Avoid campaign-killing and costly PPC marketing mistakes by paying attention to your CTAs, crafting quality landing pages, ignoring expensive fights for position and narrowing your market.
Paid ads are a great way to develop fast, high-converting traffic to your site without waiting for the slow build of SEO efforts and traditional marketing campaigns. However, investing your money in PPC is no guarantee that your investment will generate a return. Here are 4 common mistakes that sabotage a PPC campaign’s success rate:
Neglecting CTAs
Every form of advertising should include a call to action, and your Adwords ads are no exception. In fact, the smaller the medium, the more crucial a CTA becomes. When you only have a few characters to differentiate yourself from your competition and compel searchers to choose your link over organic search results, one thing is for certain: you need to at least ask for the sale. An ad without a CTA is like a salesperson who never tries to close, and the career of each will be similarly short.
Poor Landing Pages
Compared to other forms of digital marketing, paid ads seem like the fast track. You can spend years on an SEO campaign without ever making it to the first page for the keywords you are targeting. With PPC, on the other hand, you can make it to the first page of search results today with the right set of keywords and the right budget. Just keep in mind that your PPC ads are only half of the equation—they lead to landing pages with their own content and calls to action. There is no fast track when it comes to carefully crafting the landing pages that your ads direct to. Take your time when creating these landing pages and be ready to test them against each other.
Fighting for Position
Your PPC success should always be measured in terms of your return on investment, not in the position of your add. Never waste your ad budget fighting for the number one position, and always keep in mind that these positions are temporary, based on budget. If your ad spend is generating a satisfactory ROI, this is no reason risk that return by betting on higher investment. After all, there are several more important PPC metrics to focus on.
Casting Your Net Too Wide
Reaching a wide audience has never been a problem in Adwords. In order to reach a relevant audience, however, you need to narrow down your goals and focus on prequalified traffic that is more likely to convert. You can target your audience more effectively by:
- Using geo-targeting to reach audiences in specific locations, which is particularly useful for brick and mortar businesses.
- Avoid broad matching and focus on phrase and exact matching.
- Take advantage of day parting to shift your ad budget to parts of the day when your audience is more likely to be by searching on Google. If you find yourself being constantly outbid, you can also focus your budget for later in the day, when your competitors are running low on funds.
- Develop a list of negative keywords. One of the simplest methods for ruling out irrelevant matches is to develop an exhaustive list of negative keywords. Though somewhat time-consuming the process is simple and, more importantly, cost-saving.
- Don’t forget long tail keywords. Yes, creating exhaustive list of long keyword phrases can be exhausting, but the more of these you include, the more likely you are to hit upon high-converting and low-competition keywords.
To learn more about conversion-killing mistakes that could be holding your ecommerce storefront back, be sure to check out Volusions’s Ultimate Field Guide to Ecommerce Conversions.
Visit Volusion’s Ecommerce Authority blog for everything you need to cultivate a successful online business. Visit www.Volusion.com to experience the world’s best ecommerce software solution for online businesses.
