More Ways to Waste Money on Pay-Per-Click
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about protecting yourself from click fraud, but there are plenty of other ways to waste money with paid search marketing. Judging by the campaign setups we keep seeing from new clients or prospects – some of whom have PPC firms handling their campaigns – the art of wasting money on PPC is alive and well.
Here are 5 common ways to waste money on pay per click advertising:
1. Ignore your quality score.
Many pay-per-click advertisers think that ad position is based only on how much you’re willing to pay for a click – with the best positions going to the highest bidders. This isn’t true.
Google, in particular, puts a lot of weight on how relevant it thinks your campaign (including ad and landing page) is to the searcher. Google’s opinion about your relevance shows up as your “quality score”, and ad position is actually a factor of both your bid and your quality score.
If you have a low quality score, you will pay more per click for a good position than you need to.
2. Put unrelated keywords in the same Ad Group.
The person who searches for “purchasing management software” and the person who searches for “procurement management software” may actually be looking for the same thing, but because they are thinking of different words, they will respond best to different ads and landing pages. (All keywords in an ad group share the same ads and landing pages).
It’s important the keywords used by the searcher are repeated in the ads and landing pages. Since you don’t pay for people who don’t click on your ad, you may think this doesn’t hurt you. But it does. Google expects a good click-through rate. It also expects to see the keywords repeated in the ads and headlines. If they aren’t you get a lower quality score. (See #1).
3. Don’t bother to test ads and landing pages.
Seemingly minor changes in a pay per click ad or on a landing page can make a big difference in click-through and conversion rates. Google Adwords makes it easy to test ads against each other; and Google Website Optimizer makes it easy to test landing pages.
A good click-through rate on your ads generally equals a higher quality score which equals a lower cost per click. A good conversion rate on your landing pages means you get more leads and a lower cost per lead.
4. Send click-through traffic to your homepage.
Getting people to click on your ad is useless if you can’t convert them from mere visitors to prospects, leads or customers. To do this you need to get them to take action. An effective website homepage has multiple jobs to perform and it can’t be perfectly optimized to convert your pay per click traffic.
Instead of your homepage (or other existing website page), send PPC traffic to a specialized landing page – one that’s constantly tested and tweaked to produce the most conversions.
5. Set and forget.
Search advertising is constantly changing. Your competitors modify their approach; new competitors come and go; your prospects change their search and buying habits. Someone has to stay on top of this.
A good pay-per-click manager will monitor your campaign performance, constantly updating keyword lists and testing new ads and landing pages.
Pay-per-click advertising is one of the fastest and most efficient ways to generate new leads but there’s no doubt it’s time consuming – especially if you manage your own campaign. Lazy campaign management, on the other hand, almost always means money is being burned. Your money.
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