Over the years, pay-per-click (PPC) has transformed the manner in which businesses can promote their product or service in a search engine to generate leads and grow. However, many businesses are making the usual, easily avoidable mistakes with their paid ads that prevent them from obtaining a significant return on investment (ROI) from their spend.
Are you spending thousands on paid advertising, but not generating a profit? Here are the most common reasons why your last AdWords campaign failed and how you can avoid them in the future.
Although broad match keywords seem like an obvious choice – they normally generate the highest search volume – they will not produce the best click-through rates or conversions to your site. These keywords are used as default on AdWords, but this doesn’t mean they should be your primary focus. If you are currently bidding on broad match keywords, you should look at reviewing your campaigns for better opportunities.
Above is an example from Google of the different types of keywords. It is perceived that ‘exact match’ will result in fewer clicks due to the limited search volume, but if you’re targeting a smaller niche with limited competition, and are able to optimise your campaigns effectively, think of the potential sales you could be generating.
Revisit your Adwords campaigns to identify if you are targeting budget-swallowing broad match keywords. Using adwords are basically keywords, ad, and landing page relate to what the person is looking for, and this is how likely is someone to click on the ad. With expert adwords Google is basically looking for something specific, you are literally typing out words that you need of products or services, this is a way of advertisement for Google, so in this marketplace, companies pay to have their website ranked at the top of search results based on keywords, and with adwords you can make it to the top without being a big brand, it is like a type of action where people bid money for clicks involving quality for the user.
Check whether you are targeting these types of keywords and if they are generating conversions. Once you have this report available, you can start eliminating poor performing keywords and focus your paid search budget on the keywords that will drive value to your business. You might see a decline in traffic after doing this, but remember – wrong traffic is unlikely to turn into a conversion, so you could receive a higher conversion rate from more targeted traffic.
In a world dominated by digital sales, more and more businesses are defining their success through digital analytics by tracking goals such as form submissions, sales and page views. However, this doesn’t mean the telephone has been dropped as a method for obtaining high volumes of business, in fact, 75% of consumers consider phone calls the quickest way to receive a response regarding a purchase.
Call tracking bridges the gap between sales calls and digital advertising spend, allowing spend to be tracked back to calls. Through visitor level call tracking, unique, dynamic numbers are allocated to your marketing campaigns to determine which ads or channels are producing phone call conversions to your business; this information can be used to create detailed reports on the ROI for each of your marketing channels.
If you’re investing in PPC campaigns, covering all the channels from where your leads are potentially arriving is crucial to evaluating the value of your spend – merely focusing on your online conversions isn’t enough.
For example, if a user needed to locate a local plumber and typed the search term ‘plumbers in Bedford’ into Google search, the top ad result would be Rightio Plumbers. As they have included their phone number on their PPC ad, users would be able to call their business without needing to physically click the ad to find a number on their website. This means Rightio Plumbers would have no way of linking this phone call back to the deriving marketing method that promoted this offline conversion, meaning they couldn’t fully evaluate the success of their campaigns and could lead to confusion over their exact ROI.
Rightio Plumbers could solve this issue by integrating Mediahawk’s call tracking to their AdWords account. Each individual user who visits their website through their PPC campaigns would be assigned a unique, trackable phone number that replaces the previous HTML phone number. Now, the Javascript code on their website will capture the keyword that triggered the ad and the ad responsible for the phone call. Rightio Plumbers could use this data to provide a complete overview of their PPC performance, allowing them to make smarter, data-driven decisions with their current and future AdWords campaigns.
When a searcher is looking for a product or service, you will only get a few seconds on the search engine results page (SERP) to attract their attention and make them click your ad. If your ad copy fails to clearly showcase the value of what you’re offering, then your PPC campaign could become lost in the SERPs and remain unclicked.
To ensure your campaigns obtain a high click-through rate, your headline needs to be compelling and relevant – remember, you only have 30 characters to do this. Research the searcher’s intent that’s behind a query, as you need to present the most useful and beneficial solution.
Over-selling and misinforming searchers about the benefits of your product to obtain more clicks is also a poor strategy. In the example above, Invoice2oo has written that its invoice software is ‘free’ in the headline of its ad copy. However, when the ad is clicked, it leads to a landing page that mentions nothing about it being free and instead shows a price tag of $9 a year to the user – this is a typical example of not keeping the promise you made in your call-to-action. These nasty surprises will not only damage your brand’s reputation, but will also waste your PPC marketing budget in the long run.
If a well-designed PPC campaign isn’t converting, it’s the landing page that is usually the underlying problem. The long-term goal is to get your landing page to do the selling of your product or service, but your PPC ads are directly responsible for the initial convincing: PPC campaigns are a vital marketing tool for developing brand awareness, increasing traffic and driving sales. However, even paid advertising can fail when used incorrectly.
Being consistent with your keywords and landing pages is fundamental for creating a consistent sales funnel set-up for your PPC campaigns. Those at the top of your sales funnel will want a compelling offer that leads them directly to what they are looking to buy; failing to provide a relevant product or service on your ads could be resulting in wasted ad spend and fewer sales.
Implement dedicated PPC landing pages that are relevant to exactly what a prospective customer is expecting to see and experience when they visit the landing page. Watchshop has produced a relevant PPC campaign that leads users to the ladies watch landing page after the term ‘ladies watches’ is searched; this adds personalisation to the potential customer’s journey and will make them more likely to purchase from their website over a competitor’s.
Without fixing these issues, your business could be wasting substantial amounts of spend each month, causing you to lose faith in PPC advertising and scrapping your campaigns. However, despite these AdWords mistakes being common, they are easily avoidable. Instead of giving up on PPC, learn to utilise it correctly – only then will you start to generate increased clicks, higher conversion rates and, ultimately, a return on investment.
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Natalia Selby is the marketing co-ordinator at Mediahawk. With more than 10 years of experience in analytics, content management and e-commerce, she helps businesses get the most from their online marketing.
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