Using money to advertise on the web used to be a straightforward endeavor. You selected the words you wanted to use, established bids for them, wrote your ad copy, disqualified certain terms or phrases you didn’t want in your ads, and adjusted your campaigns overtime. Nonetheless, the advertising platforms that require payment are far more intricate nowadays.
The aim of these campaigns is to display your ad to the people who would be most eager to obtain the products or services that your business offers.
Paid marketing has gotten more complex
Spending money on ads can provide your organisation the opportunity to reach their intended customers and boost the volume of traffic to their website, though, for any given PPC project to perform well, it needs to be strategically designed and monitored attentively. This is a difficult task now, and with so many components to monitor, people who do not have much familiarity with marketing can make missteps that are pricey.
You shouldn’t overlook PPC when devising your marketing approach, as research demonstrates that paid promotion yields 200% return on investment (ROI), meaning $2 for every $1 invested. In the past 10+ years, we have aided customers of all types in achieving maximum success through their digital marketing endeavors with our extensive PPC campaign experience.
So, if you think your ad campaigns aren’t performing as well as they should, here are some of the paid advertising mistakes we’ve learned can negatively impact your ROI, along with advice on how to remedy them:
1. Following the recommended or default settings and suggestions
Many of the users of the services provided by PPC ad platforms are not experts in marketing. They are entrepreneurs or in groups of few individuals who have to do multiple tasks. Thus, web indexes such as Google and Bing provide many suggestions about the optimal adjustments that could facilitate advertisers adjust their projects, which can be advantageous to those inexperienced with the process.
Many of these tips could be advantageous and assist you in achieving desired outcomes. It is important to recall that the defaults and advice is based upon the figures collected from the thousands of promoters who have managed millions of campaigns. They don’t take into account your individual objectives, and are usually focused on producing the most clicks instead of the most beneficial outcomes or conversions.
The better option
It is advisable to look over each suggested option prior to determining whether to keep them active or not. It is sometimes more prudent to err on the side of caution if something is unclear, rather than taking an unnecessary risk. Nevertheless, disregarding those configurations shouldn’t be a permanent solution. Log in to your PPC account frequently and inspect any propositions, look into matters a bit, and apply only those approaches that could help you accomplish your marketing objectives.
2. Not investing in strategies and best practice expertise
It is highly recommended to take the time to design and execute a thoughtful, comprehensive digital marketing strategy so as to help make sure objectives are achieved. Without a careful plan and knowledge of your ultimate goal, you may be spending money that you don’t have.
When it comes to pay-per-click advertising, not determining who your target market is would be the biggest blunder. If you are not sure who your target audience is, it will be difficult to create advertisement content that appeals to them. Constructing a landing page that persuades your viewers to take the planned action will be harder. It is essential to understand your customer when they sign up for a newsletter, purchase something from you, or demonstrate your service.
The better option
Invest some effort in conducting both qualitative and quantitative research in order to construct a complete portrait of your targeted customer. Then learn how to use them properly. Having a thorough and carefully considered buyer persona can assist you in categorizing your advertisement groups and activities with a particular intended audience in mind, and according to a searcher’s aims. This personalised marketing is more effective than the generalised advertisements that people are so used to now, which just say something along the lines of “Purchase Our Fantastic Product Now”.
3. Relying on Smart campaigns
If you have ever endeavored to manage a Google Shopping Ads promotional drive, then you may be knowledgeable with Smart campaigns. When using the Google Shopping network, they can be incredibly beneficial in increasing your Return On Advertising Spend or ROAS. In particular situations, it can even be effective on Google Display Network. It is not true that this applies to GoogleText Ads, which are also known as Google Search Ads.
Previously labeled AdWords Express, these Smart campaigns are meant for those new to PPC advertising and will automatically control a PPC ad run. Figuring out key phrases, bidding on those words, and arranging your promotions are all part of this. The outcomes are not very impressive, and even a beginner at PPC (pay-per-click) advertising will perform better than Google’s Smart Search AI-powered technology.
The better option
Navigating Google Ads can be formidable, but one can find backgrounds and how-to-guides to help create cost-effective ad campaigns. Bringing in specialists such as Online Marketing Gurus to oversee your promotional campaigns is probably your best course of action in order to get the maximum benefit from this powerful resource.
4. Wasting ad budgets on irrelevant search terms
You may have heard of the 80/20 rule before. In other words, roughly 80% of the achievements can be traced back to just 20% of the work put in. We have concluded that this is usually the case for PPC accounts based off of our exhibitions of countless SEO experiments through the years. The analytics within PPC platforms can inform you which keywords are producing the best results.
However, lots of advertisers will persist in bidding on supplemental words with the expectation of drawing in new clients. It’s not a bad suggestion to occasionally utilize; it can prove to be quite an efficient approach for businesses striving to extend their products or widen their consumer base. However, this is usually not the case. All of those extra keywords can take up more than half of the money you budget every month for your paid advertisements.
The better option
This is luckily quite a simple fix. The initial action is to disable wide match terms. Google’s latest formulas may set broad match keywords as the default option, yet this is not nearly as advantageous for PPC projects compared to organic search. Subsequently, refine your Search Queries to identify your top performing key words. Get rid of all the keywords that aren’t leading to sales and put your modest budget towards the ones which actually create beneficial results. In general, the number of people using the service may decrease, but the cost you have to pay for each successful conversion will go up.
5. Paying Too Much for Clicks
Everybody desires to fork out only a modest amount for clicks – but this advice does not truly involve employing CPCs as a performance indicator. I am certain that when trying to decide which metric should be the primary one to keep track of, the aim in mind should be what you are ultimately wanting to achieve. For most folks, that means conversions.
If you have a limited budget, it might be worth exploring whether reducing your bids would give you more clicks without sacrificing your conversion rate. In these cases, keep looking at conversions and pertinent metrics as key performance indicators, while also conducting trials with different bid amounts to discover whether this will cause an elevation in the conversion metrics by providing more traffic.
6. Choosing the Wrong Bidding Strategy for Your Goals
Making an inappropriate choice of bidding strategy for your desired outcome is a frequent error. I am very partial to manual bidding because it gives me an extensive amount of control over my bids at a very precise level.
Bidding strategies could encompass a whole blog post all on their own, but here’s the short version:
Target Impression Share
This bidding system targets to provide advertisers with the highest amount of exposure. Thus, prices are frequently elevated and you probably will not observe a development in metrics near the end of the purchase funnel, since its true intention is becoming visible.
Maximize Clicks
This bidding strategy focuses on maximizing traffic. The emphasis of Target IS is not on metrics of the lower-part of the sales pipeline, meaning that your conversion rate could possibly decrease. This could suggest that the traffic could be of inferior quality.
Maximize Conversions (no CPA target)
This approach attempts to generate the highest number of conversions possible, while expending the entirety of the allocated budget. If you employ Max Conversions, it is advisable to start with a modest budget limit, particularly during the time that the bid computation is gaining information. Otherwise, it may use up all of the funds available at a high cost-per-acquisition rate.
Maximize Conversions with a CPA Target (Previously Known as Target CPA)
This strategy is trying to attain as many successful acquisitions as possible at the expected cost per acquisition. This approach to bidding is a favorite of mine when the quantity of data supplied to the bidding algorithm is sufficient. Be careful, if the intended CPA is set too low it can reduce the volume. If you have campaigns with limited reach, it may be beneficial to adopt a portfolio bidding approach.
Maximize Value
This approach focuses on generating the maximum amount of conversions possible in conjunction with reaching the allocated budget. In my opinion, this approach to bidding is similar to the Maximize Conversions technique, except it is even more beneficial because it takes into account both quantity and quality.
Target ROAS
I really like this type of bidding strategy, particularly if you have data about how much each conversion is worth. It will attempt to get as many conversions as possible with the purpose of reaching your ROAS objectives. If you set your target CPA too low, it can reduce the amount of sales. I am fond of this approach since it allows you to obtain the highest possible yield from your campaigns while also delivering the necessary profitability.
7. Misusing Bid Modifiers
Bid modifiers are excellent levers for optimizations. Sometimes, bid modifiers may not be successful. There are three very important things to know when it comes to adjusting your bid modifiers:
- Bid modifiers compound, meaning that if you adjust multiple bid modifiers that impact the same auction, they will compound against each other. This can mean increasing or decreasing bid modifiers significantly more than you expected, so I highly recommend not making radical bid modifier adjustments across multiple categories (device, time, demographics, audiences, or geography) on the same day.
- Bid modifiers are meant to be used on outlier segments — for instance, if one device is performing significantly better or worse than the others, it is an outlier and a good candidate for a bid modifier. If you adjust all segments in one campaign in the same direction, then bid modifiers aren’t effective as there is no control segment at that point. For example, it doesn’t make sense to increase all device bid modifiers by 10%. At that point, it would make more sense to increase the bids by 10%, not the bid modifiers.
- Bid modifiers do not work the same way with automated bidding as they do with manual bidding. It’s important to verify how bid modifiers work with the bid strategy that you are using to ensure that you understand the impact of any adjustments.
8. Choosing the Wrong Keywords for Your Goals
When I review campaigns, I often observe people employing overly broad terms for their keywords.
It would likely be more economical for you if you were to bid on phrases such as “where to purchase a pinball machine”, “home pinball machines”, “arcade games for the home”, and “home arcade games” rather than terms such as “toys” or “amusement”.
Although the latter phrases may still be related to the topic, they are not specific enough to provide enough information about what the person searching is trying to locate. It would be difficult to fight for those conditions, because more common phrases tend to have high traffic and can use large amounts of money quickly while having conversion rates that are lower than typical.
Think as if you were a potential customer and imagine what you would type in a search engine if you were in their situation.
Summary
To conclude, it is effortless to make some of the traditional mistakes when formulating your paid media advertisements. Pay attention to these usual errors and you will have saved yourself much time and funding in the long term!
