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Vigilance, micromanaging and attention to detail can help you avoid some common and costly mistakes of PPC advertising. What are those mistakes? Here are the terrible 10 that are typical to most pay per click campaigns.

Too Many Keywords Per Ad Group

If you put all your keywords into just a few big and broad ad groups, it’s time to restructure your account. You are missing out on important flexibility that pay per click advertising allows. Tighter ad groups allows you more focussed, relevant ads.

Not Using Negative Keywords

With quality scores and click through rates playing a bigger role in your pay per click ad rank, it’s more important to weed out the keywords that push up your impressions and don’t result in desired clicks. If you sell “widget software” make sure you have negative keywords such a “-free” or “-serial.” Also, check your log files for your site to look for bad keywords that you are spending money on right now.

Not Enough Testing

Running split tests on your ads is essential. And, no item is too small to test. Of course, you will want to work on your various call to action statements, as well as your unique value statement, but keep in mind that there are other variables. There are small, but effective tweaks that can boost results by just testing titles, each line of copy and your display url. If running continual tests is time consuming, hook up with an experience pay per click management company. A good firm can offer you daily split testing and optimize your results very effectively.

Not Tracking Results

If you do get into testing ads and fine-tuning your keyword lists, it’s only as effective as your tracking. Any PPC search engine will give you your ad spends and click through rates, but what about the bottom-line success? Knowing that you made $14,000 off of a $7,000 ad spend is fine, but if you dig deeper with your tracking you might be able to make that same $14,000 with only $6,000 a month in spend. That savings ads up.

Not Getting Keyword-Level Tracking

Good analytics or a good pay per click management company will get your data down to the keyword level. Why pay for keywords that are not performing? That money could be better spent on keywords that are doing well or on other marketing expenses. If one keyword has an earning per click of 45 cents and another keyword has an earning per click of $1.45, you need to know. You can lower the bid on one and raise the bid on the other to drive more profits. If you aren’t doing this, you likely have under-performing keywords that are leaking your account daily.

Keywords That Are Too Generic

While some generic keywords can drive a lot of traffic and even be very profitable, they also can be filled with pitfalls. Negative keywords may not be enough to save you from going in the red on a generic keyword. Often, the users doing these searches are at a very early stage of the research and buying process. Again, this is another important reason to track results on a keyword basis.

Avoiding the Dirty Work of Building Long-Tail Keywords

This follows the above item on generic keywords. Building a list and individual ads for the long-tail keywords can be a major time-sucker. It can also be profitable if the task is performed correctly. Those earnings per click will likely vary widely from a generic keyword like “mp3 player,” “sony mp3 player” and “sony 2GB S610 walkman video mp3 player.” One consumer is doing research, the other knows what they want and is most likely looking to purchase.

Not Pulling Apart Content and Search Campaigns

An easy way to get scorched on poor performing traffic or even click fraud is to not separate your search network ads from your content network ads. Chances are that if you don’t know what the difference is, then they are likely not separated in your account — and bad keywords are leaking your funds daily. You are better off to build different campaigns for your keywords on the content and search networks.

Failing to Geo-Target if You’re Local

Local businesses that attract clients from their region must take advantage of the geo-targeting that each of the major PPC engines offer. Bringing that local clientele to your front door on non-local keywords can increase profits greatly.

Not Frequently Monitoring Your Accounts

Not everyone has time to run split testing on a daily basis or frequently checking your EPCs (even though you should…because it’s costing you). That said, there are still a high amount of advertisers who seem to ignore their accounts for days … or even weeks … or (don’t tell me you’re doing this!) months. The big PPC search engines are increasingly cracking down on poor performing keywords, smacking advertisers with that “Inactive for Search” status for individual keywords. When this happens, you lose traffic, you lose profits. If you are investing heavily in PPC, you can’t just turn your back on your account for days at a time.

Making mistakes like the Terrible 10 of PPC Advertising are common, but correcting them can have a huge impact on your bottom line. If you can manage your pay per click ads at a high level or if you can hire them out to a professional pay per click management company…the results for your increased precision and effort will pay off.

Filed under: PPC Advertising