Justin Wilson
Google AdWords is one of the most powerful advertising platforms available.
To see why, let’s take a look at one of the challenges of outbound marketing. If you are trying to sell someone a high value item, e.g. a car, you only want to talk to those people when they are in the market for buying a new car. Talking to anyone else is a waste of your money. What is there was an advertising platform where the audience segments itself and you only talk to people asking the right questions?
AdWords users effectively self-segment by the queries that they type into Google so you can ensure that you are only talking to the right people and you only pay for the clicks that you receive, so it drives a response, not just awareness.
But Google AdWords, or Pay per Click (PPC) advertising, doesn’t always work out like this. There are some common mistakes which you may be making in your campaigns, and here are 5 that I see all of the time.
Not checking back:
Digital marketing often allows you to amend a campaign while it is in progress, continually optimising to deliver the strongest results. This is the case with PPC: always put a small amount of time, even 10 mins, in your diary every day to check back on your active PPC campaigns – you will not only see which keywords are performing well, you will be able to fine-tune your bidding as well as keep an eye on expensive keywords before they get out of control.
Not checking the type of keyword match:
Before you make your campaign live, you should understand whether you require a broad or exact match keyword setting. Exact match ads will only appear if the exact phrase (or something very close to it) is typed into Google, whereas broad match ads include spelling errors, synonyms and other related and relevant searches. There is no right or wrong answer, it depends what you are looking for and which keywords you are using. You should also be employing negative keywords which exclude unwanted keywords from your campaign.
Ignoring the landing page:
You can have the best designed PPC advert in the world, optimised, delivering an amazing click through rate and great quality traffic to your website. But if your website is a miserable experience, you have wasted your time and money getting the people there. The landing page and subsequent user experience are often ignored in PPC campaigns, but only by campaigns that don’t work: don’t be one of them.
Your ad copy is boring:
To be fair there isn’t a great deal of space in which to unleash your inner Don Draper or Oscar Wilde. The character limits for PPC ads are very small, but that doesn’t mean that you can ignore the ad copy. It is this that will encourage the click, so it is vitally important – include a call to action and have several different versions running at the same time. Your regular monitoring will allow you to see what ad copy is delivering the best results.
Not Measuring:
The amount of data that you can gather from PPC campaigns is very impressive, if not a little overwhelming for some. So you have no excuse not to track the performance of your campaigns through a wide variety of metrics – click through rate, quality score, conversion rate, etc. Linking your AdWords account with your Analytics package will really start to unlock an understanding of keyword level performance, something very powerful indeed.
Are there any common mistakes that you see when running PPC campaigns? If so, leave a comment and share your thoughts!
Image via searchengineland.com
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