PPC advertising or simply Paid Advertising is the fastest way to promote your products or services to a targeted audience. But in today’s marketing world, throwing some dollars into your campaigns will no longer bring results – website traffic, conversions, purchases, etc.
Paid marketing can be very effective when it is optimized properly. In fact, new websites without much SEO juice can reach their target customers and also rank higher in organic search results.
In this blog, we’ll walk you through what can go wrong with your campaigns, how to avoid them, and how to prevent these paid advertising mistakes in your next campaign. So, keep reading!
Common Paid Advertising Mistakes that Affect Your ROI
Paid Advertising used to be a simple process – you choose the goal, keywords, draft ad copies, set the target audience, and do optimization as needed. However, paid ad platforms have gotten more complex over the years.
With this, most inexperienced marketers are getting opportunities to make mistakes that end up costing them hugely.
To avoid this, every campaign must be carefully planned and optimized to get the best results.
10 Common Mistakes in Paid Advertising: How to Avoid them?
If you think your paid campaigns are not performing well, here are some common paid advertising mistakes that impact your ROI along with some advice. Let’s dive in!
1. Following the default settings
Listed are the common advertising mistakes examples when you choose the default settings in the dashboard.
a) Default advanced location targeting – It focuses on showing ads to “People in my target location” and excludes “People in or searching for my excluded locations” which makes your targeting tight. So, choose accordingly.
b) Including the display network in your search ad campaign as it is the default option.
c) Choosing the broad match keywords as they are the default ones and typically not the best performing for your campaign.
2. Not using a Landing page
If you’re running a campaign for a specific product, instead of landing on the product-specific page, you’re sending the visitors to a generic page like a homepage, you are not making dollars out of your campaigns.
If your visitors don’t find a relevant page after clicking your ad, they’ll just leave which affects your campaign. The main objective of a landing page is to get a conversion.
So, to increase the conversion rate, you need a dedicated landing page for your product or service.
Here are some useful tips to optimize your landing page:
- Ensure your landing page is mobile-friendly and loads quickly.
- Make sure the page is relevant to the ad copies or the campaign.
- Don’t forget to add a clear Call-to-action (CTA) button that supports your business objective.
- Include custom thank you pages after your visitors submit the form.
3. Using too many keywords in an ad group
Adding too many keywords to your ad group will devalue your campaign performance and negatively impact your ROI.
- Ensure your ad group has 5-20 keywords.
- Make sure all the keywords are directly related to your ad group.
- Use the keyword magic tool to find the most relevant long tail keywords from the keyword clusters.
4. Choosing the wrong bidding strategy
Another common paid advertising mistake is choosing the wrong bidding strategy.
How to choose the right bidding strategy? Need our advice? Glad you asked.
- Maximize Clicks – Use this strategy if your focus is on gaining high traffic.
- Maximize Conversions – The name itself says this strategy aims to get as many conversions as it can and also try to spend the entire budget we have given.
- Maximize Conversions with a CPA Target (Target CPA) – This bidding strategy aims to get as many conversions as it can (like Maximize conversions) but within the target CPA we mentioned.
- Target Impression Share – Choose this strategy if your aim is to get more visibility.
- Maximize Value – This bidding strategy drives as much conversion value as possible and tries to spend the entire budget we have given. It may appear similar to Maximize Conversions strategy, but the only difference is it has tracking value along with volume.
- Target ROAS – If you have conversion value data, choose this one. Its goal is to drive maximum conversions while meeting the Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) goals.
5. Using the same ad copies for all platforms
Using the same ad copies or images is one of the most common errors to avoid in your Facebook and Instagram ads. So, try to use unique copies and creatives for improving the click-through rate and ad relevance.
6. Wasting ad budgets on irrelevant search terms
Most advertisers will start bidding on extra keywords to attract new business. But adding these extra keywords will eat up more than half of your budget. This results in failed ad campaigns.
7. Not optimizing Ads continuously
Your efforts on Paid campaigns are not something you set and forget. One should check the performance and do A/B testing to know which campaign works best.
Let’s say you have two different creatives that share the same copy in your Facebook campaign, test them to see which one resonates better for your target audience.
8. Misusing the bid modifiers
Bid modifiers are an excellent way to optimize your campaigns but if you don’t understand how these bid modifiers work and what each modifier is doing, things may go wrong.
The best advice here is to make small changes to your ads and make them sit for a certain time before making any amendments.
Marketers should remember that changing your actual bid will be more effective than changing the overall bid modifiers in a certain category.
9. Ignoring Google Ads Quality Score
Google assigns a score to your ads based on the keywords you’ve chosen, the user experience of your landing page, CTR, etc.
You should take care of this Ad Quality score as it will affect your rankings against the competitors who were bidding on the same keywords. If your score is low, your ad spend will be high and the position will be high.
10. Not using Remarketing/ Re-targeting
- Using Remarketing or Re-targeting is the best way to avoid paying for low-quality traffic as doing this, will show your ads to the visitors who have already visited your website or taken some action there.
- PPC marketers will usually refer to these as warm leads so while promoting a specific product or any promotional offers, you can be more aggressive.
If any of these paid ads mistakes resonate with you, it’s time to re-adjust your campaigns and follow the tips shared here.
Making PPC advertising mistakes is quite common in this marketing world, but errors once done shouldn’t be repeated. They say…sometimes you win, sometimes you learn, right? So, keep testing your campaigns and know what works and what doesn’t for your business.
Looking for ways to improve the ROI of your Paid Advertising campaigns? Contact the Perficient Marketing team for all your PPC advertising needs. Our team of PPC experts will help you build better strategies to get the most results.
