Although PPC Ads campaigns might seem simple, they’re actually really complicated. Even the most seasoned marketers make mistakes when running a Google Ads campaign. Some of these simple mistakes can have a huge negative effect on your business.
If you make simple mistakes, your ad campaign will suffer. A significant one is when you neglect to set up all the necessary ad extensions or to correctly geo-target your ads.
Regardless of whether you handle your own campaigns or you’ve taken over a client’s account, you should avoid the following seven PPC mistakes:
1. Not Applying Location Targetting
Are you a local business? Is your business in Africa? If yes, then it means your target audience is people in Africa. When getting started with paid search, one of the first steps is defining your target audience.
Things like running ads in other places can sound like a good idea, but in reality, they just cost you money. It’s easier to target specific countries and areas in Google Ads when you have correctly set location targeting. Many paid search marketers either don’t know how to set this up or simply forget to do it. The effect of this is that these ads will be shown to users in places the company does not run in.
You can target the user’s location in your ads to attract their attention. This is more likely to increase engagement than ads without location targeting.
2. Running A Slow Website
If you want to get the most out of PPC, then you need to ensure that your website is speedy. If your website isn’t fast enough, it may be costing you sales because users will abandon the webpage instead of checking out what you have on offer. When this happens, point your users to a fast & reliable landing page that will get them to convert.
If you’re going to invest a lot of money into Google AdWords, then you should at least invest in some good web hosting. According to Google statistics, if your landing page takes 5 seconds to load, it increases the bounce rate by 90%. If you want to get the most out of your PPC spend, then having a fast website is very important.
If you want to make sure everyone visiting your site has a good user experience, you should ensure both mobile and desktop load quickly.
3. Failure To Use Ad Schedules
While Google’s default for all campaigns is to spend all day, there are still ways to optimize it. It’s important to track which times you get the best conversions. It’s an often-overlooked but crucial part of all marketing campaigns: knowing when your potential customers are searching the most.
Many people make the mistake of not taking advantage of busy time periods and stretching their budget evenly throughout the day. If you consistently get leads at a certain time, then you should increase your bids and spend.
You can also take advantage of ad scheduling within Google Ads, which allows you to adjust your bid modifier when certain times fall on weekdays or weekends. And for maximum optimization, you can also completely disable your ads during certain times. This allows you to set aside more money for the time periods when you’re likely to have a higher number of visitors, including the first hour they visit your website.
4. Not Using Ad Extensions
It’s easy to forget about the ad extensions when you’re setting up a PPC campaign. You already have two headlines and two descriptions, but there are also a few other fields you can use to draw in users. There are so many PPC ad extensions nowadays that even experienced PPC professionals sometimes forget to add them, and as a result, they’re losing out on potential revenue.
There are several different Google ad extensions worth adding for specific ads:
- Sitelinks*
- Callout extensions*
- Structured snippets*
- Call extensions
- Lead form extensions (beta)
- Location extensions
- Affiliate location extensions
- Price extensions
- App extensions
- Promotion extensions
These extensions increase the size of your ad and make them take up more screen space. They also significantly increase engagement, which means that more people are interacting with your product, and ultimately results in higher sales.
5. Ignoring Customers Lifespan Value
When it comes to a successful PPC campaign, the numbers are very critical. If you’re not tracking the right metrics and figures, it will be impossible to get the ROI you’re aiming for. You need to know how much each customer is worth to you in order to make sure that you’re investing enough per acquisition. You also need to know what your cost per acquisition is in order to make sure that you’re bidding enough per click.
PPC campaigns involve a lot of numbers, and like anything else you need to be mindful about getting the figures right. If you get them wrong then your campaign will fail and ultimately lose you money. However, spending too little means your campaign might not reach its potential.
6. Focusing on Ranking First.
One of the biggest PPC mistakes to avoid involves paying too much attention to your position in the search engine results pages. If you’re managing your own PPC campaign, your goal should be to maximize profits without compromising on quality.
If you’re shooting for the top spot without a plan to get there, you might be wasting your time and money. Investing your money in a position that will generate a lot of clicks can often be more effective than spending that money on the top spot.
7. Failure To Optimize Landing Pages
You shouldn’t spend all of your time creating ads, without thinking about which landing page you’re going to send people to. The landing page of a PPC campaign is one of the most important components, as it can have a huge impact on relevancy and quality score. This in turn determines the performance of your campaign.
A landing page should have a clear and logical connection to the ad that brought users there. Making your sales and landing pages mutually consistent will increase the conversion and decrease the bounce rate.
To turn your landing page into a conversion machine, there’s an easy trick you can do: A/B testing is a good idea to make sure you’re getting the most out of any landing page.
