Common Adwords Mistakes that Are Costing you Money

Done right, it can be a valuable online marketing tool. It can drive massive amounts of motivated,  highly targeted traffic in your direction. It can boost your e-commerce sales and send your online marketing ROI through the roof. It can be a wonderful complement to your SEO strategy.

Done poorly, it can cause you a lot of frustration; it can drain your bank account; it could even put you out of business.

So how can you “do it right”? What are some of the steps you can take to increase the likelihood that AdWords will help you become an online marketing success story? Let's talk about this. Let's discuss some common AdWords mistakes and ways you can avoid them, so you can not only save time, money and aggravation, but also enjoy a high level of online marketing success.

This article will give you a mixture of things to do and things to avoid in your pursuit of PPC campaign success. It will offer you simple, specific, actionable advice on how to improve the effectiveness and profitability of your PPC campaigns.

Be Careful This Can Cost You Big Time!

I urge you to keep something in mind when you are conducting or even considering an AdWords PPC campaign: every time someone clicks on your ad, you pay for that click, whether they buy or not! So it's vitally important that you take steps to increase the ratio of sales you make compared to the number of clicks your ads receive. 

Web shoppers are usually searching for a specific item (a solution to a defined problem). For example, a car enthusiast who likes to repair engines in his spare and is looking for a socket wrench will typically search for the term “socket wrench”, not “tools”.

To help him make the search and buying process easier, and to give yourself a better chance of making the sale, be sure your AdWords results delivered to him in his search match what he's looking for. If he searches for a “socket wrench”, don't offer him a PPC ad that leads to a page with a whole host of different tools, send him to a page that has socket wrenches.

Google lets you bid on which keywords and keyword phrases you want to put in your campaign. When you're deciding which user search terms and phrases you want your PPC ads to be associated with, you can be extremely broad or pinpoint specific. When you're entering search phrases in your AdWords console that you want your ad to be found for, you have the option of “exact match”, “phrase match” or “broad match” keyword terms.

There are pros and cons to each. Broad match terms will gain you more impressions and maybe more clicks but many who view the search results will see the your ads as not relevant to them. Hence you will most likely have a lower conversion rate.

On the other hand, an exact match will possibly lead to a higher conversion rate, but will result in fewer impressions and may not bring you nearly as many sales as you want.

As with so many other parts of the online marketing process, this is an area you need to regularly test and refine to determine what will work best for you and your specific campaigns.

More AdWords Tips You May Not Have Thought About

The AdWords console allows you to use “negative” keywords. This is important for you to remember. Keep in mind that you pay for every PPC click whether the viewer buys or not.    The negative keywords feature allows you to exclude terms and searches you don't want to be found for and that will hurt your campaign's results.

Here's an example: let's say you have an online store that sells vitamins. You're running a PPC campaign aimed only at men. If someone searched for “health supplements for women”, they might still be shown your ad in their search results.

What if they click on it without first reading the ad copy aimed at men? That's a problem for you, because you have to pay for the click and you won't make the sale; they were searching for products for women, and your landing page (if done correctly) will show only products for men. You can preemptively solve this problem by adding the search term “women” as a negative keyword.

A PPC campaign can be very expensive. A lot of marketers who are just starting out make the mistake, in their beginner's enthusiasm, of approaching the campaign “too big too soon”. They invest a lot of dollars up front, even though they have no experience in the often tricky, confusing world of PPC marketing, and end up losing a lot of money.

Perry Marshall, perhaps the world's foremost authority on effective PPC marketing recommends starting out small. Perry says

“My advice is to initially set a low daily budget -- maybe $5 to $10 a day -- so you won't spend too much as you get the hang of the experience.”

This makes a lot of sense. When you are an AdWords/PPC “newbie”, give yourself a very small daily budget for PPC activities, an amount you can afford and an amount you can afford to lose.

Here's some more valuable advice from Perry: Click-through rate is an important PPC metric. After all, your ads have to get clicked on and opened before they can sell anything for you. And a high click-through rate can save you money on campaign costs.

But how does that help you if you don't make any sales? The end goal of any PPC campaign needs to be sales. Actually, you need the end goal to be ROI, but to get a nice return, you have to have sales. So don't get so caught up in excitement over a high click-through rate that you ignore your sales numbers.

When a B2C consumer is searching for a product online and visiting PPC ads, it typically means he's very interested in buying NOW! He's what we might refer to as a “hot prospect. So help him in his buying journey. Make it as easy as possible for him to buy.

Don't make the mistake some PPC advertisers make. Don't link your PPC ad to your website's homepage. Remember what we've said on this blog so many times: “confusion kills conversions”. When someone clicks on a PPC ad, he's interested in a specific product.

He's focused. Directing him to your homepage and expecting him to find the product he's interested in can distract him, confuse him, “derail” his search and cost you the sale. And keep in mind, you still had to pay for the click, even though he didn't buy.

Hopefully This Is Part Of Your PPC Marketing Plan

Instead of sending PPC traffic to your homepage, send it to a highly targeted, focused, well-optimized landing page that has one goal and one goal only – to convert him from a shopper to a buyer.

And since your landing page is so very important to the success of your PPC campaign, why not go with the very best available? Obviously you need solid copywriting, a quality product and a compelling offer, but why not give yourself an advantage by using Lander? Lander is the easiest-to-set-up landing page platform in the Universe; it lets you create beautiful landing pages in just minutes!

Lander offers you a ton of valuable features to help you enjoy exponentially more successful AdWords campaigns:

• Advanced A/B testing – helps you refine your online marketing approach so you can enjoy greater and greater results!
• Built-in video support - 52% of consumers say that video makes them more confident when making online buying decisions!
• Countdown timer integration – a valuable feature that can help you create buyer urgency when you are holding a big online sale!

In addition here are a couple of exciting new developments Lander offers you that will help you enjoy more success in your PPC marketing/e-commerce campaigns:

We have a new line of landing page templates designed and engineered specifically for e-commerce!

And

We now offer PayPal integration with our landing page templates!

This valuable feature can help you close more sales. How? The PPC sales process can be tricky, and the online marketing momentum you build up with a potential buyer can be fragile. When customers reach your landing page, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to say “YES!” to your offer. Our PayPal integration feature makes it super simple for your customers with PayPal accounts to buy from you!

Still not convinced that Lander is the landing page platform you're looking for? Here's a little something extra that hopefully will change your mind about give Lander a trial run. We'd like to invite you to try it out today for free with no obligation.

Any questions? We have answers, and we'd love to talk to you. Feel free to contact us today.

Happy Marketing!