If you don’t approach paid search marketing in a methodical way, it’s very likely that you’ll quickly eat through your marketing with nothing but failure to show for it.
Show of hands if this has happened to you before?
*Raises hand*
While PPC is not rocket science, there are certain errors beginners make over and over again that stops them from tapping into this limitless resource of leads and sales. In this article, I reveal the top 4 mistakes in an attempt to stop you from following the same path, or to realize your errors and remedy them immediately.
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Not dedicating enough time to PPC
Whether you’re using Facebook Ads, Google AdWords, Yahoo Gemini or Twitter For Business – you won’t get far unless you take it seriously. It’s estimated that only 10% of advertisers continually work on optimizing their PPC campaigns.
Here’s the thing: your first, second or one hundredth PPC campaign is going to need to be optimized. It’s very rare to create a winning campaign on the first attempt. If you want PPC marketing to work for your business, invest time in doing so.
I’m not saying you must spend hours each day optimizing your ads. Checking them every few days and testing different copies before allocating a larger budget to ads is what separates a losing campaign from a successful one.
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Not taking the scores seriously (Quality Score and relevance score)
Quality Score and relevance score are Google’s, Bing’s and Facebook’s rating system in deciding how appropriate your adverts are. All platforms strive to provide their users the best possible experience and when you run adverts, they want to ensure ads are relevant and of high quality.
WordStream found that a higher Quality Score reduced the cost per click and conversion:
While Adespresso revealed that Facebook ads that received a higher relevance score also saw the cost per click decrease and the click-through rate increase:
Scoring isn’t necessarily the biggest metric in deciding how successful a campaign is, but the data above shows that it should be taken seriously.
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Ignoring negative keywords
A negative keyword is a word or phrase that you don’t want your advert appearing for. For example, if you manage an ecommerce website selling furniture, you may not want users who search “how do I build…“ and then a keyword of a product you’re selling to appear in their search result.
The searcher is not interested in buying your product and by clicking your ad they only increase your costs.
When searching for “free email automation” on Google, the second ad listing on the right is an advert from Sales Mango. When visiting their website none of their products are free nor do they offer a free-trial. In fact the word free doesn’t even appear on their homepage or products page, yet they are bidding for terms where users want something for free:
Negative keywords can and should be used in every PPC campaign on Google, Yahoo and Bing to avoid burning your marketing budget.
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Not knowing how to target mobile and desktop traffic
As of today more consumers access the Internet through mobile devices than desktops, and ads served to mobile users generate more engagement.
A study compiled by Struq found that mobile ads received 100% more engagement than ads served on desktops. However, while they do get more clicks, conversion rates are still higher on desktop overall:
Ugh, that’s confusing Tom. Should I target mobile or desktop users?
That depends on your goal.
If your objective is to get prospects to take action, then targeting users on a desktop clearly provides the greatest ROI from the data above. Why is that? Because it’s much easier to view products and key in card details on a computer than a mobile device, shoppers also find it safer.
If your goal is to drive people to your latest blog post or to raise brand awareness (goals that doesn’t heavily focus on prospects taking a complicated action), then mobile ads should be favoured. Consumers often use their phones when they are bored, and while the majority won’t be interested in buying while in the bathroom or their office canteen, they will click your ads and consume your content.
It’s estimated that 42% of American use their mobile phone when they are bored, making mobile users the perfect candidates to increase your brand’s positioning.
Summary
Asides from the obvious inability to write good copy or failure to A/B test ads, I find these 4 mistakes are usually what puts most people off paid search marketing. Are you making them?
Nick Bridges
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