Everybody loves losing right? Especially when it comes to running their business and setting up un-profitable PPC campaigns. Over the years I’ve audited and reviewed more PPC campaigns than I dare to remember, with many of them making fundamental mistakes that will always ensure a losing campaign.
If you enjoy running unprofitable ads and love giving Google, Bing and Yahoo your hard earned cash, follow these 6 tips to guarantee losing ads every single time.
1. Consolidate all traffic to your homepage
Is your advert talking about a specific product or service? Then sending traffic to your homepage is a certain way to waste ad spend and annoy searchers.
If you direct traffic to your homepage when the ad talks about a specific product or service, searchers are forced to start their search all over again from your homepage, with many of them clicking the back button back to Google or Bing.
The only time you should be sending traffic to your homepage is when you’re targeting branded keyword.
2. Ignore negative keywords
Not using negative keywords is a recipe for disaster and certain failure. The reason you use PPC is to pay for traffic that is most likely to make your intended action, leveraging negative keywords minimizes the amount of users who aren’t interested in your business.
Want to see your campaign budgets filled before noon with poor conversion rates? Then ignore negative keywords.
3. Don’t use call-to-actions
With so much content on the web, nobody reads every page they land on. Instead, most skim from top to bottom and then decide whether it’s worth their time. Placing a visible call-to-action quickly tells the searcher what they will get from reading the content and increase the probability of taking action.
4. Don’t use keywords in your titles
The title of an advert is the first thing the searcher’s eyes focus on when viewing an ad, if the keyword they searched is in the search title they are more likely to click. For example, if you typed in “iMac Air 2” and saw two adverts with the title:
iMac Air 2 On Sale
Laptops on Sale
Which would you click? Winning campaigns usually include the keyword they are targeting in the title or at the very least the text.
5. Use lots of broad match keywords
Broad match is the default option selected when choosing keywords. Broad match terms are certainly useful as they can show you terms and keywords you may not have known yourself.
However, they will also bid on irrelevant keywords that won’t help you generate more leads or sales. When using broad match types, you should place them in their own ad group where you can easily monitor and track their results. Placing broad match types in ad groups with exact and phrase type words will often see the lion’s share of your budget placed towards board terms and not the other two.
6. Minimize the use of ad extensions
Ad extensions can be worth their virtual weight in gold because they help ads stand out. Google allows you to choose up to 8 extensions (although it doesn’t give you a choice on what is shown to users), using the most relevant ones for your ad to take more space on the search engine getting more clicks.
If you want to further kill your ad campaign, just don’t use them.
Summary
If you’ve made it this far down the article, I hope you found my satire slightly amusing. The 6 points above are what most novice PPC marketers make and it can cost them greatly. Simply fixing any of the problems above can see a losing campaign turning into a winning one.
The next time you audit your campaign, check to see if you’re making any of the mistakes above and remedy them ASAP.
Nick Bridges
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2 Comments
Eminent
May 13, 2016You have made some better description about ways to lose on every PPC Campaign. I want more clearance description about broad match keywords.
W.K. Little
June 23, 2016Another great article Tom.
Especially love the part about using call to actions effectively.
– WL
http://WarrenLittle.Net