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Mistakes Stopping You From Getting the Most From Your PPC Campaign

Updated on March 24, 2024
Posted on October 12, 2016 by Brent Wildman

Mistakes Stopping You From Getting the Most From Your PPC Campaign

There is no shortage of pay-per-click platforms out there these days.

Whether you’re a Google AdWords supporter, a social media maven using Facebook Ads, or a loyalist taking sides in the Bing Ads vs. Yahoo Ads tangle, PPC management is tricky. We see plenty of mistakes popping up time and time again in the complex world of PPC advertising.

Sure, some of them are understandable, but as digital marketers, we want to set the bar a little higher. Here are four PPC mistakes that we’d like to see done away with completely for both our (and our customers’) sakes.

1. Getting Too Broad

The first mistake is a simple one: failing to get specific with your PPC outreach.

This may relate to broad matching across ad groups, failing to identify customer match lists, or any other general strategy that doesn’t have clear parameters defined. PPC advertising (and all advertising, really) relies on specificity. Who’s your target market? What behaviors do they take online? Which keyword groups are relevant to one another?

Marketers who try to hit too many targets at once with broad outreach won’t see the customer engagement, or return on investment, that they’re expecting. Relevancy to the user is key for all advertisement. It’s tempting to cast a wide net, but the broader your outreach, the more diluted your message will be.

2. Improper Use of Automation

Automation of your PPC outreach (setting rules for automated posting/exclusion of your ads) can be a great thing but only when used with care.

Bill Gates once famously said:

"The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency."

In PPC terms, this means that the very benefits you’re hoping to find from automation can turn on you when applied incorrectly. While you can set time-based posting schedules across any available subset of your ad campaign, you can’t just set it and forget it. Which ads should be posted at which times of the day? Are there certain ads that will have more draw on the weekend? And which ads should be grouped and labeled together within your automated framework? You should have answers to all of these questions before deploying an automated PPC campaign.

3. Ignoring Valuable Channels

Of course, the best PPC management in the world won’t make an impact if you’re advertising on the wrong channels. This is another area where understanding your target market can bear fruit. If you want to stretch your limited advertising budget as far as possible, you need to prioritize the channels that will deliver the most efficient returns.

Consider this post by Brian Carter over at Moz that discusses the value of social media PPC advertising. In his words, small PPC inputs into Facebook’s titanic user base can yield big rewards:

“If you just spend $1 per day on Facebook ads, you will get in front of 4,000 people that wouldn't have seen you otherwise.”

And while Facebook can deliver better awareness than most other social channels, you don’t have to stick to the most popular platforms to see results. Which channels are preferred by your target audience? Do some digging into the data, and make sure you’re not ignoring any important channels for your PPC campaign.

4. Sloppy Ad Copy

With the near constant debates over retargeting, automation strategies, and PPC platform selection, a critical element of many PPC campaigns often gets overlooked: ad copy.

Think about it for a second. Well-written PPC ads are the key to actual clicks; all the intensive analysis and market research in the world won’t matter if users aren’t moved by the words in the ad. Despite this, many businesses still treat the actual ad text as an afterthought in their PPC campaign.

Compelling ad copy is a powerful driver of engagement. Ignoring the impact of your ad text will inevitably cause your click-through rates to decrease, cost-per-click rates to increase, and your PPC strategy to suffer overall. Review your text to ensure that it’s unique, that it’s tightly-written to conserve space, and that it does a good job of displaying your product or service’s unique value proposition.

Effective PPC Ads

Although PPC advertisement can be hard to handle, the benefits are hard to ignore. Research shows that effective PPC ads can increase brand awareness by 80 percent; and what’s more, 46 percent of consumers can’t tell the difference between a paid ad and an organic search result. This data highlights the value of quality PPC management. When you avoid common pitfalls like the ones listed above, your business and marketing ROI will see a big boost.

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