Pay-Per-Click campaigns have proven to be one of the best ways to advertise, however, if clients do not know how to use them properly it can blow a marketers budget out the window. Here are several ways people improperly use PPC:
1. Ignoring Match Type Options-
When you only purchase key phrases, without applying any match type,you inherit the "broad match" setting, which means that your ad shows up on the results page when any of the words in the phrase are searched on. This has the negative effect of either driving unqualified clicks or driving down your CTR, which in turn drives up your CPC.
2. Ignoring Landing Pages-
Many marketers feel that creating custom landing pages is just too much work. Instead, they send all pay-per-click traffic to their home pages. This is tremendously frustrating to those visitors who arrive at your site after just searching on specific words at the search engine. They now have to begin their search all over again to find what they are looking for on your site. You will see that many leave your site immediately, unwilling to search again simply to end up with unsuccessful, dead end results.
3. Not Implementing Conversion Tracking Code-
I am still amazed at the amount of companies that just won't add conversion tracking code to their thank-you pages (the code provided by the search engines or provided by your analytics package.) Without this information, you can pretty much guarantee that you are throwing away a large percentage of your pay-per-click budget.
4. Bidding Too Little for Keywords-
This may sound strange, but if you don't pay enough for a keyword, you will find yourself at best "beneath the fold" (which is disappointing because many people don't ever scroll down) or worse, on page 2 or 20 of the results. This is just one more way of driving up your cost per click by driving down your CTR.
5. Using the "Set it and Forget it" Mentality-
This may be the biggest mistake...Managing Successful Pay-Per-Click Campaigns is not a one time task! Effective marketers pay attention (analyze, modify and improve) campaigns frequently. With campaigns that are dormant, you throw money away uselessly by continuing to spend money on keywords or ad's that don't work and by not optimizing spending on what works best.
To be Continued Tuesday February 9th 2010, stay in touch!
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This is too good. Thanks for sharing this with me.