Paid Search Optimizations: 15 PPC Optimization Mistakes to Avoid

If you want to make the most of your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, you need to have the right strategy. Every detail matters in PPC marketing, not just because of the advertising costs, but also due to the scale and reach that your ads have when properly optimized.

Don’t just jump into paid search optimizations without a clear idea of the proven strategies to implement and the mistakes to avoid. It could be the difference between wasting your budget or having tremendous success with your conversions.

If you put the extra time and awareness into your PPC campaigns, you can catch mistakes and stay on the right track. That way, your return on investment (ROI), cost-per-acquisition (CPA), and other metrics need to be for high profitability.

In this article, we will help you avoid the most crucial PPC mistakes that marketers make to have the best growth trajectory possible.

1. Failing to Align With Your Goals

The first and biggest mistake you can make when running PPC accounts is failing to keep it in line with your campaign goals. It’s great to have higher click-through rates (CTRs) and lower cost-per-click (CPCs), but these tend to be vanity metrics without a guiding strategy based on your goals.

You need to clarify your goals or those of the organization you serve. Otherwise, you won’t know the criteria that determine success versus failure.

An excellent framework for setting goals is the SMART method. It goes as follows:

i. Specific

If you don’t know where you’re going, you can’t possibly achieve success. To hit a target, you need to know what it is first. This approach involves getting specific about revenue, traffic, or another goal that your organization has. Everything else should filter down from here.

ii. Measurable

For a goal to be SMART, it has to be measurable. This means there is an objective data point you can look to determine if you hit the goal. For instance, it could be a certain number of leads or a particular CPC. The point is that you are just shooting in the dark without a way to measure it.

iii. Attainable

It’s all well and good to set high goals for yourself. It’s one of the things that makes PPC exciting for you and your business. However, you need to stay reasonable at the same time. Trying to make $1 million in a week when you barely have a live product isn’t realistic. Look at your current starting point and consider what kind of results you would be happy with while still challenging yourself.

iv. Relevant

Every brand will have slightly different needs. Some larger organizations may have more budget to set longer-term goals and spend more to achieve them. However, if you are on a limited budget, ask yourself what’s the more appropriate goal that is appropriate for the company. Not all goals are created equal, and neither are all campaigns.

v. Time-Bound

Without a specific timeline, you could flounder around forever. A goal is not truly set until you have a specific timeline on which you want to attain it. It could be a week, a month, or even a year. But without explicitly writing this timeline down, projects tend to stretch out and take more time than necessary. That wastes your time, your payroll, and, ultimately, your opportunity for more growth.

If your end goal is to sign people up for a high-ticket coaching program, you are concerned with the final conversions (sales) and not simply the metrics that might precede it. For instance, you want to avoid focusing too much on front end traffic. This traffic could be a result of broad keywords that waste your budget without fine-tuning your approach.

2. Not Using Enough Data in Your Decision Making

Another critical mistake when performing paid search optimizations is not analyzing enough data. You need to have enough data to make a statistically reliable decision. When you first start testing, you might see that one ad has 15 clicks, whereas another has 10. You might conclude that the first one is better. However, you should aim for more data so that your decision is in line with statistical relevance.

Your keywords, landing pages, and ads need a proper chance to prove that they are either effective or costly. That way, you can maintain a profitable campaign.

For example, you might determine that web traffic is a more important metric at the moment rather than pure conversions. Thus, a higher conversion rate with a low number of actual conversions might not be a good data point for guiding your campaign.

3. Not Improving on Something that Worked in Past

If you have a campaign that is performing better than others, it doesn’t mean you should just let it run without tweaking it. The market reality can change overnight, so you should always be evaluating ways to make it better.

To this aim, here are some points to consider:

• Check the account reports especially search term reports.
• Is the match type pulling in irrelevant queries?
• What types of keywords are being used by people to find your site?
• Is the campaign out of budget restricting reach?
• Does the ad copy and landing page match up with the keyword?

4. Focusing On Your Product Instead of the Customer’s Pain Points

A lot of brands make the mistake of talking about themselves too much. They get stuck in the trap of promoting all the time (such as a sale, limited-time promotion, or particular product feature).

However, you need to consider that when someone sees an ad like this, it is often for the first time, and so, they might not know anything about your product or solution.

You need a set of ads that approach your market at different levels of awareness. For instance, someone might require you to talk about their pain points to realize that they have this issue in the first place. Then, you can create campaigns that speak about your solution and specific ways to solve their problem. Remember that your prospect is most interested in themselves and the problems they have, not your product at first. Understand the customer journey first to improve your PPC strategies.

5. Being too Granular

Another big mistake with paid search optimizations is putting too much focus on individual keywords or ads. If you don’t see the bigger picture, this can quickly become a problem. To avoid this, here are some tips to keep in mind:

• If your keyword data is too small, look at your ad group data — you’re sure to uncover greater insights. And if your ad group data is too small, look at your campaign data.
• If you have the same ad messages across multiple ad groups, run a pivot table in Excel to benefit from a larger data set or check different PPC reports to check your performance on different levels.
• Try only to make optimization changes when you have minimum clicks or conversions. Keep moving up a level until you have enough data set to make informed decisions — any changes you make to them will be more likely to have a positive impact on your account performance.

6. Not Bidding On Your Brand Name

A lot of marketers think they can save money by not bidding on their brand name. However, this is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. Your brand name is a great chance to get in front of searchers with high intent. Think about it, if they are searching for your brand, they already know they have a problem, and they are looking to your company for a solution.

7. Not Appreciating Soft Conversions

Instead of going for “hard” conversions every time, consider the value of soft conversions. Hard conversions are those that occur at the bottom of the funnel, where sales happen. A soft conversion is one that happens at the top of the funnel, where customers are in the early stages of the customer journey, considering their options, and showing interest in your products or services. Understanding the customer experience is important through the cycle.

While the end goal is always to increase revenue in some form, you don’t always want to craft your ads to be aimed at the bottom of the funnel. The reason is that some sales cycles and buying journeys take longer.

For instance, you might not have a significant amount of traffic yet. Therefore, you should focus on the top part of the funnel (traffic). By doing this, you can generate more interest and engagement over a longer period. You will be getting more prospects to sell to at the end of your funnel.

From here, you can break down your conversions at different points. One conversion might just be a visit to your website. Then, you might look at engagement on the site with a video or with scrolling. Eventually, you will have more conversion for signups, leads, or sales. With patience, you will get more conversions at the bottom of the funnel because you took your market through the right steps first.

8. Not Managing Exclusion Lists

An exclusion list is a collection of targets that you choose to exclude from your PPC campaign, such as specific locations, keywords, or demographic types. For example, if you’re running a campaign for first-time driver’s insurance, you may opt to exclude people over the age of 30.

Exclusion lists can be a powerful asset in your PPC campaigns. But your paid search optimizations depend on you having good exclusion lists that let you focus on new acquisitions. With a dynamic exclusion strategy, you can achieve more than a mere cookie-based list.

For instance, let’s say you have an ecommerce store. When someone makes a purchase, you can add them to a database as your customer. Since you have their data, you can exclude them based on multiple factors, depending on the data you collect. This tactic allows you to target them for upsells and future offers without annoying them and wasting money on current customers who have already bought a product.

9. Not Testing Changes When Doing Paid Search Optimizations

One of the key aspects of paid search optimizations is testing. Every single ad should have another version that you are testing it against. Otherwise, you are leaving free money on the table.

For instance, you can test your call to action, your landing page, or your Google Ad against multiple versions at the same time. By doing this, one of the ads will have a better conversion rate or better ad costs. Over time, your funnel will become a well-oiled machine that is always getting more effective.

10. Changing Too Many Things At One Time

While testing is a good practice, you need to be careful not to overdo it. Testing one thing at a time is the best approach. If you test too many things, you won’t know which element increased your conversion.

When testing for paid search optimizations, try to single out one aspect of your ad or landing page that you want to tweak. It could be a headline, description, video, or anything else. The point is that you will know what is affecting conversions instead of playing the guessing game. Over time, of course, you can test more of your funnel. Be patient and let the data tell you what needs adjusting so that you aren’t throwing money away.

11. Not Managing Time Frames Correctly

When you are looking at your PPC data, it can quickly become overwhelming. You need to have specific dates when you check your data, depending on when you last made changes to your PPC campaign.

For instance, if you are looking at data for the last 30 days, but you made changes seven days ago, you might get confusing data. Perform your analysis at the right time to assess only the most recent updates, so you can gauge how they have affected conversions.

12. Not Optimizing Your Landing Page

Just because someone clicks on your ad does not mean they will buy your product. Your landing page needs to do the heavy lifting. Visitors will look at many factors to determine if your brand is right for them.

There are several factors to look for when optimizing your landing page. The first is your headline. It should reflect exactly what the pain point of your market is. This lets them know they are in the right place.

From here, look at your CTAs and other elements such as opt-in forms and videos. Each aspect will either help your conversions or hurt them. There are no neutral aspects of a campaign.

View your campaign sections like different people in a traditional sales system. On the front end, you have your PPC ads. These are like marketers or canvassers that go door-to-door or call on prospects. They are merely getting your message in front of them for the first time.

Then, your landing page is like the sales professional that takes initial interest and turns it into desire. Finally, your CTAs are the closing sales techniques you use to get highly interested visitors to purchase. By doing this, every aspect of your campaign is contributing to your overall campaign goals. You must have idea about how to have good landing page which can lead to conversions.

13. Quitting Too Early

PPC can be a trap for beginning marketers. They might see it as an opportunity to make a lot of money in a short amount of time. You can indeed see faster results with PPC than with search engine optimization (SEO). However, it still takes some time.

You might not see results in the first few weeks or even months. Sure, you have valuable data in the meantime, but to get better conversions, you should set goals along a reasonable timeline without going over budget. This will help you stay motivated and avoid quitting before you strike gold. Don’t give up early, even daily 1% improvement can take your performance too high by the end of the year.

14. Making Technical Mistakes

You could go on and on about technical mistakes that first-timers make with their PPC campaigns. In managing PPC campaigns, you’ve learned a lot of tips and tricks along the way so that we’re able to squeeze the most value possible out of our clients’ budgets and avoid costly mistakes. Think about these questions:

• Do you know the difference between broad, phrase, and exact match?
• Do you know what the different ad extensions are and how to use them?
• Do you know what campaign types work best?
• Do you know how to set up conversion tracking, dynamic call tracking numbers, or live chatbots?
• Do you know what keywords to bid on, how much to bid, where to land searchers, and how to remarket to users after they’ve left your site?
• Are you wasting money inside your campaign without even knowing that you’re wasting it?

If you answered no to one or more of the above questions, don’t feel too down on yourself. The many features and nuances of Google Ads are myriad and can be hard to explain and understand. Still, it’s worth it to spend time getting to know these intricate technical aspects to avoid running into glitches that could halt your campaigns.

15. Fighting for the First Position Always

In an ideal world, you could have the lowest bid amounts and still get the top position. But since the position is not the only important metric in a campaign, you could spend more than you have for the same amount of conversions.

Evaluate your data to come up with the right position that meets your conversion needs and doesn’t break the bank. You might find that second, or even third is preferable due to the ROI you see from it.

Wrap Up

Paid search optimizations are part-art and part-science. Knowing how to mix the two and stay on track with your goals is crucial to your PPC success. There are so many factors in PPC that if you don’t have a guide to avoiding costly mistakes, you could end up abandoning campaigns or wasting time and money.

Use the guide above to navigate the challenging arena of paid search optimizations. You will eventually develop an instinct for which methods are best, all while improving your ability to analyze the objective data. Now that you know the obstacles, you can advertise online more confidently and effectively for massive business growth.