6 Major PPC Mistakes Every Marketer Should Know & Avoid!

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Pay-Per-Click refers to paid marketing through various mediums such as Google Ads, Bing Ads, Paid Social, Amazon, YouTube, and many more. Well, running digital advertising campaigns requires prior analysis and determination of target audience, strategy-making and lots more. Well, sometimes even these highly converting campaigns fail to draw the desired results.

It can be highly disappointing to have spent moolah on something, and not be able to gain anything out of it. What can be the reason?

Well, there may be many reasons behind it, some hiccups, some mistakes that every marketer should be aware about PPC campaigns.

Let’s delve into some high-level PPC mistakes that every marketer should know about.

Mistake #1: All Campaign, No Strategy

All Campaign, No Strategy

Any campaign without a suitable strategy is like a car without steering – directionless!

There are lot many companies and marketers, who do not give time enough to go through the situation for assessing the situation. They simply begin with the campaign, and that’s where they make a big mistake.

Analyzing the situation by learning about the user experience is very important as accordingly the strategy can be created or improved. Visualizing, how is it going to be for the user would really help in understanding how it should actually be. Before starting a campaign, create a strategy, and before creating a strategy, determine and set the desired goal, as it allows you to visualize the customer journey throughout.

So now, it would be like, understanding the target customer’s requirements and knowing about them and their profile, determining the platform where the campaign is to be run or conducted, determining the demographics, keywords, preparing an ad copy, creating a landing page that presents information about what we have to offer in the form of an impressive story, and of course the goal. The goal may be anything, either making the customer purchase what you’re offering to them, or even getting them to sign up or subscribe to your newsletters.

So this way, as you think about the user’s journey, you won’t be missing on any crucial step till the time you meet your goal. You may often wonder, if you have set the right goals, and that whether the target audience would click on your ad or not. Actually, the answers lie in the way you must have had thought about the entire campaign, to ensure that the targeted audience takes the favourable action as you would have thought.

Know about Digital Marketing Statistics for Inspiring Strategies

Mistake #2: False Audience Targeting

False Audience Targeting

The worst way you can determine and target your audience is by just making guesses about them. Instead of simply considering a particular group of people to be the relevant audience, you should determine them. In case you already have a customer base, you may widen it by understanding them, knowing about which platform they would be looking for you, using which keywords or search terms, and that how would they want you to approach them, would do they expect from an ad campaign, and lot more.

Well, if you are still to develop a customer base and do not have any, you would be required to perform ample research to find out the right audience you should be marketing your brand to. The more you would research, the more helpful would it be for you to determine the audience that would pay attention, and would be interested in what you have got to offer to them.

Mistake #3: Going Overboard with Geo-Targeting

Going Overboard with Geo-Targeting

It is good to go determine all the aspects about your campaign at a granular level, be it setting your goals or determining the relevant audience and geo-targeting. But sometimes, when marketers become so specific about it that they rather shrink the audience slab to be targeted.

With very limited target audience, they automatically fail to meet their goals, that they had set for the campaign. With very limited geographical target area, you can consider expanding it to some extent, rather than becoming more specific.

Apart from this, widen the platform base. Yes, you may choose to reach out to other platforms with the remaining budget, or simply may run other campaigns at parallel level on Twitter, LinkedIn and may hit the pot of golden opportunities.

While widening the geo-target, just make sure you do not start targeting the location and audience that wouldn’t be interested in your brand, product or services, else you would end up wasting your resources, efforts and budget in them, gaining nothing.

Mistake #4: Using Keywords that Don’t Match Well

Using Keywords that Don’t Match Well

Using keywords that do not match, may really lead to your advertising budget going haywire. The broader terms match well and reach among the larger audience. These are the default keywords. There are phrase terms as well, and they are supposed to be used in the similar sequence of words, though one or two words may be different in the phrase.

The keywords that match exactly have recently been changed by the Google such that, little variations led by the synonyms and plurals in the keywords are considered in the ad, and it matches with the search terms.

By determining the matching keywords, you will be able to avoid the ones that are useless for your ad campaigns and thereby their goals. It is, however, always recommended to use exact matching keywords.

Mistake #5: Not Using Negative Keywords

Not Using Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are the ones that prevent the ad from showing to the audience that is actually not looking for it. So, they help the ad in reaching only to the audience that is relevant and can be the potential customers.

The negative keywords match with variations in a phrase, some may be logical, while some may not.

Negative keywords improve the click-through rate (CTR) and thus, ensuring that the ads are not going waste, running after irrelevant searches. These keywords avoid spending on useless clicks, and rather get the clicks that convert, therefore aid in increasing the conversion rate.

Mistake #6: Issues with Landing Pages

Issues with Landing Pages

Landing pages form the most crucial component in PPC campaigns. Unfortunately, they don’t get as much attention as they are meant for. The major issues pertaining to the creation of these landing pages are getting distracted from their purpose by making them too complex with lot many fields. It is always recommended to make landing pages as simple as possible so that they even load faster.

 

Avoiding such mistakes while creating and conducting such ad campaigns may certainly help you to avoid getting all your efforts waste, while going over your limited budget, and showing up on the searches they are not meant for. So, if you are not getting the results from your PPC ad campaign, that you had expected, you may be certainly up to these mistakes. A PPC marketer pro like those at Tarika Tech keeps checking theses campaigns on regular intervals of time, keep improving them time to time for better results every time.

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