PPC Mistakes that affect your SEM

Making PPC mistakes negatively affects your business in many ways, so to improve the SEM strategies, you have to avoid any of the PPC Mistakes at all.

Omitting or ignoring PPC best practices influence ROI. PPC mistakes have two direct impacts on your SEM performance; firstly, it wastes your marketing budget; secondly, it will not provide as many conversions as you expected.

Types of PPC Mistakes

Using Broad Match Type on Short Tail Keywords

Broad Match type is a Google Match type that is always set automatically by default each time you want to start any SEM campaign. Most PPC beginners rely on the broad match type without knowing that it drains their marketing budget.

There are three things to take care of while using broad match type on short tail head search terms; short tail head keywords have high search volume, which results in many clicks and may drain your budget; secondly, short tail head keywords have a high competition which requires to raise your PPC bid that means you have to spend a lot, thirdly broad match type brings unnecessary clicks from close variant search terms which attracts many irrelevant clicks.

Broad match types get you to click from synonyms, similar phrases, and if few search terms in Google search that meet any of your keywords ad group. So this means that you got many unnecessary clicks that you will not convert.

My advice is to use exact match type on short tail head keywords with high volume and competitive search terms. You can also use bid modifiers such as location, devices, time scheduling to optimize your PPC.

Not Testing Conversion Funnel

You cannot guess the numbers, statistics, and analytics behind your SEM campaigns' customer journey.

Testing your conversions funnel helps you improve your Ad Campaigns and make better decisions for your future SEM plans.

Before starting a PPC campaign, you have to install web analytics tools that will help you to test and measure your conversion funnel. So before publishing your website live, you have to test it with those metric tools.

Testing conversion funnel will help you deeply understand the process and steps your customers take until they finish important actions such as buying a product or filling out a web form. This will help you to know how and where they came from and how he left your website.

Emotionless Ad copies

Emotions are essential while creating your Ad texts. You have to think about the feelings and impressions of a person who will see your Ad copy. This means you have to put yourself in your customers' shoes, especially on how you could react if you were searching for a product online.

Writing suitable Ads improve your quality score, CTR, and decreases your Cost Per Click (CPC). So you have to select better keywords so that you can maximize your impressions share (number of Ad impressions you received compared to the number of eligible impressions you had to get).

Create ad campaigns that invoke emotions and attitudes that lure your users into taking essential actions on your web platform.

Not Understand your Target Audience

To win your PPC campaigns, you have to understand your target audience. You have to do in-depth research about your products and customers to understand your audience's wants.

The following ones are the most important things you have to know about your target audience; Age range, occupation, hopes, interests, hobbies, and influencers. Additionally, you have to understand their locations base as well.

Improper Bidding

PPC bidding is one of the most challenging steps for the paid search marketers. Sometimes you wonder what amount to set on your keywords bidding or Ad groups so that you will not waste your SEM budget.

So if your Ads are not visible, you can increase your bid even if you are getting clicks and conversions.

Otherwise, if your SEM Ads are getting impressions but not getting clicks, it could be a sign of an incorrect target audience or not following Google Ads guidelines.

If also you get many clicks, but you are not getting any conversions. You will need to check your landing pages.

A good PPC Expert has to keep an eye on his budget to optimize his bidding strategies and not waste his budget.

Not Split Testing

The split test helps you compare different versions of your PPC Ads performance.

Split testing is an SEM technique that most PPC Experts use for trying to use various single Ads with different variations.

If one Ad copy is working correctly or let suppose that it is not meeting your expectations. You can set up different versions of your Ads and compare the results of each Ad copy.

To do split testing, you have to change your Ad title and description with better-written texts; then, after you can wait for 30 days if you want to pick an Ad copy that is performing better than others.

Not mixing Keyword Match Types.

There are three different Google keyword match types; Broad Match, Phrase Match, and Exact Match.

During your SEM campaigns, you have to mix different match types if necessary, to improve your PPC results and ROI. Absolutely, you do not have to rely on a single match type in your Ad groups.

You can, for instance, mix phrase match with exact match types depending on search volume and length of your keyword search terms. This will help you to get the best results during your search engine marketing campaigns.

Not Using Negative Keywords

Using negative keywords prevents your Ads from being seen by people who type irrelevant search terms you have set as negative.

You have to check all the unnecessary keywords that users are using to find your Ads. If you find in your Ad reports that web visitors are reaching your landing page through search terms that are not related to your business, you better set these keywords as negative keywords.

For instance, if you sell "men shoes" and you see that you are getting traffics from visitors typing for "women shoes" in this case, you have to set "Women" as a negative keyword so that your Ad will not appear on irrelevant web visitors who are looking for women shoes.

Remember that negative keywords are for Phrase Match and Broad Match but not necessary for Exact Match Types.

Using negative keywords optimize your budget, improves quality score, and shows your Ads to real potential customers who are likely ready to take an important action on your website.

Not Using Long Tail Keywords

If you are not using long-tail search terms, you are losing crucial web traffics.

Long-tail keywords are long search phrases that web surfers may type for reaching your products or services.

There are some advantages of using long-tail keywords, such as; increasing your conversions, more targeted Ads, and their bidding strategies are cheaper than short-tail keywords because there is no much competition on long-tail keywords compared to short-tail keywords.

Remember that long-tail keywords don't bring much traffics as they target only specific potential customers.

Want to be always on number #1 Position

It is great to be number one on PPC Ads, but it is not always worth it and necessary.

First of all, being on top of your competitors requires much time, effort, and raising your bidding, which is a strategy that you do not urgently need at the beginning of your SEM campaigns.

The most important objective of PPC is to increase your ROI. If you are in the second or third position and you are generating clicks and conversions. It is better not to raise your bid for the sake of being in the first position because you can end up wasting your budget for nothing.

No Customer Lifetime Value

Measuring your customer lifetime value helps SEM Experts and decision-makers to understand the cost and profit metrics they make on each purchase and customer acquired.

So you have to think about how much you spend, bidding cost, and Return On-Ad-Spend (ROAS). These include your Cost-Per-Click (CPC), Cost Per Action (CPA), and your conversions.

Customer lifetime value raises questions like; how much you spend on your Ads and how much profits you get from your Ad spend. Answering these questions helps you to improve your SEM campaigns.

For instance, if you spend 100$ on your Ads, you have to calculate how much money you make from it. You need to install analytics tools to track every step your customers take to purchase your products or services.

Not Using Ad Extensions

Google Ad extensions help paid search marketers to create additional values to their Ad copies.

Not using Ad extension makes you lag and lose essential features that would have added more values, size, clicks, and conversions. Ad extensions available are;

• Location Extensions
• Sitelink Extensions
• Callout Extensions
• Price Extensions
• Call Extensions
• App Extensions
• Structured extensions

You can add some of these Ad extensions to increase your ad's size, so adding Ad extensions will improve your Ad's engagement and CTR.

Using Smart Campaigns

Every PPC beginner tends to use smart campaigns because it is easy and does not require much effort or previous PPC management experience.

Using smart search or smart display Ad campaigns is a bad idea because firstly, you will not control your Ads properly. Secondly, Google will use its automation Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to consume your budget. These processes will end up producing disappointing results.

Note

However, using smart shopping campaigns for an eCommerce website is good, and it produces better results. So do not be confused with its negative impact on using it with “smart search” and “smart display."

Not Avoiding Click Frauds

Click frauds are clicks that happen on your Ads and can be seen in your reports but with evil intentions of draining your budget.

Those clicks sometimes come from automated web bots, unethical competitors, or unhappy customers. Many search engines have tools for detecting and blocking computerized bots.

If you want to avoid clicks fraud, you can check the number of those wrong clicks you have received; then, you can later buy click fraud protection tools if you urgently need to protect your PPC budget.

Too many Keywords in one Ad Group

The number of keywords in the Ad group has to be 20 keywords in one Ad group; unfortunately, some PPC managers force to use more than these numbers expecting that it will improve their SEM.

It is better to use a few keywords in your Ad group, and if you want great results, you can even use like five keywords in an Ad group.

Keep in mind that your Ad group keywords have to be closely related in order to deliver better results.

To Keep Losing Ads

In your campaigns, not all of your Ads will make the best results. Some of these Ads are no longer needed as they produce nothing fo your business.

Keeping losing Ads may affect other good performing ones and may drain your SEM budget. So it is better to delete non-performing Ads.

Note

Please do not change your Ad often because it can affect your quality score.

Not Enough Ad Copies in Ad Group

It is not good to have only one Ad in your Ad Group. Using a single Ad in an Ad group will lag you behind and will not produce the best results.

You can add at least 3 Ads in a single Ad Group. This can help you to assess them and know which one works better.

During 30 days of running your SEM campaigns, you can decide which ad pays off and keep that one and delete those that don't deliver properly.

An additional tip is to create an Ad group that contains only single keywords. This helps you to organize your marketing campaigns and produce the results for those single keywords.

Note

• Additionally, on your Ad copy, you do not have to use your Ad Settings for choosing the "Optimize" option unless you are sure of which copy is working better than others.
• Choosing “Optimize” too early may cause Google to show the wrong Ad to your user. Better wait for at least 30 days.

Bad Landing Page

A crappy landing page can cost you a lot. So make sure that everything is running correctly.

A good landing page must have a clear call to action with working forms, correct contacts, loading faster, and well-designed.

Make sure that your Ads redirect your potential customers to a correct URL and Landing Page so that you will not lose your conversions and your marketing budget in vain.

Bidding on too many Keywords

Bidding on many keywords waste your marketing budget. Therefore you can remove unnecessary keywords so that you can concentrate on the keywords that bring useful web traffics.

The research shows that average PPC sales and conversions come from 6% of search engine marketing keywords, which means that 94% of keywords waste your money.

This research proves that most PPC managers for many businesses don’t know how to run their digital marketing budget appropriately.

No SEO Best Practices

Search Engine Optimization has a significant relationship with SEM and PPC.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization helps companies to acquire organic search traffics and organic website ranking. So improving your web page keywords improves your quality score, which means that you pay even less bid for your Ad ranking than your competitors who do not have the right SEO strategies.