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With the cost-per-click (CPC) prices available through various PPC search engines always increasing, it’s essential that you avoid certain mistakes that will undoubtedly result in poorly performing PPC campaigns. The mistakes that you should be aware to avoid pitfalls:
1. Creating a Long List of Poorly Targeted Keywords - When you first set out to create your AdWords campaign, it’s important not to go “keyword crazy” — resist the temptation to create long lists of irrelevant, generic keywords. It’s important to identify your specific niche, and to market directly to users who want the products and services that you offer. Don’t trick yourself into thinking that broader is better. With AdWords, that’s just not true.
2. Failing to Identify Unique Aspects of your Product or Service - Before you implement your AdWords campaign, you must understand exactly what it is that makes your organization stand out from the competition. By identifying your unique products, services, or offerings, you’ll see clearly how you can rise above your competitors and zone in on the keywords or phrases that are unique to your business.
3. A Lack of Keywords in your Ad Text - When you’re creating descriptive ad copy, it’s imperative that you manage to inject your keywords in to your title and description while maintaining a delicate balance between clarity and relevance. Your ad copy should be tailored in such a way that as visitors read it, they understand exactly what they can expect when they click on your ad.
4. Directing Users Solely to your Homepage - Few site owners take the time to decide which destination URL should be applied to each ad. Instead, they point all ads in a campaign to the site’s homepage, then wonder why they’re not getting decent conversions.
5. Creating Single Ad Groups - If you categorize ads that target related keywords into a common AdWords ad group, you’ll establish a high level of control over your entire campaign. Organizing your ad group structure in this manner gives you the ability to create in-depth reports on each ad-group, and to make real changes that have a significant impact on those ads’ performance over time.
6. Utilizing Single Ad Campaigns - Once you have your AdWords ads sorted into easily identified ad groups, you can move on to the next step: creating campaigns. Having highly organized campaigns is the key to determining which ads are creating the optimal conversions. Don’t simply put all your ads into the one campaign — split them into separate campaigns to make tracking and amending the ad groups easy.
7. Using Broad Match Only - Unless you take advantage of the phrase matching options that AdWords makes available, chances are that you’re missing out on potential customers and creating a higher CPC for yourself. As the name suggests, broad matches are usually less targeted than exact and phrase matches. Broad matching is the default option under which your ads will appear for expanded matches such as plurals or relevant keyword variations. Take the time to test these different matching techniques, and to tweak your selections to improve your conversions. Broad matching is not necessarily the best or only option.
8. Failing to Optimize Ad Serving for your Ads - When you take advantage of the AdWords ad serving service, you’ll ensure that your most popular ads are displayed more often.The AdWords platform will give more weight to the ads with the highest click through rates (CTRs), and will display them more often than ads with lower (CTRs) in the same ad group.
9. Failing to Track Results - n order to have any idea about your AdWords campaign’s performance, you must be able to identify which keywords work and which do not. Google AdWords supplies a vast array of very useful tracking tools. Google has also built into the AdWords interface Google Analytics a marvellous web analytics tool that provides in-depth reporting on all aspects of your campaign’s performance.
10. Entering the Content Network without Modifying Bids - The AdWords platform has recently given advertisers the ability to set different bids for the content network than for the search network.If you don’t set different bids on the content network for your keywords, you’ll be paying more than you should be for each click. Lower the prices on certain keywords, and you’ll notice that the number of clickthroughs you’ll receive will remain the same as at the higher bid.
Source: Adwords
