Pay-Per-Oops – Top PPC Marketing Mistakes To Avoid

Pay-Per-Click or PPC marketing like Google Adwords can be incredibly effective, if you know what you’re doing. If you take one wrong step, you can quickly lose everything. Not only that, but there is tons of competition out there. Just because you think you have a winning PPC campaign doesn’t mean that it’ll get seen amongst all the other ads that grace search engine results. How do you make your ads stand apart? You can start by refraining from committing these top PPC mistakes.

The Wrong Landing Page
Even if you have the best ads in the world, if you send your visitors to a crappy landing page, you’ll experience a higher than normal bounce rate. Your website should have professional design and the information should be easy to find. Furthermore, make sure the ad sends your traffic to the appropriate page. Sending your ad traffic to your home page will only force them to search for what they came to see, and few people, if any, are going to take the time to do that.

Setting Too Low of an Advertising Budget
It is wise to try and save money when you are just starting out with PPC marketing, but starving your PPC budget will only cause your ads to show up intermittently. Your customers may need to see your ads a few times before they choose to click-through and buy. Make sure your ads are showing up when your searchers do, and you can do this by setting an appropriate budget that always shows your ads at the appropriate times.

Bidding Too High Or Too Low
When bidding on keywords, if you go too high you may end up getting into a bidding war with other PPC advertisers. And if you go too low, your ads may not show up on the first page of the search results. Experts recommend bidding enough to achieve positions four through seven. Then, you can optimize to try and reach the top spots. This will help you keep your cost-per-clicks down while improving your conversion rates at the same time.

Trying to Predict Search Behavior
Some PPC advertisers think they know when and how their searchers operate. Instead of trying to predict this behavior, consult your PPC account reports. By analyzing this data, you will get a better idea of when and how your ads should be displayed. It is always best to have your ads running as much as possible so that you can get an accurate assessment of when traffic peaks and when people are ready to buy.

Pay-per-click marketing puts your ads in front of the people who are looking for those ads. But it is easy to become overwhelmed. By keeping away from the above mistakes, you will experience better click-through rates and higher conversions for your advertising dollar.
Do you have any PPC tips you’d like to share, or mistakes you think advertisers should stay away from? Let us know in the comments below.