Top 3 Mistakes Made by PPC Advertisers
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a great way for websites to quickly start receiving highly targeted traffic via search engine results.
The problem is when people start using something like Google Adwords or Microsoft AdCenter without making a plan to begin with, they can make a number of mistakes which seriously diminishes their efficiency.
This is why there follows the 'Top 5 Mistakes Made by PPC Advertisers' to help you identify your mistakes and make you campaign the best it can be.
Forgetting About Conversions Sometimes when you are coming up with keywords it can be tempting to use a very general one like 'shoes'.
While this may well direct a fair amount of traffic to your site it will not necessarily result in a great deal of conversions.
It may also be very expensive as general terms will be more expensive.
What you need to do instead is choose much more specific words or phrases.
Such as: •Womens red or dead chloe high heels •Womens babycham leopard diamante lace trainers •Mens vans classic slip on trainers While these key phrases may well bring you less traffic, the traffic that does come will be much more likely to buy.
Only Sending Traffic to Your Homepage When someone searches for a product, they are most likely looking to buy that product.
If you were looking for some nice new leather sandals and you followed an advert for 'nice new leather sandals', would you then want to have to navigate from a shoe shops homepage to find the sandals you had been hoping to buy? Most likely no.
To avoid this, you need to make sure that your adverts link to the exact page for the product searchers were looking to buy, or at the very least a landing page created especially for that search term.
Not Focusing On Your Goals A PPC advertising campaign needs goals, otherwise how are you going to know if you are doing anything right? When you set up your campaign you need to decide what it is that you are hoping to achieve, be it someone completing an application, watching a video or downloading a form.
Using your PPC engine you can set a conversion metric which logs when a user makes it to your goal and triggers a report which will automatically update, giving you a great way to judge how you campaign is doing.
This way you will know if something is wrong with your site and people are not making it to your conversion trigger point.
If you don't have these goals and reports to work from you will be wasting money every day.
Of course it is critical to have other areas in order so as to help your PPC campaign to be effective.
For example, if your website design is poor then click-through won't make conversions.
Also, an ongoing search engine optimisation campaign can boost your rankings in the long run and eventually could reduce your need for costly PPC.
Either way, PPC is never the complete package for advertising your website and you should always consider the usability and effectiveness of your website and particularly the landing page.
The problem is when people start using something like Google Adwords or Microsoft AdCenter without making a plan to begin with, they can make a number of mistakes which seriously diminishes their efficiency.
This is why there follows the 'Top 5 Mistakes Made by PPC Advertisers' to help you identify your mistakes and make you campaign the best it can be.
Forgetting About Conversions Sometimes when you are coming up with keywords it can be tempting to use a very general one like 'shoes'.
While this may well direct a fair amount of traffic to your site it will not necessarily result in a great deal of conversions.
It may also be very expensive as general terms will be more expensive.
What you need to do instead is choose much more specific words or phrases.
Such as: •Womens red or dead chloe high heels •Womens babycham leopard diamante lace trainers •Mens vans classic slip on trainers While these key phrases may well bring you less traffic, the traffic that does come will be much more likely to buy.
Only Sending Traffic to Your Homepage When someone searches for a product, they are most likely looking to buy that product.
If you were looking for some nice new leather sandals and you followed an advert for 'nice new leather sandals', would you then want to have to navigate from a shoe shops homepage to find the sandals you had been hoping to buy? Most likely no.
To avoid this, you need to make sure that your adverts link to the exact page for the product searchers were looking to buy, or at the very least a landing page created especially for that search term.
Not Focusing On Your Goals A PPC advertising campaign needs goals, otherwise how are you going to know if you are doing anything right? When you set up your campaign you need to decide what it is that you are hoping to achieve, be it someone completing an application, watching a video or downloading a form.
Using your PPC engine you can set a conversion metric which logs when a user makes it to your goal and triggers a report which will automatically update, giving you a great way to judge how you campaign is doing.
This way you will know if something is wrong with your site and people are not making it to your conversion trigger point.
If you don't have these goals and reports to work from you will be wasting money every day.
Of course it is critical to have other areas in order so as to help your PPC campaign to be effective.
For example, if your website design is poor then click-through won't make conversions.
Also, an ongoing search engine optimisation campaign can boost your rankings in the long run and eventually could reduce your need for costly PPC.
Either way, PPC is never the complete package for advertising your website and you should always consider the usability and effectiveness of your website and particularly the landing page.
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