Whether you are running your own pay-per-click campaign or whether you have hired someone to run it for you…
It’s unlikely that your campaign is going to be completely without problems.
The very nature of PPC is trial and error.
But there are some errors that are definitely more egregious than others.
Here are three of the biggest problems that PPC marketers face, how they can kill your campaign, and how you can make sure they aren’t afflicting you:
Problem One: Too Much Stuff
It can be tempting to have MORE.
Especially if you have a relatively large pay-per-click budget, to choose a huge number of keywords, separate ad campaigns, and ad groups.
If you have a lot of resources to devote to this area, it may start to feel like more is better.
More keywords and more ads means more reach, right?
NOPE! Not necessarily.
In fact, it can make an account become completely disorganized and difficult to handle.
Nobody wants that! Not you.. and Not Google!
If you have dozens of campaigns with dozens of different ad groups, all vying for your attention, be careful.
It is unlikely that even the best account manager is going to be able to stay on top of everything he needs to stay on top of.
Having too many keywords, campaigns, and groups means not being able to actually give any of them the attention.
This is something that they need in order to truly become optimized.
Time stretches thin.
So does the budget!!
And none of the campaigns perform as well as they could/should.
There simply is no way to track, optimize, test, and adjust every single one.
This problem can be solved by simply knuckling down and restructuring your account.
This starts with trimming the fat.
This is going to take some time, but the identifying which keywords are performing well and which aren’t performing at all should be relatively easy.
You can sort your account by impressions to ferret out which keywords are just cluttering up your account.
Eliminate keywords that are not and have never performed so you can give more attention to keywords that are performing.
Problem Two: Focusing Too Much Attention on the Top Spot
Reaching that top spot is the goal of just about every PPC campaign.
Without that goal, there really would be no reason to spend so much time and money crafting ads that people are likely to click on.
But are you spending far too many resources in order to get to that top spot?
Here’s this questions framed in a better way:
Are you spending more resources on that top spot than it is worth to your business?
The draw of being number one, simple for the satisfaction of being number one, is strong.
This causes many people to make rash, and sometimes unfounded decisions when it comes to trying to get to that top spot.
Why is this a problem?
Because making hasty decisions without considering all of the facts and without actually testing any resultant changes out can seriously hurt a campaign.
Many people mistakenly believe that if they pay more, they will get a better position in the search results, and will therefore get more traffic to their website.
Unfortunately, that’s not exactly how PPC works, especially for those that have a limited budget.
Once the budget runs out, your spot will be taken over by another website,
You will lose out on valuable impressions and clicks, because you burned out your budget too quickly.
While being in the top position might look great, it doesn’t necessarily bring you more conversions than being in the third spot does.
In fact, anything above the fourth spot has about the same number of conversions.
What does this mean for you?
It means that you shouldn’t leap at the chance to spend all of your budget on a few clicks!!
Don’t overspend just to be at the very tip top of the search results.
You’ll burn out and probably actually lose valuable conversions.
Instead, make decisions that are supported by facts and data, that will raise your position in paid search, but won’t deplete your budget so quickly you aren’t actually getting the traffic you could be getting.
Problem Three: Not Believing in Your Campaign
Too often, small businesses or account managers don’t see the results they want to see.
Because of this, they give up on pay-per-click altogether, before they’ve even really given the campaign a chance.
Some of this can be chocked up to laziness.
Some of it can be chocked up to simply not believing in your campaign and giving it time to work out the kinks in the system.
AdWords reports that only a tiny fraction of small businesses update their accounts every week.
Only half of all small businesses work on their accounts every quarter.
That’s just once every three months!
These kind of statistics prove that the reason most AdWords campaigns fail is because the account manager isn’t giving the account the attention it needs.
Being active on an account and believing in its ability to succeed if it is given the optimization and testing it deserves is often all a campaign needs.
Doing this will improve its quality score, get you more clicks, and ultimately make more conversions.
Successful PPC marketers research new keywords, optimize their bidding, research negative keywords, optimize their ad text, and get rid of expensive keywords that do not perform on a weekly basis!
These marketers have much more successful campaigns than those who do not do these tasks.
How do you solve this problem?
By simply making a commitment to your PPC campaign.
A PPC account manager can be a great resource for making sure your campaign gets the attention it needs, for example.
