Many businesses rely on PPC marketing to help them achieve sales goals. However, if you’re not creating a marketing strategy that performs well, you could be hemorrhaging money on your PPC campaigns.
How do you know if your PPC campaign is doing well? And if you figure out that it’s not, what can you do to fix it? PPC marketing isn’t black and white. There are simple mistakes that can destroy your campaign, ruining your hopes of meeting your business goals.
Here are some of the most common PPC marketing mistakes most small businesses make.
Developing Your Goals
If you jumped into a PPC marketing campaign without setting any goals first, you’ve set yourself up for failure. Your goals should be aligned with those of your business, and if necessary, include additional goals you’re hoping PPC can achieve.
When you know what your goals are, you already have an understanding of the metrics you need to be looking for. That way, you can easily track the success of your PPC campaigns against your bottom line. It allows you to make room for adjustments and pivot when necessary.
Set-up Conversion Tracking
Similar to knowing what your goals are, if you’re not tracking your conversions, you’re missing out on a huge identifier of success. This is all about defining your goals so that you can track whatever that “conversion” is.
It might not always be about making a sale. If that’s the case, you still have to have a goal. If it’s around engagement, define what that is and how you’re going to track it.
Not knowing how to track your goals is another way that your PPC campaigns can fail.
Lacking Thoughtful Landing Pages
Where you direct your lead after they click on your ad is a big piece of the puzzle. You want to think through what that page says about you, your product, and what the consumer expects.
The landing page is the next step in the funnel, it’s the place where your conversions take place, and not thinking it through is detrimental. In fact, it can even affect your SEO traffic through bounce rate and fall off.
Contemplate your goal and think about which landing page makes the most sense. If you need to create a new one, great! Thoughtfully consider the message and build something that encourages conversions, sign-ups, or engagement.
Campaign Demographics and Targeting
You can’t set-up a generic PPC campaign and hope for the best. Chances are, it’s not going to do well.
You need to fully think through your audience so that you can target them specifically. There are a few key questions you can consider as you’re setting up your demographics, including:
- Who is your audience?
- What are their personas?
- How do they use search platforms?
- Where do they live?
- How do they engage with search platforms and websites?
Before you even begin a PPC campaign it’s worth building out a customer persona so that you can target efficiently. Not having the right information could cause you to spend money in places where it won’t work. That’s like spending money on air!
Understanding your potential for mistakes is essential to a great campaign. Especially for small businesses that are running PPC marketing campaigns on their own. Learn the common mistakes and avoid them whenever possible. It will help you set up a campaign that is both thoughtful and successful.