Avoid These Common PPC Mistakes!
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is an excellent way to generate leads, but it’s highly competitive. After setting up your ad campaigns and investing the money, it can be frustrating when you receive fewer clicks than you expected. To save you from scratching your head in confusion, we will shed some light on 5 common reasons PPC campaigns fail.
For details on Growthlabs experience with PPC Campaigns, visit here.
Be conscious of the following…
You’re targeting the wrong people
Targeting specific people is one of the biggest strengths of PPC advertising and a crucial part of any successful advertising campaign. It allows you to leverage audience intent and display ads to people genuinely interested in the products or services you provide. These people are far more likely to click on your ads, dramatically increasing your ROI – when used effectively, personalised advertising can increase sales by 30% against average advertising returns.
Google Ads offers different targeting options to help you reach your target audience and maximise your success. For instance, if you’re a local business with a physical presence, you should target people in your area and avoid promoting your ads nationwide. You can use location targeting to help your ads find customers nearby and increase your ROI.
Your conversions aren’t tracking
Every business focuses on measuring performance and profit margins, which should apply to your PPC campaign. Conversion tracking shows you what happens after a customer interacts with one of your ads. If a customer completes an action you’ve listed as valuable – such as buying a product, making an enquiry, or downloading your infographic – it’s recorded as a conversion.
It’s essential to set up conversion tracking to enable you to attribute success to specific ad campaigns and optimise your ads towards your specific goals. Conversion tracking reveals which keywords, ads, ad groups and campaigns drive the highest ROI. Understanding this will allow you to improve your ads and make better decisions regarding your budget.
Not learning from your results
PPC campaigns take a lot of work; hence our dedicated PPC Managers constantly monitoring ad performance and make regular changes. Many PPC campaigns fail because people don’t stay engaged with them and learn from the results.
For instance, if one of your Google Ads doesn’t generate any clicks over a week, investigate why. Are your negative keywords cancelling out your active keywords? Or maybe it’s simply because you haven’t optimised your ad copy to incorporate your target keyword? Your ad copy must include your keyword because this tells Google that your ad is relevant to the user’s search query.
In addition, your results will likely vary from month to month as a result of the ever-changing ranking system deployed by search engines. Nearly half of all clicks through Google are distributed to the first three PPC ads, but these refresh upon regular occasion – falling in and out of favour with these positions can make and break your campaigns.
Restricting ad budgets
If you want to maximise the results from your paid search advertising campaigns, you can’t afford to hold back. Restricting your budget is another common reason why PPC campaigns fail. This is especially true in B2B paid search, where you may see fewer leads, so
you must increase your budget to meet your objectives.
While it’s important to start with a modest budget for a new ad campaign, investing a very small amount can prevent your ads from ranking on the first page, meaning less people will see them.
Bidding on a small number of clicks can open up the possibility for competitors to outrank you, highlighting the importance of striking a balanced budget – additionally, restricting your spending will also reduce the amount of data that you can use on a manual level to improve your success.
It’s worth noting that each industry provides a different average cost per click – sectors such as ‘Travel’ and ‘Arts and Entertainment’ offer a much lower average CPC than ‘Legal Industries’ and ‘Home Improvement’, highlighting that there is a unique variance offered from business to business. Tailoring your budget to provide successful leads at an affordable cost will require continuous amendments and monitoring.
Your landing page doesn’t work
You could create perfect Google ads with compelling copy and exciting headlines, but if they direct people to an ineffective landing page, you’re limiting your own success. You must focus on where your ads are sending traffic and how effectively the landing page converts this traffic.
To maximise your results, you must ensure your landing page loads in less than 5 seconds. After 5 seconds, every additional second your page takes to load reduces your conversion rate by 4.42%. Additionally, you must ensure that the content on the page reads well and corresponds with the ad. And keep your copy succinct; Unbounce found that 29.5% of landing pages had too much copy.
Where we come in
Managing paid search advertising campaigns is a full-time job that demands vast experience to avoid these reasons PPC campaigns fail. As a full-service digital marketing agency, we’ve got the PPC expertise needed to create compelling ads that are precisely targeted to your ideal customers.
We’ll manage every aspect of your PPC campaigns from start to finish and ensure that your landing pages are optimised to convert traffic that comes from the ads. With our support, your budget will be spent wisely and generate the right leads for our business.
To learn more about our paid search advertising service, click here.