Paid search is an ever-evolving marketing tactic that can get your services or products in front of your target audience without all the time an SEO campaign may take. However, it is a pay-to-play tactic; thus, it’s very competitive, meaning it’s important to make sure you put your advertising spend to good use. Otherwise, you will be getting a low-quality return that costs you more than you’ll make.
How can you avoid this trap? Check out these common mistakes we’ve outlined below so you can beware when you’re creating your own paid search campaign:
One of the great things about Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is that you can make tweaks and changes with little effort. Unfortunately, many firms experience pressure from clients and stakeholders who insist on seeing results immediately, which can cause advertisers to make decisions on the fly before important data becomes available.
It’s often hard to be patient and wait for more data to accumulate before deciding to change campaign settings and elements, but this patience will ultimately pay off in the long run.
The Solution:
To combat this problem, have a plan in place with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) outlined so you can monitor A/B testing consistently. You need to make sure you have enough data in your campaign; you also need to have a predetermined number decided, so you know when you need to reflect on the potential changes that need to be made. Without these KPIs, your campaign won’t have the goal structure, and you won’t be able to identify opportunities or make improvements where needed.
Your keywords need to be structured around specific queries relevant to your target audience. Significant market research is required to understand what keywords you should use to make your calls to action relevant to searchers.
When your keywords are relevant to what your target needs, your efforts will allow impressions and conversions. With the right match types installed on these keywords, you’ll get these conversions for the lowest possible cost.
Proper utilization of keyword tools and continuous optimizations using search-term reports are essential if you want to improve your targeting. How you organize your keywords in a campaign, and your strategy for continually adding terms from the search term report, can help you ensure your ad remains relevant. If you’re not keeping up on queries with negative keywords, your ads could soon appear as irrelevant or inappropriate search queries, which could hurt you in the long run – both by reputation and your bottom line.
The Solution:
Select the right keywords and match types. The quality of clicks is far more critical than the number of clickers.
It’s true – you could perform great keyword analysis and post highly targeted ads that are perfect, complete with excellent ad copy and creative touches, but your ads still might not convert.
Why? People get lost on your landing page. When consumers get to your landing page, they’ll leave if the page has weak CTAs or there’s too much noise even to understand what to do next.
There needs to be a strategy that seamlessly guides your audience from Google to your website. Furthermore, you also need to ensure that you’re communicating the value you’ve outlined on your ads and have the tracking tags installed so you know how people are engaging on your pages and what might be attracting the most attention.
The Solution:
Set up conversion tracking using one of the online tools readily available to you, such as Google Ads Conversion Tracking. Alternatively, you can hire a great SEO agency that can help you put tools into place, so you can measure metrics and gather the data necessary to make the most of your marketing efforts.
When it comes to keyword analysis and all things related to paid search, our clients trust our team at ZGM to deliver the goods. If you want to learn how conversion tracking and market research can change your business operations, let us know when you’re ready to get started!