks on your
When everything is set up right, pay-per-click advertising can immediately deliver some of the best returns of any digital marketing channel.
You can instantly appear at the top of search results for keywords and phrases your ideal customers use when looking for your products and services.
And you only pay when someone clicks on your advertisement, not just when they see it. That’s dozens, hundreds, even thousands of relevant clicks a day from customers who are self-qualifying as warm leads.
But that’s only if your account and campaigns are set up properly. And in our time, we’ve seen a fair few that aren’t and are burning through and wasting PPC budget before results start to show.
In this blog, our PPC experts have compiled the most common PPC mistakes they see as well as some easy to use tips to make improvements.
Why not book a PPC strategy session to start improving your PPC campaigns
Targeting
the ideal audience for your PPC campaign is a bit like the goldilocks effect.
You don’t want to go too broad with your keywords, because this can result in your overspending on irrelevant clicks, wasting budget. On the otherhand, you don’t want to go too narrow too soon, because you could potentiall rule out a larger pool of people who would be interested in your products and services.
Doing PPC keyword research can help you find a seed list to target with your ads, and then you can use suggestions and campaign data to expand or narrow down your targeting over time.
Being able to see which PPC campaign are converting and which aren’t is key to improving results over time. Whether you view results by ad, keyword, audience, campaign or landing page.
Setting up points of conversions are needed to show you what’s delivering the results you expect, which need further improvements, and which need to be paused.
Whether a conversion is a lead (form fill etc) or a direct purchase on an eCommerce website, it’s important to have conversion points set up.
You can set up conversion actions in your Google Ads account by going to Goals → Conversions → Summary → New conversion action
You’ll need to check whether you have a Google tag set up on your website as part of setting up your website conversion tracking.
It stands to reason that the more marketing channels you use to get in front of your potential customers the more leads or sales you’ll get.
But this only works if you have the budget to be effective on every channel.
PPC is a competitive channel, and the cost of a click can be high.
If you’ve spread your budget too thin, you might not be able to get the number of clicks you need to get the conversions to make the channel worth it.
It can be better to start with a couple of campaigns with a higher budget that work well, and then scale over time, rather than trying to target everything and spreading your budget too thin.
Your audience aren’t going to be looking for your products or services 24/7, and it’s likely your campaigns are performing better on certain days or particular times in the day.
But if your campaigns just run 24/7, 365 with no checks, they’re not going to be optimised to bid higher on the days, or at the times, when it would be more beneficial.
By looking at your campaign reports you can see the trends of when your campaigns perform the best. Then in your settings you can optimise campaigns to spend less at the times when people aren’t looking for you, reserving budget for the times when they are.
So much of PPC – especially Google advertising – can be automated with features like smart bidding.
As a Google Premier Partner, we’re all for using the AI and automation tools you have available to improve the performance of your campaigns.
But relying too much on automation can be a negative thing.
You’ll still need to lean on manual bidding and oversight of PPC bidding strategies to keep costs per click under control and increase your clicks and conversions over time.
Remember, automation is a tool, it shouldn’t replace experience and expertise.
To improve the chances of getting a conversion from paid ads you should ideally have specific PPC landing pages linked to your ads.
Even if you have product and service pages already, these will have been optimised for SEO to help them rank.
Creating landing pages specifically for your ads means you have pages dedicated towards getting conversions, allowing you to be more salsey and ignoring the organic search elements you’d need on the rest of your website.
You can read this blog to get some simple PPC landing page tips.
Experimentation is one of the biggest benefits of PPC. You can test pretty much every aspect of your ads, copy and landing pages. We know it can sound risky to put budget aside for “testing”, but it’s important to remember that these tests are done to improve ad performance and deliver better returns over time, so it’s more of an investment in future performance than an outright cost.
PPC generates so much data that can help you improve the performance of your campaigns over time.
The worst thing you can do is ignore it.
Check CPCs, look for spikes in conversions, look for trends. Even researching and adding negative keywords to your PPC campaigns can help reduce budget waste and improve returns over time.
Do you ever have that thing when you see something so often you stop even noticing it’s there?
In marketing, this is called “advertising blindness” and according to one study, as much as 86% of consumers experience it.
Essentially, it’s when they subconsciously block out ads on their feeds, and it’s particularly prevalent on ads that don’t change.
Refreshing your ads, whether it’s the creative or copy, keeps your ads looking new and can keep your audience interested.
PPC can deliver great results, but it can also burn your budget quickly if campaigns aren’t set up, tested and improved properly over time.
Get a strategy session from our PPC agency to see where improvements can be made to your paid campaigns to drive better results and returns on your investment.
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