Newbie PPC Marketer? Avoid These 5 Mistakes

If you’re new to pay per click (PPC) marketing, chances are you’re a little hesitant about running your own AdWords campaign. That’s understandable. You certainly don’t want to waste your time or money running a campaign that doesn’t get you more traffic and ultimately, more sales.

However, pay-per-click marketing isn’t as challenging as you might think. You can learn how to create a profitable campaign with just a little bit of time spent in learning the ins-and-outs of the wonderful world of PPC.

Watch out for PPC mistakes

If you’re ready to take a leap into the PPC marketing world, here are five PPC mistakes that you can avoid when it comes to getting your ads out there in cyberspace.

1. Using your homepage as your landing page

A common mistake that newbies make in the PPC world is that they link their ad to their homepage instead of their product or service page. This is a no-no. Your homepage might be stunning. We know you love to show it off. However, what you’re after when you lead potential customers is to direct them to a specific landing page where they will make a buying decision within moments of landing there.

Why?

Because you’ve thought this landing page out brilliantly. In fact, you may have even hired someone to design it for you beautifully with the best sales copy ever.

This masterpiece landing page is where you want people to land. This is where you want visitors to know within 2 seconds to feel impressed and interested. Think of it as your fat, squirmy night-crawler on the hook, dancing before the biggest, baddest bass in the lake.

And he’s going to eat that baby, hook, line, and sinker.

In all seriousness though, don’t make the mistake of linking to your home page. Redirect to your product or service.

2. When you fail to split test

Don’t make the mistake of failing to split taste test your ad text. Most PPC engines will let you split test your various versions of your ad text for each PPC campaign. You certainly want to split text to see which keyword phrases are getting you the most click-through and conversions before you launch out in the deep.

The thought of split testing make you cringe? If you’re confused, consider reading up on it further, or hiring a PPC marketing specialist to assist you.

3. Using broad match keyword ads only

Broad match keywords can land use some traffic. However, if you’re going broad, those keywords may end up in front of a niche that is not among your key target audience.

For example, let’s say you’re a relationship coach and you create your ad using the broad keywords, “relationship coach”. While you may show up in a search query for “relationship coach”, you might also show up in search queries for other phrases like, “coaching relationship with athletes” or “Phil Donahue relationship coach” Alright, so I’m stretching here, but you get the idea.  You’ll be better off using your phrases more specifically or an exact match, like “Atlanta relationship coach” or “LGBT relationship coach.”

You might not get as much traffic, but you’ll surely be showing up in more relevant search queries.

4. Ignoring negative keywords

You might be tempted to skip over learning what negative keywords mean. However, I encourage you to take advantage of them. Negative keywords prevent certain ads from displaying when particular words are being searched.

For example, using the example above, adding the word, “athletes” will prevent your broad match ad from appearing in the results for “coaching relationship with athletes”. It looks at the word, “athlete” as a negative, and ignores it.

When you add negative keywords to PPC campaigns, you have more control without actually decreasing traffic to your website. It takes a little bit of investigative work, but it’s worth it.

5. Linking to a contact page

You may be tempted to send visitors to a page where they must fill out a contact form in order to join your list, get a newsletter, or some other lead generation form submission. Visitors don’t usually like this and it can hurt you in the long run.

At the same time, Google AdWords doesn’t like it either, and their guidelines state that you shouldn’t do offer something for free in exchange for contact information. So, resist the temptation to send visitors solely to your contact form.

These are the most common mistakes that newbie PPC marketer makes when they’re trying to get more traffic to their site. Good news is that through trial-and-error, you learn quite quickly. Once you’ve run a few campaigns, you get the hang of things and you start to get into a rhythm.

However, if you’ve already run some campaigns and you’re not seeing great results, you may want to consider hiring a PPC advertising specialist to assist you. They are professionals for good reason, as they get the job done.

Marketing is nothing to skimp on, and if your unable to put the time in to really become an expert when it comes to PPC marketing, it’s in your best interest to hire out. There are plenty of companies who are competing for customers, so the rates have come down quite a bit over the last few years.

At the same time, the rates are completely worth it, because they get you a better return for your investment. They’ll do the intensive research and work for you, saving you time, and maybe even a few headaches.

Fewer headaches, more time, and more sales sounds like a pretty good deal, huh? Yes, PPC advertising can get you there!