The most common mistakes in PPC campaigns

What are the most common mistakes no PPC hand entirely avoids? We looked back at our own beginnings and at the mistakes of competitors whose projects we took over. You would not believe how many badly configured ads are running on the internet. So we have written up the most common mistakes to avoid. When building PPC ads, aim for the highest possible quality, and your effort will come back to you with interest.

Poor targeting

A frequent mistake is badly chosen keywords that are too general and so fail to target the right, relevant audience. In that case the ad is not effective at all and, against its cost, wins far fewer conversions (a goal met — a purchase, a form submission and so on). When choosing keywords, specify your product or service as precisely as you can. Better specification prevents the ad from being shown to users who are not looking for the product, and helps win more conversions at lower cost.

On Facebook we can target ads by various demographic measures such as gender, age and country, or by interests, occupation and the like. So it is worth targeting a more specific group of people rather than too broadly, to avoid needless clicks that are of no relevance to us.

Not splitting into ad groups

Throwing all your keywords into a single ad group with a single ad is probably the largest mistake you can make. An ad group lets us assign particular keywords to particular ads. It lets the ads be relevant. Every product or service should have its own ad group holding several similar keywords. Here too, less is sometimes more: better to have fewer, relevant keywords than a heap of needless ones that will burn budget and be harder to optimise. If everything sits in a single ad group, relevant ads will not appear and we will not reach the quality score we want, which shows up in the cost per click.

Not using negative keywords

If you use phrase match, or heaven forbid broad match, it is more than likely that your keywords are catching terms irrelevant to you. To reach better results and avoid paying for clicks needlessly, they have to be checked and excluded regularly. By default Google shows ads for phrases such as "free" and "cheap". So if you do not use exact match keywords alone in your campaigns, your ads will run for those phrases too. Once you exclude those words, you need not fear your ads appearing for them.

Mistakes in the copy

Various grammar mistakes, typos, missing punctuation, unclear or badly chosen copy and so on. Many people are put off by precisely such "details" and would rather go to the competition. This too is a form of presentation for a company, and if you do not take care over even this, doubts arise about whether your company is serious and how good the products or services it provides are.

Linking to a single page

Sending users to a single page, usually the home page, is another large mistake you can make. If a user is looking for a particular product or service, they want to click straight through to the page that product or service is on. So if you send them to the home page, an unrelated one or even a page that does not exist, they will probably leave the site. What matters is that your ads link to relevant pages where the visitor quickly finds what they are looking for.

Not using Google extensions

Ads without extensions are rather flat and dull. Two or three headlines and two descriptions. Even some experienced PPC hands can forget to add ad extensions to their campaigns. There really are plenty of them these days, but we recommend always adding at least a few of the main Google ad extensions:

• location extension
• sitelink extension
• callout extension
• structured snippet extension
• and where possible, the price extension too

These ad extensions not only enlarge your ad and take up more of the screen, but also markedly raise user interaction and click-through. Extensions are free, and anyone not using them is making a large mistake.

Badly configured conversions

You need specific, measurable goals so you can analyse your campaign's performance and decide when to make improvements and updates. Some people track only impressions and clicks to their site, but without conversion tracking you will not be able to judge your campaign accurately. To analyse your campaign's performance accurately, you have to ensure that everything possible and relevant on your site is tracked. That means tracking phone calls, form submissions coming through the site, the purchase itself, and smaller intermediate goals such as downloading a PDF or an app, visiting several pages and so on. You can also track shop visits and offline prospects. If you do not do this, you cannot declare your campaign a success or a failure.