5 ppc mistakes that are costing you money

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5 PPC Mistakes That Are Costing You Money

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Mistakes Were MadeWe have been doing PPC for the past seven years and after hundreds of account audits, we have encountered all kinds of mistakes.

Let’s look at five of the most common mistakes and find out how to avoid PPC tragedies.

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The 5 Mistakes:• Poor Conversion Tracking• Ineffective Remarketing Strategy• Inefficient Monthly Management• Generic Ad Copy• Lacking Landing Pages


Mistake 1: Driving Blind Without Conversion Tracking • Conversion tracking is essential to PPC success. A conversion is a desirable action made by a visitor. By tracking desirable actions such as sign-ups, sales and subscriptions, the effectiveness of a PPC campaign can be determined. • A good PPC manager can optimize an account to produce even more desirable, affordable actions.• Without conversion tracking, a business will have no idea how effectively money is spent on PPC.


Check Your Conversion Tracking• We’ve found that conversion tracking is often set up wrong.

Sometimes it’s even tracking extra, non-existent conversions, inflating data and misleading business owners.

• Use Tag Assistant in your Chrome Browser to check where your conversion tracking codes are and what they are actually tracking.

• Tag Assistant: https://support.google.com/tagassistant/answer/2947093?hl=en

https://support.google.com/tagassistant/answer/2947093?hl=en


Tips for Tracking Success• Lead generation PPC should integrate with your CRM, e.g., Salesforce. By

doing this, you’ll be able to assess the quality of the leads gained via PPC, and with this information you’ll be able to determine an accurate ROI.• Ecommerce PPC should have Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking set up

and importing into Adwords. This tracking will also help determine ROI.• Knowing the lifetime value, or LTV, of a customer’s business is another

important factor when determining ROI.• Having an accurate ROI helps you determine what your PPC budget

should be.


Mistake 2: But Wait, There’s More! Remarketing!• The second mistake is the fact that most of the time an account’s

remarketing strategy is set up poorly, or there is none to begin with.

• Remarketing focuses on creating ads that will bring back both non-converting and converting individuals. These ads are all about bringing people back to your website.

I think we should go back to their website


Audience Lists• If there are any concerns with remarketing, a good first step is checking your

audience lists. Go into AdWords, select the account you want to view, look at the shared library on the left and then go into audiences in the same left panel.• Check if there are lists for excluding converting visitors from seeing your ads• Check if the lists are targeting different sections of your site• Check if the lists are targeting visitors who have converted for up selling and cross

selling

• Without proper audience lists, your remarketing strategy won’t be able to deliver customized, high-performance ads for past visitors.


The Pretty Remarketing Ads• Just a technical side note for remarketing ads here: make sure that

image ads are optimized for the ten desktop and five mobile sizes supported in AdWords!

• Make sure there are text ads as well. If there are fancy lists and no ads can be shown to a particular visitor, the lists become useless.• Check the ads within the remarketing campaign for image sizing and text

counterparts


Mistake 3: Optimize, Optimize, Optimize! Every Month!• Monthly management is what really keeps your PPC account thriving.• The mistake of underestimating the time required for a strong PPC

account can be costly.• Without proper optimization, your account might be spending too

much of its budget on the wrong targeting.


Is Your Manager Managing?• Is there an experienced person checking the account daily for

negative trends such as out of hand spending?• Monthly search query analysis, bidding optimization and general

account reporting are staples of a well-managed PPC account.• Check if your account keeps up to date by looking at the change

history of your account viewed in the main AdWords overview under “view Change History.” If the changes are a rare sight, you might have a problem.


Focused & Fruitful Ad Copy• Many accounts have ad groups with far too many keywords in them.

This makes their ad copy general and unappealing.• If you want to have targeted ads, you will want to limit the keyword

count within each ad group. We suggest a maximum of 10.

Highly targeted ad copy looks this delicious


Highly Targeted Ad Copy• Maintaining highly targeted ad copy will improve the quality score of

your ads and lower the cost you pay for each click on your ads.• You should be able to tell what the user’s search term was from the ad

shown to them, e.g., after searching “BC law firm,” we get:

• The headline of the ad includes the exact words searched.• Check that each ad group has at least two variations of ads.

• By having variations, you will be able to continually test ad copy for improvements in conversion rates and click through rates


Mistake 5: Land Ho! But Where Are The Pages?• Just like having targeted ad copy, you should have targeted web pages. These

pages are called landing pages, and it is a big problem if you are not taking advantage of them.• A bold, beautiful landing page offers you the chance to wow, inform and

possibly convince your potential customer. • The big mistake we have encountered in regards to landing pages is that they do

not exist or are not tailored to the searcher’s query.


Use These Handy Landing Pages• Check if you are indeed using landing pages. In AdWords, do this by

going to the ads tab within an account and looking at the destination URLs• Dedicated landing pages might have their own headline, benefit

statements, and call to action. Landing pages increase the likelihood that the visitor will convert.• We recommend that you run at least two variations of your landing

pages.• Increasing the conversion rates of your landing pages will reduce the

CPA of your PPC and increase your ROI!


You Can Fix Your Mistakes!• The aforementioned five mistakes can be lethal to your account’s

health. We highly recommend checking that your account is taking advantage of everything suggested in this article.

• If you are still unsure about what is going wrong, contact the team at Vantage for free PPC consultation• http://vantagesearch.ca/contact/

http://vantagesearch.ca/contact/



5 ppc mistakes that are costing you money

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