6 PPC Mistakes That You Must Avoid For An Increased Conversion Rate

Pay Per Click is an essential element of search engine marketing. It works more effectively when you need faster results on SERP. However, many marketers play it wrong with their PPC campaigns and that’s the reason they don’t give any ROI and only add burdens on the brand. 

Here are 6 mistakes that you must avoid to deliver super successful PPC campaigns: 

1. Not having dedicated landing pages: 

 One of the major reasons that most of the PPC campaigns fail is, not having dedicated landing pages. Most of the ad managers run their campaigns based on either the home page or the contact page. However, creating a separate landing page is essential for better CTR. Here is an example of what exactly you need to do.  

 Let’s assume that you are an e-commerce site and you want to sell a brand new collection to your audience. If you create a PPC campaign with your home page as the landing page, where you have all the products listed, your visitors would find it elusive. It also ruins your user experience and increases your bounce rate.  

2. Not testing your ads:

 A/b testing plays an important role in conversation rate optimization. A strategy that worked for a previous campaign, may fail for an on-going one. The mantra is, always test with different keywords, formats, texts, and images to come up with the optimum one. You need to recycle the entire process to get the best results for each ad campaign, each ad within each ad group.  

3. Not considering your target demographics:

 It’s often seen that ad managers run their PPC campaigns without giving enough consideration to their target audience. But the fact remains, the potential customers play a pivotal role in your success stories, as they are the ones who you are expecting to click on your ads. 

 Let’s assume that you are a financial company and want to run ads for people who are looking for home loans. If your target audience is based in India, you can use ‘home loan’, but if they are in USA, you must consider ‘mortgage’ instead of ‘home loan’ as a keyword.  

4. Not thinking about how people search:

 Most ad managers don’t pay attention to the related key phrases and only focus on the broad keywords. This leaves a wide window untapped, because searchers use different variations while searching for a service or product online.  

 For example, suppose you are an interior decoration provider. You would naturally target the keyword, ‘Interior decoration’, but what about those phases that your searchers often search with such as ‘Home decor tips’ or ‘Home decor ideas’? You also want your ad to appear for these keywords, right?  Use Google Keyword Planner Tool extensively to understand how your TG searches.  

5. Not tracking what went wrong:

 There is a popular quote, “Let bygones be bygones”. And there is a more popular saying, “Learn from your mistakes”. Both stand true for PPC campaigns. As a PPC professional, you always should make it a point to learn a few new lessons from each one of your past campaigns, instead of burying them under the ground because you don’t want to look back at your failures.  Remember, every mistake offers something new to learn, so are the successful ones. Moreover, if you track your campaigns thoroughly, you are more likely to find new areas for improvements.  

6. Not utilizing negative keywords:

 Have you ever considered negative keywords while creating a PPC campaign? It affects your search results to a great extent. By including a negative keyword in a keyword analysis process, you can make sure that your ads will not appear when people search with the given keyword. Strategize your negative keywords so your ads remain visible to a more relevant audience.  

 For example, let’s assume that you want your ad to appear when people search with ‘divorce lawyer’, but don’t want it to show to people who are looking for ‘criminal lawyer’. You need to include the latter in the negative keyword list and your are good to go. Showing your ad to a more niche and concentrated audience would increase your ad performance altogether.