Running PPC campaigns well-enough to make them work for your business is ridiculously hard — not because it’s really hard, but because a lot goes into a campaign and businesses don’t usually take their time out to ensure that they implement PPC best practices.
Google ads or Facebook Ads might appear as if it all it takes to launch your campaign is just a few clicks.
The reality is far from that illusion. Understandably, many businesses and even seasoned marketers do PPC ad campaign mistakes that’d have been easily avoided. Avoiding those mistakes could mean much less budget spent, better ROI, more customers, and profitable campaigns.
Here are a few top PPC ad Campaign mistakes you should never, ever do:
Launching With Defaults
Google and Facebook are massive platforms. The only reason why they exist is to make money off of your advertising. In fact, advertising is their only revenue model. As such, the default settings on those platforms for launching campaigns are designed in a way to make “them” money.
You can’t be careful enough here and that’s why you should start with only those campaign settings that make sense for your business.
For instance, consider this:
- Run one campaign for one country. Don’t lump multiple countries into the same campaign.
- Instead of choosing an entire country, choose only major cities. Or drill down deeper and target using specific cities, pin codes, or your locality (depending on your business).
- Don’t choose “everyone” in a city. Only choose those who “live” in the city and not those who are “visiting” or those that are “interested” in that geographic area.
- Choose to show all ads, all the time (and not just show popular ads) because you want to be testing your ads (so, you’ll need ads to rotate equally).
See what I mean? This will be covered in detail in another blog post.
One ad? Two ads? Three ads? Just how many?
If you are launching a campaign — whether it’s Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, or LinkedIn Ads — always create ads in pairs. Like Ad A and Ad B; Ad 1 or Ad 2; or Ad X OR Ad Y.
Create ads in pairs because you’ll be testing ads from the word go.
Don’t let testing be an afterthought since you’d need a lot of data to make decisions and you have a better chance of gleaning enough data if you did split testing right from the start of the campaign.
Blowing up (or Starting with) Big Budgets
If you were a trillion-dollar company like Apple, I’d suggest that you start with the smallest possible budget where you’d account for the budget for the main campaigns along with budgets for retargeting campaigns.
Campaigns of small businesses or startups run by egoistic entrepreneurs usually bite the dust because those specific business owners thought that running campaigns with big fat budgets is a matter of pride (something similar to buying a big ass car just to prove to the world that they’ve arrived).
You’d need to start with small budgets (just as much needed for your specific demographics and as long as the needle moves) because you’d want to test, measure, get a feel for the campaign’s response, make necessary tweaks while the campaign is live, test landing pages, and be sure that your email automation sequences are triggering alright.
Not using Landing Pages & Funnels
You are better off not running your campaigns at all without using landing pages and funnels. The only page people (your potential customers) should be visiting after they click on your ads should be your landing pages (or funnels).
Landing pages provide focus. Let grab your visitors’ attention, entice them with good design, make them take action thanks to your copy, and help people sign up for the offer you’ll make.
Read more:
Leadpages + Drip: The Ultimate Combination For Lead Gen & Marketing Automation
The Importance of Landing Pages: Why Even Bother?
What’s the number?
If there’s a phone number in your ad, you are likely to get much more engagement from that ad (and hence more bang for your buck) than without.
Ryan Shark of PhoneWagon writes:
“Mobile search will generate more than 73 billion calls (that’s a B). Google reports that ads with phone numbers in them lead to at least 8% better click-through rate than those without phone numbers. “
“Call-focused search ads are one of the growing forces behind high returns from digital ad spend. In fact, BIA Kelsey estimates that $64.6 billion is spent each year on localized ads meant to generate calls to businesses”
Make use of Phone Call Tracking Software to give yourself dynamic phone numbers or numbers eligible for inbound call tracking.
No nurture? No Future
The last step of the lead generation machine is to enable an email marketing automation sequence to nurture all those leads who just subscribed to your offers on your landing pages or funnels (above).
This doesn’t have to be hard at all. Using leading email marketing automation tools such as Drip or Mailchimp, you could easily create simple and effective email workflows to start nurturing your leads.
Marketing automation might sound fancy, but your business has no future without these nurturing sequences in place.
Lost without Retargeting
Not everyone who visits your website or landing pages will do anything that has intrinsic value for your business. Most people check you out and leave.
You paid money (or you’ve put in the effort) for them to arrive. Now, when they leave without taking any action, you owe it yourself to have them come back.
Do that with retargeting.
Retargeting causes an average lift of 1046% for branded search.
The CTR of an average retargeting ad is at least 10 times more than a regular ad
Online buyers certainly notice retargeting ads and consider revisiting or buying.
Be sure to split your total advertising budget in a way that you also account for retargeting.
What kind of PPC ad campaign mistakes are you doing?