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5 PPC mistakes to avoid

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Zara, Staff Writer

Monday, 22 February 2021

PPC (pay per click) is a method of digital marketing that gets your business out there on search engines and social media pages. By paying to have your advert displayed, you can quickly draw in an audience instead of waiting months for organic methods to pay off. 

But before you launch your campaign, there are a few points to note to ensure you see a healthy return on your investment. Here is an overview of some of the biggest mistakes people make when setting up a PPC campaign to tell you more. 

Lack of targeting to your audience

While every business would like to think that their target audience is ‘everyone’ - the reality is that every product or service will appeal to a certain group of people more than others. Therefore every business needs an understanding of its demographics to be able to target its PPC campaigns effectively. 

Most PPC platforms will give you options such as age, gender, location and even interests. If you’re not sure who you should aim your PPC campaign at, taking the time to understand your audience will save you a lot of time, money and effort. 

Not using negative keywords

Negative keywords help eliminate potential searches that aren’t relevant. If you don’t include negative keywords in your PPC campaigns, a user may click on an ad that isn’t what they were looking for, but you’ll still pay for the click on your ad that likely won’t lead to a sale (conversion).

An example is the word ‘glasses’ as it can mean something you drink out of or a pair of spectacles. You need to be sure that you exclude any terms that are ambiguous or unrelated to what your product or service is selling. If your business sells spectacles, you’d need to remove negative keywords like ‘wine glasses’ or ‘drinking glasses’ to stop those triggering ads for items you don't sell.

Using poor copywriting

You may have a character limit when writing a PPC advert, meaning every word counts. Users will quickly scan an advert to identify whether it’s of interest or not. Poorly written text either due to bad grammar, weird sentence construction or even bland language use just won’t do.

Instead, your PPC copywriting should cut straight to the point. Where possible, it should be written in an engaging way since it is an advert after all. 

Having a non-optimised website

Imagine setting up a brilliant PPC campaign, only for the user to land on a page which doesn’t fit their screen properly. Would you hang around if you couldn’t read the text or scroll down a page properly? You, like most others, would probably make a swift exit, contributing to what’s known as the website’s bounce rate. 

Approximately 50% of all internet traffic comes from mobile users, with the numbers steadily increasing each year. If you send your users to a website that is only designed to be viewed properly on a desktop computer, you’re essentially losing half of your audience in an instant. So test your website on different devices before your PPC campaign goes live.  

Not hiring an expert if you’re unsure

Running a business is essentially a giant game of plate spinning. Whether you’re self-employed or the owner of a global company, the key is to know when it’s time to outsource a particular service. PPC is definitely one of these examples, since you are relying on it to bring you traffic quicker than organic methods such as SEO.

If you don’t know what you are doing with PPC, it’s very easy to run up a huge bill that brings in no tangible leads. However, a PPC specialist will take care of all the hard work for you, making sure your advert is correctly optimised. They’ll also keep a close eye on its progress so that it’s genuinely working to its full potential. The same just can’t happen if you lack the experience or even the time to do this yourself.  

To sum up

The above is only a snapshot of some of the mistakes you can make when using PPC if you aren’t extremely well versed in its mechanics. Just like any marketing effort you wish to undertake, it needs to be thorough in every aspect of its approach to be successful. 

Few of us are trained in digital marketing, and nor do we have the time to study it alongside running a business. If that sounds familiar, then hiring a PPC specialist will be of huge benefit to your marketing efforts, and ultimately your conversions. 

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