If you’re looking to drive traffic to increase your websites visibility in a hurry a good pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign is a great place to start.
In a world where everyone is vying for the number one spot in search results, both paid and organic, having a well thought out campaign is non-negotiable. While everyone is waking up to the importance of proper SEO to aid organic search rankings, the pitfalls of PPC advertising have gone unnoticed.
So how do you get PPC advertising right? By avoiding these 6 common mistakes.
Overlooking the landing page experience
Many businesses overlook the importance of having a good, relevant landing page. When someone clicks on your ad it means they believe they’ve found what they’re looking for so don’t drive them away with landing page that is irrelevant. For example, if you’re PPC ad is about your painting services your ad needs to click through to your painting services landing page, not your home page or worse still your contact form. You don’t want your potential lead to work too hard to find what they are looking for once they’ve clicked through to your site.
Pay-per-Click helps you target your ads to customers in certain countries, regions or cities – or within a set distance from your business or shop. Your business gets found by people on Google precisely when they’re searching for the things that you offer.
Relying on broad match keyword ads only
According to research one in four small businesses only use the default broad match keyword type because it maximises the number of clicks because your ad is displayed whenever all or part of your target keyword is searched for. Now this may sound great the only problem is that you’re sacrificing relevance for reach so the clicks you will be receiving are less likely to be relevant to your offering. By using the phrase or exact match option you can ensure that your ad only appears for search queries that are most relevant to your business.
Not using negative keywords
Negative keywords prevent your ad from displaying when the particular term or terms (that you’ve chosen) are included in what someone is searching for on Google. Many people don’t use this functionality and yet it can help you weed out even more irrelevant clicks. After all you must remember that you are paying for these clicks and you don’t want to be paying for any that are not relevant so cut them out.
Look out for part 2.
