Pay per Click (PPC) marketing can be the easiest way to drive traffic to your website. However, if done incorrectly it can drain your entire marketing budget. PPC marketing is more of an art than a science. It takes a lot of testing and optimizing to get your campaign profitable. Once it is profitable, you have to constantly be tweaking and optimizing to stay there. It is a never ending battle. However with a little guidance you will be well on you way to mastering PPC and generating quality targeted traffic your website needs to succeed.
Here are 5 PPC mistakes to avoid while you journey to internet success.
Combining Search and Content Networks
By default when you create a new campaign in Google Adwords, your ads will show up in Google's search results and also in Google's content network. Their content network is a huge network of third party websites which will display your ad on their site if it is related to the content on their website. This might sound fine, however most clicks from content sites are not very targeted, and have a low conversion rate. It is always good to turn off content targeting when you are first starting out. This will give your campaign a much better chance of succeeding. You can use Content Targeting, but put it in a separate campaign.
Not Enough Testing
In order to succeed with Adwords, you must test every aspect of your campaign. This means try different ads, test what time of day converts best, and also which days of the week product the highest click-through rates. Then target these areas. You must always be testing if you want your Adwords campaign to succeed. Also be sure to use conversion tracking. Knowing which keywords are producing the most conversions is very important.
Too Many Keywords in Each Ad Group
You should be using a large list of keywords when creating your Adwords Campaign. However don't just put them into one ad group. You must create multiple ad groups with a small amount of related keywords in each. This allows you to target your ads for only that group of keywords. Using highly targeted groups will greatly increase your ads' click-through rates.
Not Optimizing Landing Pages
Don't just link each ad back to your homepage. Try to link to sub pages in your site which relate to your ads and keywords. Having landing pages which relate to the ads will greatly help your overall conversion rates. Also optimize these landing pages so that when someone clicks an ad to get to your site, it is easy for them to find they are looking for.
Using Too Broad of Keywords
When first starting out, use exact match for your keywords. This means that your ad will only show up when someone types in exactly the keyword you are targeting. This will enable you to maintain a higher click-through rate and reduce your Adwords costs from wasted clicks on terms you really didn't want to target.
With some testing and optimization along with avoiding these 5 Adwords mistakes, your PPC campaign will be profitable in no time.
