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Mistakes with PPC

When people are starting up with PPC marketing there are a few mistakes that are commonly made.

One of the very common mistake is to not turn off the content network ads. The content network are all the pages that use Google´s AdSense and the quality of this traffic is usually not very good. To forget to turn off, or just not knowing about the content network ads being enabled by default can cost you quite a bit of money with very little or no return.

Apart from the low quality of the traffic, you will also get a massive amount of impressions on your ads. This will usually cause your Click Through Rate (CTR for short) to go way down. With a very low CTR, Google will think that your ads are not relevant to the search terms you have specified and will penalize you. This will result in a higher cost per click. All this is quite simplified but the important thing is that a low CTR leads to higher price for the same click. And a good CTR means a lower price for the same click.

The next common mistake is bidding too high initially. Start out with smaller cost per click, especially when you are learning how PPC works. Bidding high will give you top positions and a lot of exposure, but that will not help you if you are a novice at creating landing pages. Even if you get a bundle of hits to your page, it will be worth nothing if you can’t convert it into a sale.

So, start small and learn both how to get an appealing ad that pulls in a good CTR and polish your landing pages so that you have a high conversion ratio.

Both these things are done best by split testing two versions against each other. Run two ads for the same landing page at the same time, see which one gets the highest CTR. Remove the one with lower CTR and try to improve the one you have by making yet another ad, split test these against each other. Always try to improve your landing pages as well, but remember to keep the previous versions in case the new one is worse!

This brings us to a third common mistake that new PPC marketers make. Not using landing pages. You need to send the traffic from the PPC searches to a well prepared and very targeted landing page. If you run a big campaign, you might even need to have several landing pages for different niches within your topic.

It´s never a good thing to be ”general” when you are working with PPC. If you are selling a specific part for a specific model of cars, for instance, do not bid on just ”car” as search word. Be as specific as you can. It will generate less traffic to your site but the traffic will be better quality.

Working with PPC marketing is about always improving what you currently have in, my opinion. Test and test again what works and what doesn’t. It will pay off in the end.

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Advertising with PPC Search Engines

Pay-Per-Click or PPC, as it´s also known as, is a great way to drive targeted traffic to your site. However, learning how to use PPC in a good way can take a lot of time.

If you are not familiar with what pay-per-click is I will explain it here. When you make a seach on for instance Google, you usually get a bunch of links on the right side of the browser window (sometimes those listings also appear above the regular results in a box with a different background). Above the links you will see a text that says ”Sponsored Links” or something similar. These links are the pay-per-click links.

Pay-per-click lets you bid a certain price on certain search words or terms and whenever someone search for those things, your listings will show up in the sponsored links section. If it´s a competative term the price to get listed in a good position will be higher. I will just clarify one thing here, the term is pay-per-click, and this means that you actually only pay when someone click on your links, not when it´s shown.

In the introduction I mentioned that PPC is a good way to bring targeted visitors to your website, and it is, because the visitors will be very targeted to the topic of your site. That is, if you know what you are doing. If you use the PPC marketing in a wrong, or bad way, it can end up just costing you money without producing proper amounts of sales.

Something that you hear about frequently are people who have had basically no success with their PPC campaigns in terms of sales. The reason is often that once they have their website up and running they rush off to a PPC search engine and start bidding on every term and word they can imagine that´s related to their product. The people who do this get quite a bunch of traffic and it´s targeted traffic, sort of. It´s just not targeted enough.

Let us imagine that you have a site about poodles and you intend to somehow make moeny with this site. Now you should not go out and bid on every term you can think of related to dogs in general. Since your site is about poodles, you want people who are crazy about poodles to come to your site.

Try to get your PPC campaigns as narrowed down as you can. You should do this for several reasons with the most obvious being that the more targeted your traffic is, the higher chance you have to turn your visitor into a customer. If you in fact have a site about just poodles, it´s a good assumption that you yourself is crazy about poodles and because of this you speak the same language as your visitors. This will make you connect with your viewers and if you are good at what you do, you migth come off as an expert in your field.

Both these things are great since people are more likely to listen to experts and they are more likely to buy something from someone they can relate too and feel connected with. If you can connect with your visitors on the page you send them to from the PPC campaign, you have a good chance of them listening to what you have to say about the product you offer. And the chance of them actually buying this product is a lot higher than if you’re not connecting on a “personal level”.

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