Quite often you see lists of advice regarding Pay Per Click advertising telling what the best practices are and what you should be doing. However today I am going to be telling you about some of the things that you shouldn’t be doing as they may be having a negative impact on your campaigns.
1: Don’t Assume Success Translates Between Campaigns
Just because you have had a successful campaign in the past doesn’t mean that employing the same tactics will work for you again. When campaigns have different aspects to each other, they are bound to have differences in what makes them successful and what doesn’t.
2: Don’t Forget Negative Keywords
Adding in negative keywords is critical in ensuring your PPC ads don’t show up for searches that make it irrelevant. It seems very simple to keep this in mind but it’s easy to only focus on the searches you want your ad to show up for and not on the searches you don’t want it show up for. For example if you were selling baseball caps you should be using negative keywords such as sun or cowboy so that people who don’t want baseball caps won’t see your ad.
3: Don’t Set Up Too Many Ads In A Group
This is particularly important when you have a relatively low budget. You may be very interested to see how six or seven different ads perform but when your budget runs out you won’t have gained any meaningful data on any of them. It’s best to focus on fewer ads in a group so even when you have a low budget you can get a good idea of what is performing well and what isn’t.
4: Don’t Send People To Your Homepage
If you have spent the time and money to get people to click on your ad you’re wasting potential customers by not giving them exactly what they want. This happens an astonishing amount even with larger enterprises. When a customer has searched for your product or services, they don’t then want to have to navigate your website in order to find what they are looking for once again. Creating landing pages specific to your ads is crucial in PPC advertising.
5: Don’t Quit Too Early
When starting out it’s easy to get fed up waiting for results for days or even weeks, you may be tempted to scrap it and move on. That may be one of the biggest mistakes you can make. PPC advertising is a game of averages and it may take three to six months before any truly meaningful data emerges so don’t get disheartened and quit before it pays off.