Big Mistakes to Avoid with Your First PPC Campaign

by Bill H.

While you’re learning on the fly with your e-commerce business, if you’re anything like me, you’re going to make lots of mistakes.   Your goal should be to minimize those mistakes as much as possible, but rest assured, mistakes are pretty much unavoidable.  The thing you really have to do is avoid making the BIG mistakes when running your first pay-per-click (PPC) campaign.  When it comes to PPC advertising, the big mistakes absolutely, positively have to be avoided.

Big Mistakes to Avoid with Your First PPC CampaignFor the uninitiated, we’re going to assume that our audience knows very little about PPC, which is simply an internet advertising method used with search engines, content sites, and advertising networks. Advertisers will pay the host site or search engine each time an ad displaying their product is clicked upon. Advertisers bid on keywords or keyword phrases that relate to their target market when using search engines. Typically, advertisers can place a ceiling on the price their willing to pay when their ads are displayed on content sites, websites and blogs.

Simple enough right?

While building your first pay-per-click campaign, mistakes from newbies can be VERY, VERY expensive.  Trust me, I know.  I’ve literally made every mistake in the PPC campaign book.  People clicking on your ads who have absolutely no interest in your products can get very expensive, very quickly. Setting up and maintaining profitable pay-per-click advertising campaigns will take time, energy, and above all, practice to fine tune and keep earning profit over time.

Regardless of how often it’s talked about, the most common PPC campaign mistakes seem to be made over and over and over again.

We’ve provided a list below of the biggest, most common mistakes made by beginners, but shockingly, commonly made by PPC “professionals” as well.  Print this list out and use it as a checklist of items to most avoid with your first PPC campaign build.

Sloppy Initial Campaign Build

One of the most common errors made by first time advertisers is too quickly throw a campaign together just to “see how things go.”  Often times, new PPC advertisers just haphazardly throw a list of keywords together, put them all in the same ad group, and then point all of that traffic to their home page.  An ad group is a Google Adwords reference to a group of ads that contain similar or related keywords.

Undoubtedly, one of the single, biggest mistakes made by first time PPC advertisers is creating ad groups with a large number of relatively unrelated keywords, and then writing copy for ads that attempts to cover every concept in the list.  DO NOT DO THIS as it will nearly guarantee low click-throughs (CTR’s), poor ad positions, high CPC charges, and dismal performance.  This is one of the biggest mistakes that you can make and a sure fire way to go broke quickly!  Be sure to group your keywords into tightly bundled ad groups that are very closely related.

Poor Keyword Research

Another common mistake is inadequate or poor keyword research, which is one of the most important components of building your first campaign.  There are a wide variety of keyword research tools that you can use to build out your keyword list, including 2 of the best in the marketplace, Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker, which are two of the best keyword research tools currently available.

One of the most important features of Wordtracker is that it allows you to evaluate how competitive the terms are that you’re targeting.  It can identify the most competitive keywords as well as the less competitive “low hanging fruit” keyword prospects, providing invaluable guidance on keywords to focus on and the ones to stay away from. You can start out out by trying Wordtracker’s free trial, but any serious PPC professional can’t do without a tool like Wordtracker.

Bidding Only on Broad Match Terms

Long Tail KeywordsFollowing the theme of “don’t be lazy”, it’s very important to spend time building out a list of keywords that will convert for you. For starters, you should focus primarily on keyword phrases that demonstrate a visitor’s predisposition for buying your products and services.

Terms known as long tail keywords will have much less volume than shorter generic keyword phrases.For example, the volume of search queries for a tail term like “Nikon D40 SLR 6.1 Megapixel Digital Camera with 3x Optical Zoom” will get far, far fewer search queries than a search for “camera” will get.  These tail terms, however, typically have far less competition, will be less expensive to bid on, and will typically convert into sales much better than generic terms.

I would avoid broad match terms entirely and focus exclusively on exact match and phrase match terms. An exact match is a keyword match that has to match exactly with the search query to show your ad.  A phrase match simply has to have a portion of the phrase in the search query to show your ad.  Build out a list of very specific tail terms, group them tightly, and use exact match and phrase match exclusively.  You’ll get far less traffic, but you’ll avoid wasting money on broad match “tire kicker” clicks.

Landing Pages Not Aligned with Your Ad Copy

Make sure that whatever you tout or promote in your PPC ad that you have that copy on your landing page where you take that visitor as well.  If you’re promoting a 50% off discount, you can be sure that visitors that click on that ad will be looking for that promotion on your landing page.  If they don’t see reference to the copy in your ad right away, they’ll most likely leave.  Make sure that you have the copy in your ad on the landing page that you’re sending them to.

Fighting for the #1 Ad Position

From my experience, being ranked #1 for your search term will be far more pleasing to your ego than it will be to your bottom line.  Trying to rank #1 for keywords in highly competitive categories with high PPC costs is, quite frankly, pretty dumb.  Ranking #1 for a generic term is the best way to attract those tire kickers who are just looking around, doing some research, but aren’t really interested in buying your products or anyone else’s for that matter.  From my experience, the best converting ad positions in Google are #3 and #4 which will cost you substantially less than position #1, but will convert way better.  Check your ego at the door and focus on keeping your costs down and your conversions up.  Leave the top spot for your competitor.

Not Separating Content Match from Search

I don’t recommend using the Content Match networks to start out with either.   The content networks on search engines are basically “partner” sites (Adsense sites) that match the keywords from your campaign with sites in the network that have similar content.  Content networks can be profitable but they are tricky to navigate and it’s an entirely different animal than search results pages.  If you do decide to include the Content Match networks, you have to separate that campaign from your Search Results campaign.  Grouping these two together is a HUGE mistake.  You’ll get a much clearer understanding of which keywords are converting and which portion of the campaign is working and which one is not.  You’ll need to set different costs per click (much lower on content) and separate budgets for content versus search.

Ignoring Your Competition

You really have to pay close attention to your competition when running PPC ads.  First, it’s your job to create an ad that’s relevant, compelling and unique that will separate you from your competition.  We’re talking about a “Unique Value Proposition” or something that distinguishes and separates you from your competitors. Watching your competitors can provide incredible insights. Just through casual observation, you can learn many things about your competitor’s strategy and success rate.  One of the best keyword tools available for keyword research is an application called KeywordSpy.com.  This tool is positively one of the best ways to spy on your competition and find out what keywords their bidding on.

Failure to Track ROI by Keyword

You’ve got to track each and every click from your campaigns by keyword, campaign and ad group.  Establish unique identifying tracking URL’s that you can integrate with Google Analytics or whatever web analytics software that you choose is essential and the only way you can properly calculate the ROI and the true effectiveness of each keyword in your campaign.

Not Using Negative Keywords

Using negative keywords are a component of a PPC campaign that is frequently neglected by first-time or uneducated advertisers.  Using negative keywords in your campaign is one of the easiest and most effective ways to significantly improve the performance of your campaigns.  Each of the big 3 search engines has a negative match feature that allows you to prevent displaying your ads whenever certain keywords are included in the search query.  No matter what you’re advertising for, you’ll see scores of visits from people who are looking for “free” information, “advice” or “tutorials” on certain topics from visitors who are less likely to pay for goods or services on that respective topic.  Negative keywords can improve your performance in this area.

Not Using Keywords in Your Description or Title

Putting keywords in your ad copy improves the relevance for those searching on that specific term and increases the likelihood that your ad will get clicked on.  Putting your keywords in your ad title is usually most effective, but it won’t always work because of character limitation.  If you can’t get the keyword in the title, try putting it in the ad description, but try to get that keyword in there somewhere.

This is obviously not an exhaustive list of things to avoid, but for the beginner or first-time PPC advertiser, it’s a great place to start and will help you to avoid those BIG mistakes that have hobbled so many entrepreneurs trying to gain a foothold in this arena.

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