One of the quickest and effective way to attract potential customers to your website is through pay-per-click advertising. Using Tools such as Google AdWords, business owners can display their ads in the sponsored results section of search results page and pay an amount when someone clicks through from the ad to their site.
However, PPC has can be perilous if not implemented correctly and you can spend a large amount of money without getting the number of new potential clients you were hoping.
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Here are 4 PPC mistakes to avoid when commencing your PPC campaign.
- Sending visitors to your home page
Suppose you are an online clothing store and running a PPC ad for the keyword “Denim Shirts” – a product you sell on your website. You have set up the ad to run whenever this keyword is being searched on your engine, and you utilize the URL which redirects the visitor who clicks the ad to your site’s home page. Thus, the user has to now click through your website’s navigation to find the clothing he/she has chosen.
In the following case, you have sent a potential and engaged visitor to the homepage which may cause frustration. Rather, you should drive visitors to targeted landing pages to avoid a frustrating user experience and bring the visitor closer to purchasing the product.
- Unable to split-text your ad
In order to create the most effective and efficient results, make sure to avoid running PPC ads without testing them. You can split test your ads by producing multiple versions of your ad’s text and therefore, can decide which specific words leads to most click through. Most of the PPC engines allow you to split test, but make sure that your ad variations is presented at random, so that it is evocative. Also, you can find guidelines that will assist you to guarantee that your ad versions are exhibited randomly.
- Being completely dependent on ‘broad match’ keywords ads
The broad match keywords ads are exhibited when the entire or part of your target keyword phrase is searched for, which generates large amount of traffic. For example, you are a restaurant targeting the phrase “Mauritius cuisine” with a broad match ad. Thus, your ad should show on the results of the page for the search query “Mauritian cuisine”, but then it can also show up for irrelevant searches queries. In this case, you may be wasting your money on irrelevant searches. Focusing your ad to the exact phrase may decrease your traffic but will ensure relevant visitors.
- Not utilizing negative keywords
Most of the businesses fail to utilize negative keywords which prevent the ads from displaying when certain words are being searched. In fact, adding negative keywords to your PPC campaigns is one factor to control relevancy without eradicating the potential traffic of broad match ads. However, this requires you to invest your time and effort to find as many negative keywords that can influence your campaign.
Let us know some more errors we may have missed in the comments below.
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