Semalt Reveals 8 PPC Mistakes To Avoid 



Ensuring that you've set up your PPC campaigns is the right way to distinguish a succeeding campaign from a failing one. In this article, we will be helping our clients who want to use PPC for their SEO by showing them the mistakes they should avoid. Here, you will learn common issues that stop paid searches from performing as expected and how we can rectify these issues. 

Understanding the basics of PPC campaigns

Do you believe that your PPC campaign is performing at its max? Regardless of your answer to this question, you will still need to see the common mistakes and avoid them. Regardless of the nature of your business, industry, size, or number of staff, you may still fall victim to one or several of these mistakes.  

Many mistakes can influence the success of PPC campaigns. We hope to highlight the top-ranking issues and tell you how we can help fix them. Some of the mistakes we will be mentioning are obvious mistakes, while others may be more difficult to spot. 

Mistakes you should avoid for the success of your PPC campaign

1. Not defining success

When you do not have an image of what the success of your campaign will look like, it becomes more and more difficult for you to make objective and factual decisions. Making the right decisions is critical when setting up, managing, and measuring your PPC campaign.

To have the right success image, you start with top-line business goals, your marketing goals, and finally, the granular or less significant goals. From these goals, you draw a line connecting your business and your PPC goals. By doing so, you can project how the PPC campaign will influence the business. Get to Key Metrics that matter, such as the number of leads, sales, visits, impressions, and other metrics.

You can even create a PPC media projection to help with the process. Work out your numbers carefully and make sure your budget is correct as well as the performance expectations. 

2. Not understanding the funnel

Stopping at the right prioritization is a short-sighted approach. It is naive to assume that every visitor that looks through your website will end up getting converted on that visit. Yes, we can hope for this, and in certain circumstances, we do experience a high percentage of converts. This could be due to a certain keyword or because we used a certain display that performs well with the audience. However, by ignoring the rest of the funnel, you leave many converts on the table. That is why you must build out your funnel.  

We do this by using analytics, heat mapping, and UX tools. These methods help us understand what the visitor's journey looks like. We can leverage PPC to open, support, and close the deal, which leaves us conversions. 

Put different values, budgets, and focuses on the campaign. The ad groups, the ad content, and the landing page all contribute to where someone is in the funnel. Marketing is key to moving your audience through the funnel. 

3. Lacking KPIs or conversion tracking

We just spoke about conversions and how to get them. Here we will explain how funneling wouldn't matter without the right method to track and measure these conversions. Now not every campaign wants to drive sales or leads. Regardless of the position (top, middle, or bottom of the funnel), the engagement, or the support of a business objective, there is always a way to measure success. If you hope to keep winning, track your conversions. Track your engagements; track your awareness goals.

With PPC and other digital marketing disciplines, you must know these details. Not knowing them is a big mistake that can get your PPC campaign squashed at worst. If you are lucky, it will only hold back certain opportunities.

4. Budgeting the wrong amount

Any PPC campaign team hopes that their team leader does their homework and do their best to explain the needs of the project. One highly common mistake with PPC is wasted spend. Not spending enough is also a challenge. At Semalt, one of the first things we do when managing or taking over a PPC campaign is to find ways to cut waste before we suggest that the budget is increased.  

This relates to targeting bids and a wide range of competitive elements, best practices, and many more. We are not here to discuss those factors, but you should know that embarking on an audit and searching for waste will help you spend efficiently. There are many ways to unlock more budget, and most PPC managers are always in need of more money. At Semalt, one of our most efficient strategies is to hit the goal. Not knowing what opportunities are for the increasing budget can be costly. It is also important that you have open communication about the increment in budget with the stakeholders in charge of the PPC budget. 

5. Letting your landing page comes as an afterthought

As SEO professionals, we go beyond collaborations. When you are highly focused on where we send the traffic and how it helps to do the job of reaching the next step in the funneling process, you are well on your way to making a worthy PPC campaign. With the most tuned account structures, research, audience targeting, and engagement in your campaign, and still miss it. Yes, you can if you continue sending traffic to the wrong pages. It is important that we think through the next step or conversion. If not, all the efforts that have been put into the campaign can get watered down.

We focus on the landing page, the user experience, content, messaging, and other key goals for each ad that gets traffic to the site. Your objective should be what happens after they have taken the steps to click through from the ad? 

6. Thinking only about ourselves

Do not assume that you're the only website attempting to get the attention of your target audience. There are several websites you are competing against on the internet. Research them. Yes, we create unique messaging, branding, and competence, but you aren't the only one advertising to the customers.

It is a costly mistake to only focus on what you offer and not take a moment to study how your competition goes about their advertisement. Study your competition and take note of what keywords they use to get ranked. Many times, you may discover that you will have to step out of your arena in order to be able to reach your target audience. When you realize that your branded terms or keywords function as fishing lines, you branch out, which gives you a net. Using a term that isn't your category might feel wrong, but there are a lot of creative and smart ways we can target common terms.  

Whatever you do, you should always try to stay in tune with your market as you sell your unique brand and propositions.

7. Picking the wrong targets

In order to pick the right targets for your ads, we take time to answer the following questions:
  • Who do you want to reach? 
  • What are their personas?
  • What are the terms your target audience uses while searching?
  • What is their location?
  • How do they behave? 
There are several other questions about our target audience. It is safe to say that this is no small task. You get charged for each click whether or not PPC is working or not. That makes getting the perfect audience highly important. 

8. Running on autopilot

We aren't discrediting software that helps manage PPC campaigns. There are a number of great ones that use effective machine learning to manage ad accounts properly. The issue with using software is that they do not attend your marketing meetings, they do not speak with your clients, or they do not fear the consequences of having to be held responsible for their actions. You, your vendors, and your team do.

Do not make the mistake of delegating too much to the robots. You should have a clear understanding of which decisions are made by robots and humans, respectively. Know how often you'll have to intervene and what aspects of your campaign are left to you:
  • Is doing your PPC manually a good idea? YES!
  • Is it wise to have software assistance in your PPC campaign? YES! 
  • Is it wise to leave your PPC to robots and only visit monthly or quarterly? NO! That is a mistake. 

Conclusion

For PPC to succeed, it needs both technical skills and experience. Semalt offers both to all its clients. Although PPC may seem like it doesn't work for everyone, with our help, you will understand that when the mistakes are scrubbed off, PPC is an effective marketing strategy. However, there are many mistakes that often happen and compound each other. That is why when nonprofessionals attempt it, all may appear fine, but once the hood is lifted, there are several complications. We know what to look for and how to get the job done. Message us today.