PPC Campaign Mistakes You Shouldn’t Do (& You Know Better)

PPC campaigns are fantastic, but PPC campaign mistakes (whatever the reason why these mistakes still happen) can be devastating.

Businesses and brands all over the world take to digital paid advertising campaigns in the hope of getting all the goodness that digital campaigns can provide:

• Lower advertising costs
• Better ROI for ad spend.
• Flexibility when it comes to choosing platforms you want to advertise on
• Freedom to stop and start campaigns.
• The remarkable flexibility when it comes to ad spend
• A tighter integration with ads and lead nurturing and email marketing automation campaigns leading to better results (leads and sales)
• Analytics and tracking
• The ability to discern which platforms work better for your business.
• And so much more…

Yet, give any business a week or a month with a paid ad campaign and the chances are that they are going to pause the campaign.

Most businesses can barely get a dollar out for every dollar they spend on ads.

Why is that? Why is more than 98% of ad spend wasted? With the wealth of information available (in addition to online training by all major platforms such as Facebook and Google apart from several online courses others run), why do businesses barely scrape through their ad campaigns and push towards a positive ROI?

Big, badass mistakes, that’s why.

Here are some of the most common PPC campaign mistakes that you should avoid:

Not Spending money diligently

While most small businesses and individuals struggle to shore up enough advertising budget to make their campaigns work, there are businesses with excessive ad budgets to spend with nothing much to show for that kind of spend.

Pardon the rant, but one of the biggest mistakes when it comes to PPC campaigns ad spend is one or more of the following:

• Starting with big budgets but low bids (should be lower budgets but higher bids)
• Not spending in a predictable fashion (stop with the accelerated ad delivery already)
• Bidding low, hoping to save on budgets and getting leads of low quality.
• Spending without objectives in place

Most people reading this blog are entrepreneurs who bootstrap (like I do), and for all of us, here’s how we do it:

• Always start with budgets that you are comfortable with.
• Start with low budgets and push towards higher spends only when you have leads or sales data to back it up.
• Initial low budget (but higher bids) outlay is to help you do A/B testing with campaigns, ads, offers, landing pages, and more.

That’s all I’ll say.

Emotion-driven Decision Making

Most of the campaigns — and resultant decisions — are emotion-driven. Entrepreneurs come in all shapes, colors, sizes, countries, and business types. As such, campaigns are just as varied.

What do I say? We are humans after all.

There are people who say things like:

“Landing pages? I don’t think we need landing pages”
“Facebook? Instagram? That’s for kids”
“Google is expensive”
“Marketing automation sounds fancy. Look, we just need sales OK?”
“Pink. Pink. Charlie, I like pink. So use pink on my landing page”

First, no one cares about what you “think” you know. The only thing that matters is whether or not your $1 spend on the ad got you $2 back (that’s a good 100% ROI). You can keep your opinion to yourself and just launch the campaign please?

Creativity in terms of how you create ads and write copy for landing pages, or write out your email marketing campaigns can be understandable, and that’s all that a digital paid campaign allows for.

You can’t overthink your way into a campaign. There’s a protocol to follow as far as campaigns are concerned.

Finally, instead of letting your emotions run the show, let data tell you what to do and what not to do.

No Sales Funnels

Have ad? Will point to a website.

No, you don’t.

Pointing an ad to a website is a sin. You are a criminal if you do that to your campaigns. Ads pointing to websites are guaranteed to fail for the simple reason that there’s just too much information on a typical website for your prospect to process.

Even before you launch your campaigns, you’ll have to think of a sales funnel — a predefined path your potential customers will take (most of which is in your control) to make that sale happen.

Sales funnels are the full 7-course meal — consisting of your ads (top of the funnel) to landing pages and then to email marketing automation campaigns (usually delivered by email marketing).

If you don’t have a sales funnel before you click on the “launch” button, just don’t launch.

No Email Marketing Automation

Here are a few secrets for you: no one wakes up to buy your products and services today. Like, the moment you decided to show up on their Facebook newsfeed. Heck, it won’t even happen even though they searched for you on Google.

Before they whip their credit card out, they need to know you are good at what you do, or that you can keep your promise, or that 234,000 other customers claim that you are absolutely smashing.

How does anyone know so much just by looking at an ad or when they sign up on your landing page?

They usually can’t tell.

That’s why you use email marketing automation to send out autoresponders and various other campaigns to help nurture your leads to lead them to buy (and then hopefully keep buying from you) in the future.

Without an email marketing campaign in place, what do you hope to do with those 5,400 leads who signed up last month, thanks to your campaign?

Think about it