Performance marketing campaigns can be some of the fastest ways of getting clients for your brand. These campaigns, however, are not as easy as they sound. With so much to stay up to date with, marketers end up making a lot of mistakes with pay-per-click ads.
A lot of people end up wasting resources by running paid online ads only to end up thinking that PPC marketing is not for them. They start believing that it can’t have a positive effect on their quality score. It is, however, important to note that sometimes all you need to run a successful campaign on digital platforms is professional help.
Partnering with a performance marketing agency can help you to avoid PPC pitfalls and to improve your performance marketing campaigns. The agency will also help you in measuring the results of your campaign.
Keep in mind that it’s also crucial that digital marketing professionals work closely with you to understand your business.
The performance of your campaigns can only be the best if your partner understands your target audience. They also need to understand the key differentiators.
Due to this, marketing professionals from the performance marketing agency must take time to understand your business. That way, they’ll be in a better position to make strategic solutions to reach your target audience and convert them.
PPC Mistakes to Avoid in Performance Marketing Campaigns
Pay-per-click is a great way of directing traffic to your brand’s website when properly executed. PPC helps to satisfy the needs of the people searching for some information in particular search engines as well as online advertisers. It is a fact that site visitors are likely to click on a paid advert.
This article discusses some of the PPC mistakes that you must avoid for a successful performance marketing campaign.
1. Always Aiming for Position One
Taking up position one and being ahead of everyone else looks great, especially on paper.
You may be managing your PPC campaigns or managing them for a client’s brand. Whatever the case, everyone wants to get to the number one spot. But no matter how good it is, aiming for that elusive spot is a classic example of a PPC pitfall.
Being position one is a wonderful metric that you can show to your clients. But reaching that top spot requires a lot of effort and resources that can be directed towards something else.
For some competitive keywords, the number one position can cost upwards of $10. This is a lot of money, especially for startups.
That’s why it’s recommended that you focus on your return on investments instead of the number one position. Taking the second or third position is still good enough and will generate a lot of clicks. That will also happen at a much lesser cost.
2. Not Using Ad Schedules
Google campaigns are by default set to show ads all day. This is in most cases, not ideal.
For any type of marketing campaign, there will always be times when you get the best conversions. This can either be 9 am or between 7 am and 9 am in the evening. If you do an analysis, you’ll realize that every campaign in marketing has its golden period. This is the period when potential clients are searching the most.
A common PPC mistake among marketers is failure to take advantage of these periods and stretch your ad budget evenly throughout the day. If you continually get quality leads at a particular time of the day, you should be looking to boost your bids and spending.
To effectively do this, you must make use of ad scheduling within Google Ads. This will allow you to increase or decrease their bid modifiers during certain periods of the day. For maximum optimization, disable the ads entirely during certain times.
This means that instead of stretching the daily budget throughout the day, you can focus on the high-performing periods. Think of it like the 80/20 rule. 20 percent of the day will get you 80 percent of your conversion.
3. Ignoring Default PPC Settings
Google is notorious for its sneaky default settings. Thus, you must be alert not to forget about editing your account information as it could cost you heavily.
If you don’t have the resources to manage another strategy, you’ll be better off opting out of the content network and revisiting later. You shouldn’t overuse the broad match keywords either because you risk showing up for relevant searches.
Assuming you have more than one ad variation in a PPC group. It’s the variation with the highest CTR that’s recommended by Google. The ad with the most clicks may not be your best converting one.
So be sure to adjust your ad delivery and select “rotate.” This way, every ad will get approximately the amount of impressions. After collecting data for some time, you can then make the necessary adjustments.
The bad news here is that with Google Enhanced, users can’t opt out of the device targeting for desktop or mobile. So the best way to target one or more of these devices is to make adjustments to the bids. The default is 0 percent for every device. Thus, you’ll be required to increase the bid percentage for the device that you want most of your traffic from.
4. Failure to Optimize Your Landing Pages
Another classic case of a PPC mistake is spending time focusing on campaigns and advertisements instead of the landing page.
A landing page is one of the main components of a PPC campaign. Apart from having a huge impact on the relevance and quality score, it’s also responsible for your conversion.
You can drive traffic to any webpage on your website. You must, however, note that user conversion is an entirely different matter.
Ideally, every advertisement is supposed to point to a unique and relevant landing page where clients can engage with it. If you mention a sale in the ad, you must ensure that the landing page highlights the same sale. That’s because if it’s not on the page yet a user expects to find it there, it will significantly increase the chances of a bounce.
To get the most out of a landing page, it would be best that you consistently optimize it with A/B testing. That means simultaneously running two versions and checking to see the one that performs better.
Final Take Away
The incorporation of Pay-per-click advertising is a powerful use of your marketing budget if done right. It has the means to remarkably boost traffic and conversions. But if you overlook these pitfalls, you can be sure of receiving negative results.
FAQ Questions
1. What is performance marketing?
It’s a form of digital marketing where businesses only pay marketing service providers for performance-based results.
2. Why do PPC campaigns fail?
A good PPC is made up of various small ad groups. Each of these groups is customized according to its respective keywords. Stuffing dozens of keywords in the same ad groups is a recipe for failure. The other reasons for failure include not optimizing landing pages and ignoring default PPC settings.
3. What are the disadvantages of PPC?
Certain trends in user activity have indicated that there are weaknesses in pay-per-click advertising. Some of these weaknesses include a steep learning curve, shrinking ROI potential, saturation, and inflation.
