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PPC management agencies will tell you that pay-per-click advertising (PPC) is one of the best ways to acquire new customers in the Digital Age.
Publishing an ad on Google’s search network allows your business to reach new customers from across the world, or right in your local area.
It’s easy to see the value.
When prospective customers see and click your ad, they are brought to your website. From there, you can encourage them to buy, subscribe, sign up, schedule a demo or complete any other action that drives your business.
There is an element of cost involved. After all, it’s called pay-per-click! As this name suggests, every time your ad is clicked, you’re charged a small fee.
With these costs, there is a risk of losing money at advertising. This keeps some marketers away from PPC. They worry that their inexperience will end up costing them more than they’ll benefit.
PPC marketing doesn’t have to be a grand mystery or an expensive mistake.
If you want to handle your Google Ads campaigns in-house, instead of hiring one of the many PPC management agencies, there are 10 mistakes that you need to know and avoid.
These obstacles can cost you thousands of dollars, if you aren’t careful. In this discussion, you’ll learn what these mistakes are and how to stop them in your own PPC campaigns.
Customers are people, not keywords.
Since PPC campaigns are so heavily reliant on keyword targets, some advertisers forget this distinction.
In the hype of understanding what people are searching for, which keywords are most popular, the best match type options, etc., you can forget to think about the people behind the searches.
Even Google recognizes the shortcomings of keywords. Each year they move further away from keyword targeting and more towards audience and interest targeting.
For instance, Google’s search algorithm uses semantic and contextual clues to identify the intent behind someone’s search.
Google cares less about the actual words being typed into the search box and more about the meaning behind those words.
The search engine also looks at the individual user when creating search results. This can slightly alter what you see versus what someone else sees when performing the same search.
This shift in how Google prioritizes search content has urged them to develop the Audiences feature in Google Ads.
You can view your target audiences and identify which segments are producing the best results. Then, you can refine that audience and dig deeper into the detailed customer profiles that are most engaged. In turn, this allows you to fine-tune your campaign performance!
Solution: Keywords are still important and they can inform your strategies. That said, they should not be the entire purpose behind the content you produce. You should write for your audiences, not the search engine.
Don’t let mistake #1 derail you from thinking that keywords don’t matter anymore. Keywords are still the foundational building blocks that should guide most of your content and messaging strategies.
Keywords are still the primary means of targeting potential customers through PPC ads.
If you have the right keywords selected, success and growth should come in no time. Choose the wrong keywords, however, and your strategies will sputter and struggle to perform.
To avoid poor keyword research, it’s important to define what exactly it means. There are several ways to identify a poor keyword.
A lot of short-tail keywords have this problem. They seem incredibly relevant to your business, but their lack of specificity creates issues. Mainly, you’ll see lots of impressions and clicks, but a low number of conversions.
For example, if you were one of the top PPC management agencies, you might target the keyword “cross-marketing.” It seems like a reasonable target because this is something you offer clients.
This will drive people to your website that may not have any interest in hiring a cross-marketing specialist. They may merely be trying to understand what is cross-marketing for their own business.
All those clicks are going to cost you!
Pay attention to your shorter, broader keywords. If you’re spending a lot of money on these keywords and not seeing conversions, it’s time to move on.
Ideally, you want to find keywords that are very popular with search users. The downside is that this also makes them popular targets among your competitors.
When there is heavy competition for a PPC keyword, it is more expensive. More competition means more bids. Thus, you’ll need to enter a higher cost-per-click (CPC) amount if you want your ads to appear for this keyword.
Again, you need to think in terms of value. If this is a very actionable keyword that frequently leads to conversions, the added price and competition may be worth it.
Longer, niche keywords make ideal targets. They are relevant to your business and typically have less competition than broader search terms.
Although, when you get too specific with your keyword targets, you can run into some problems.
First, very specific keywords do not receive as many searches as broader ones. You’ll have low impressions and clicks for these terms. Hopefully, the specificity makes these keywords very relevant and actionable for your business.
The second obstacle is that Google may not serve ads to keywords with poor search volumes. You may be creating ad content that audiences will rarely see.
Arguably the most popular keyword faux pas is using data that is outdated. In other words, marketers don’t spend enough time reviewing their existing keyword targets and looking for new potential targets.
Keywords are never set in stone. Your strategies will become stale and stagnant if you aren’t actively monitoring your keywords and on the lookout for new potential targets.
Performance that may have been increasing over time will start to plateau or even dip. If you aren’t paying attention to these trends, you could be wasting money on overly expensive keywords.
How do you permanently avoid flawed keyword research? The best option is to invest in a third-party keyword research tool. These tools provide all of the necessary data you need to judge your keywords: CPC, clickthrough rate (CTR), search volume, relevance, etc.
Ideally, you want to find relevant keywords with low competition and costs but high search volume and CTR.
PPCexpo Keyword Planner is an excellent tool for researching new and existing search terms.
The PPCexpo Keyword Planner tool gives you hundreds of relevant keyword results for any search you make. Each suggested keyword is complete with search volume data, estimated CPC values, relevance % and more.
It’s an awesome alternative to Google’s Keyword Planner.
Solution: Take your time with your keyword research. It is not a one-and-done activity; it is an ongoing process. You should take time out of every day/week to monitor your existing keywords and search for new potential targets. Expert PPC marketers are always testing new keywords!
When you create a PPC campaign on Google Ads, you’re asked to set up specific parameters. One of these settings is your daily budget.
If you set your daily budget to $25, you would expect to spend up to $25 each day on your campaigns. Unfortunately, it won’t always work out that way, depending on your bidding strategy.
Sometimes, when Google is trying to optimize your keyword bids, it will spend more than your daily budget. It can even double it in some circumstances!
This occurs when Google’s automated bidding AI decides that overspending today will achieve higher-than-average results. It’s looking at the data and determining that spending more is the best course of action.
This may seem insignificant when the budget is only $25, but imagine if it was $25,000. You could be allowing Google to spend thousands more on some days than others.
It’s worth mentioning that your daily budget is different from your overall campaign budget. Google will never spend more than your overall campaign budget. The daily budget is this value divided across the entire month.
If your maximum budget is $3,000 each month, your daily budget will be around $99 each day.
The problem with Google exceeding your daily budget limit is that it could leave you without enough money to cover advertising at the end of the month. You could spend 90% of your monthly budget and still have 10 days left to go.
Solution: If you’re using any type of automated, smart bidding feature, get in the habit of checking how much is being spent each day. You don’t have to check every single day, but enough that you know how your money is being spent. You can use automatic rules and scripts to implement your actions.
There are many ways to measure the success of a PPC marketing campaign.
You have access to tons of data, even just within your Google Ads account. All of these metrics matter to varying degrees.
To simplify the data, many advertisers focus on return on advertising spent (ROAS) to measure success. This helps advertisers get their performance down to a single metric.
ROAS looks at revenue based on what you’ve spent on advertising. It does not guarantee that you’ll be getting the best possible profit for your ad spend.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this strategy. It is an approach that many advertisers use. However, it does have some substantial limitations. For this reason, ROAS should not be the only metric you rely on when measuring the success of your PPC campaigns.
There are two problems with ROAS:
Solution: ROAS is an excellent benchmark metric, but it shouldn’t be your ultimate success determiner. Think about future margin on ad spend, customer lifetime values and other metrics as well. The more critically you analyze the performance and trajectory of your campaigns, the better the resulting success.
As mentioned, great PPC marketers are always testing new keyword opportunities. You should also get in the habit of testing new ad copy variations.
Weak ad copy will produce unsatisfactory results, even if your PPC campaigns are designed perfectly.
The problem is that there is no perfect recipe for A+ ad copy. The only way you can evaluate what works and what doesn’t is to test.
The best way to evaluate different ad copy variations is to use A/B testing. This is a simple process of writing two variations (or more) of a single ad. Each variation will have one subtle difference.
For instance:
Both messages are identical, except for the first word. By running these two ad messages simultaneously, you can see if people are more enticed by “Click here” versus “Shop here.”
You can also use Google’s responsive ads tool. This feature asks that you submit multiple ad titles and descriptions. Then, Google combines these different components to make variations of your message.
Over time, the responsive ads feature learns which combinations work best and with which audiences. This is an automated method for A/B testing that provides great results.
The tradeoff is that you won’t always have full control over which ad components are shown.
Solution: A/B testing is essential. The more possible variations you can test, the more you understand what offers entice customers the most. It’s all about learning what language to use and how to advertise your business and products best.
PPC marketing is highly competitive. If you’re only considering your own campaigns and keyword targeting, you’re not recognizing that there are other players on the board.
Remember, PPC keywords are won in an auction. You won’t see good results if you aren’t paying attention to the other bidders.
Your costs, ad ranks and even your CTRs are directly impacted by what competitors are doing. If you want to win in this competitive space, you need to develop strategies that counter what the competition is doing.
Solution: You should routinely perform a PPC competitive analysis. This will compare and contrast competitor strategies to uncover a variety of insights, such as:
Answering these questions will help you develop your own strategies. You’ll apply what you learned to selecting better keywords and devising stronger ad copy.
Everyone has experienced the annoyance of seeing an ad too much, whether it is a PPC ad, TV commercial, radio ad or something else.
You don’t want to bother a prospective customer to the point that it becomes annoying. The more you disrupt their activities with your ad message, the more they will resent and distrust your company.
Frequency capping is an often overlooked setting that allows you to control how many times a single user can see your ads. By default, it is left on unlimited. This means that your ads will be shown to users no matter if they’ve already seen your message 70 times.
Solution: You should set some sort of frequency cap for your campaigns. It will protect you from oversaturating one target with your ad messages.
It’s also wise to show your ads evenly throughout the day, instead of “accelerated.” The accelerated setting tries to use your budget as quickly as possible. This may result in audiences seeing your ads three times in rapid succession.
Data plays a significant role in the success of your PPC campaigns. If you can actively listen to your campaign data and make adjustments when appropriate, your results will continue to grow positively.
When you neglect this data, you start to run into problems.
There are two reasons why data becomes neglected. The first occurs when marketers trust their own experiences, opinions and intuition more than the numbers. They want to apply the knowledge and experience they’ve gained from years of traditional marketing to the digital space.
The issue is that there is not a direct translation between the two. Digital marketing is worlds different from more traditional forms of marketing.
Not to mention, digital marketing itself is always changing and transforming. What professionals considered “best practices” for digital marketing in 2010 have little-to-no bearing on today’s environment.
The other reason that a marketer might neglect their data is that they’ve invested in a sophisticated algorithm or software tool to use instead. The main issue with this approach is that these algorithms rely on data.
If you don’t have the right type of data to feed the algorithm, the results it returns will be lackluster and inaccurate.
Solution: Data can’t be ignored or replaced. All of your marketing expertise and knowledge are precious commodities, but they need to be backed by data.
Algorithms and AI technology help manage your data, but that doesn’t mean that you can rely solely on these tools. You need to provide these resources with verified, relevant data to assist them in making smart decisions for your campaigns.
While it is unwise to neglect your data, it is also a mistake to trust it too much.
For one, most of your ad data is coming from Google Ads, which is not exactly an unbiased partner in the world of PPC marketing.
The other obstacle is that you have data coming from all sources — some verified and others not. It can be challenging to bring all of these sources together to achieve a single, unified view of what’s happening behind the numbers.
There is an incorrect belief that data is infallible and numbers can’t be wrong, which leads to data-driven decisions made with 100% confidence. You might make the mistake of going all-in on a new strategy because data suggests that it is the next big hit.
Unfortunately, data can be wrong. When high-confidence is made based on flawed or insufficient data, the results can be catastrophic.
Solution: Again, data needs to be used alongside your expertise and knowledge as a marketer. It is not a replacement for what you already know about your customers and business. This will allow you to focus on the data that actually matters and avoid unverified sources that may be selling snake oil.
In the past few years, AI and machine learning have skyrocketed in use cases and applications. Many activities that were once human-driven are now being left to machine learning.
As time passes, the world will undoubtedly see more human activities being taken over by machine learning.
This is not a bad thing!
While some marketers may be apprehensive about using an AI tool, the benefits make the tradeoff very worthwhile.
These tools save tremendous amounts of time, which can then be spent on more valuable activities.
Solution: Marketers seem to be all-in or all-against AI and machine learning. The best solution is really to be in-between the two.
Yes, AI is extremely potent and will help you become more productive as a marketer. That said, there are still tasks that need to be human-driven. You don’t want to hand over too much control to AI.
You should look for automation tools that make your life easier, but still keep you in the driver’s seat.
You don’t need one of the top PPC management agencies to help you succeed at digital advertising. You just need the right tool for the job.
PPC Signal is a machine learning tool for monitoring your campaign performance. It provides signals when things are moving up, down or otherwise behaving strangely. These alerts let you know what areas of your campaigns may need more attention.
For instance, a keyword has an above-average week in performance. PPC Signal notifies you of this positive trend and provides additional details for you to explore.
Plus, it doesn’t make any changes to your campaigns themselves. So, you don’t have to worry about giving up any control as a marketer.
PPC Signal provides much-needed foresight to your campaigns. It’s not just about seeing what’s happening, but also why it is happening and what it means for the future.
For example, let’s say you notice that your overall clicks are down recently. You open PPC Signal and filter the active results to only show you alerts related to CTR.
You’re given four signals that relate to CTR:
You’ll notice three signals for the “Forerunner Charlton” campaign that all have downward-trending CTR numbers. Meanwhile, CTR is performing above average in the “Garmin Forerunner Sales” campaign.
Clicking “Explore” on any of these signals will give a more detailed view of the data.
This will show the real-time data for how long this negative CTR trend has been occurring.
You can also elect to view this data as a table.
There are a few ways you can use these signals to improve your campaign performance.
You can also click “Take Action” at the top of the page. This will give you PPC Signal’s recommendation based on the data.
The key to avoiding all of these 10 mistakes boils down to activity.
Suppose you’re actively paying attention to your campaigns, testing ad copy, exploring keywords, using data, studying the competition and everything else. In that case, you’re on your way to becoming a successful PPC marketer.
The issue is that these activities all require a lot of time and attention, which is why some owners decide to hire one of the top PPC management agencies in their area.
If you don’t like the idea of hiring outside help or don’t want to make this substantial investment, there are ways around it.
PPC Signal is a great alternative. By automating the monitoring and detection phases of PPC data analysis, you have more time to commit towards taking action and avoiding risky mistakes.
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