6 March 2013

Top Tips

Common PPC Mistakes

PPC (Pay Per Click) can allow you to achieve first page results on Google. However, as the name suggests, these results do come at a price with every click incurring a charge.

Whilst PPC can be a huge asset to a business by increasing brand awareness and leading to a higher volume of sales, there are some common mistakes which you should be sure to avoid in order for a successful PPC campaign.

Pausing an ad in its early stages

During the initial stages of a PPC ad, Google may rank an ad higher or lower than you expected – even if you have your rotation settings set correctly! Where Google ranks your site during this period will depend on the history of your Google AdWords account.

With people not seeing their ads positioned where they expect to see them, a lot of people initially pause the ad and try to resolve the ranking ‘issue’ however, by pausing the campaign, Google is unable to correctly rank the ad – therefore having to repeat the process when the PPC campaign is re-launched.

Not giving a PPC campaign enough time to perform

On a similar level to pausing an ad in its early stages, a lot of companies run an ad for a month or so and, because they haven’t seen the result they wanted to see, have stopped the campaign. As outlined above, Google can initially take a while to place an ad in the correct position. With this in mind a business should allow the PPC campaign to run for a minimum of 3 months in which it has had enough time to settle in the Google rankings and, therefore, its performance can be properly identified.

Judging ad performance without running simultaneous ads

In order to monitor the success of a PPC campaign, you should ideally run 2 ads simultaneously in order to identify which campaign brings in the most traffic.

Ads should be run simultaneously as opposed to one after the other in order to accurately assess which advert is more successful. If you were to run one ad after the other, other factors such as a change in the conditions of the market could affect your results.

Not personalising your ad settings

By default, Google will set your ads to rotate indefinitely as this has the highest CRT (click through rate). However, in order to properly assess the success of your ads, you need to make these settings personal to you and your business.

Not testing the placement of your PPC ads

Whilst it may be obvious that the advert in number one position is likely to get the majority of the clicks, this doesn’t necessarily mean that this is where your company needs to be in order to have a successful PPC campaign. With 3 ad locations above the organic search results and further PPC listings to the right of the organic listings, you should test a number of ad locations in order to identify which spot gives you the best results for the cost per click.

By Sarah-Jayne