Pay per Click (PPC) marketing is a very powerful tool in the internet marketers arsenal but just like any other advertising campaign it needs to be planned out well before you start spending any money on your advertising
If you begin your PPC marketing plan without prior preparation you have set yourself up to potentially lose a lot of money very quickly, not to mention a lot of wasted hours. There are some great books available that you can read that will help you optimize your PPC marketing campaign.
But you can do all this without reading them if you avoid a few of the more common mistakes that most new marketers make. If you find you are making one or more of theses errors, don’t panic as they can easily be rectified and you can get your campaign back on track.
The 3 most common PPC mistakes are:
- The most common mistake people make when creating their PPC marketing plan is to send the prospect to their home page. This may seem logical to you but there are reasons why this should not be done. People who click on your advertisement are looking for specific information and this is probably not available on your home page. You are much better off sending them to a squeeze or landing page as this allows you to send your prospect to exactly the right information that they were looking for. They will be happy and if your message resonates with them, they are much more likely to take action whether that be to enter their email address or buy your product or service. Each of your landing pages should be keyword specific relating to your ad. It should also be clean and shouldn’t contain any other links or distractions that may confuse them and cause them to leave.
- Keep it simple. As touched on in the previous point, if your landing page causes confusion you will lose sales as a result as people don’t want to be made to feel stupid! If you create a PPC that is highly targeted to the keywords the visitor is searching for it will result in consistent sales as long as it easy for them to read and understand. Your landing page address should ideally contain the keyword that they are searching for. Make sure that it is easy for the prospect to find. You should also have several different landing pages if you have several different keywords or topics.
- Know your keywords. All the search engines are different and will use their own methods and discretion as to where to place your ad for greatest exposure. One of the biggest PPC mistakes that people make is that they do not laser target their keywords and as a result end up losing optimum placement on the search engines for their ad for that particular keyword. Over 85% of all search engine results are based on the top three ads. If you are not able to hone in on your keywords you will probably not make the top three and this could cause you to potentially lose sales as a result so really concentrate on getting your keywords dialled into your target prospect.
As you can see the most common mistakes made by new users to PPC marketing are very easy for anyone to make and there are probably a lot of more experience marketers making them too and therefore potentially throwing money away, not just in the cost of their ad but also in lost revenue. Knowing how to identify and fix them is the key to a great profitable PPC marketing campaign.
