Thinking of running a PPC campaign – Think again
Yes, a PPC Campaign can increase traffic to your website and drive new business to you, but the number of failed campaigns far out weight the successful ones. So just why do a large number of PPC Campaigns fail?
Here are 8 pitfalls to avoid with your PPC Campaign.
The premise is easy, put a few text adverts up and capture people when they are looking to buy your type of product or service.
But with so many failed campaigns, before you embark on this type of advertising its worth looking at the main PPC campaign pitfalls:
So here they are our 8 pitfalls to avoid with your PPC Campaign.
Planning & Expertise
Top of the list for why PPC campaigns fail is lack of planning and lack of expertise, this is a highly competitive market and you have to have a strategy to succeed with a clear understanding of the aims and ambitions of the campaign you will run. This is the starting point of any PPC Campaign.
The very start of this planning is getting the central aim of the PPC campaign together, whether it be:
- selling more products
- getting a new product known
- increasing your brand awareness
- expanding an existing product range
- expanding sales of a single product or service.
Whatever the specific objective understand clearly what you are trying to do.
Budget
Next is putting a budget together so you know exactly what you are willing to spend on the set up and monthly PPC campaign. Set up costs can be high as that is where so many things have to be created correctly, do this wrong and the whole campaign will fail, set enough aside to make sure this is done properly.
- What are you willing to spend each month?
- What do you expect in terms of clicks for this?
- What do you want these people to do once they click and at what cost?
Consider all the goals and objectives together to understanding and establish your acceptable Cost Per Click.
Keyword Research
Keywords need to be research properly, there really is no short cut here; you need to understand not only the correct keywords to use but also the ones you do not want to use that may be connected to your main keywords. If you are going to succeed these ‘negative keywords’ may play a big part in keeping costs down and stopping people clicking on your advert when they have no interest to you.
Putting these keywords together into close groups will aid your PPC campaign. Depending on the type of PPC campaign, consider looking at keywords that may be seasonal or more time sensitive.
Are your Text Ad’s relevant?
Next comes the creating of the text adverts. Here you have to understand what your Primary call to action going to be, and ensure the keywords you’re bidding on are in your ad’s to attract the relevant click!
Relevance is what matters here with a clear call to action.
With the text adverts you have 95 characters to succeed, not just to get clicks but most importantly to make the clicks relevant to what you are selling.
Landing Pages – are they optimised?
Once you’ve got the click – make sure your page is relevant and targeted to what the user is searching on! Too often users are directed to landing pages that are at worst irrelevant, poorly structured, and conducive to convert the click into a conversion.
There is wide set of best practice rules that you have to follow to create Landing pages that succeed, once they are in place make sure you test which ones work and why.
Relevancy is Key!
Google work on a quality score, the higher the score the less you pay per click, so the more relevant and trustworthy your PPC campaign, in terms of your keywords, text ads and landing pages, the more relevant each is – the less it will cost. Get this correct and your cost per click goes down and your clicks go up.
Targets – what are you trying to achieve?
Once the PPC campaigns are ready, and your budget set, you need to understand how you will measure the success of the PPC campaign, and how this will be tracked. Is it total clicks, cost, number of sales, or emails collected.
Above all make it achievable so that you have clear targets to reach and a fixed time limit to get there.
Test, Measure and Monitor!
Remember that PPC campaigns are all about trial and error, the key is not to lose too much money while you are doing this. Experiment and get it right and roll out the working parts, stopping the ones that don’t.
Use of keywords change as does the cost so you need to have on-going research and adjust as needed. On-going PPC campaign success is about continuing to closely monitor what is working and why.
To really succeed with your PPC campaign or even just in the creation of the Landing Page’s optimised to convert your clicks into sales/ leads talk to our team at One2One Digital. We’ll work with you to ensure that every step of your PPC campaign follows Best Practice to give you a higher chance of succeeding.