Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be one of the best ways a business can put its products or services in front of the right people. But just launching an ad campaign and then waiting around doesn’t guarantee results.
In fact, some of the biggest PPC problems we at Starlight Digital see aren’t caused by a lack of budget. They’re usually caused by businesses approaching paid search as something they can set up once, leave running, walk away from and easily generate success.
From poor conversion tracking and irrelevant keywords, there are several common mistakes that can quietly drain your budget. Here are our top five biggest things we’ve noticed over the years that companies get wrong about PPC and what you should do instead.
5. Treating PPC as “Set and Forget”
As a big misconception of paid advertising, launching an ad campaign isn’t the end, it’s just the beginning.
Search behaviour is constantly changing, competitors adjust their bids, costs fluctuate, new competitors enter the market, your products and services evolve, and the advertising platforms themselves are continually developing.
Some businesses judge their PPC primarily through metrics such as impressions and clicks. Although those numbers can look impressive, they don’t necessarily tell you the whole story on whether your advertising is generating results.
To understand the performance of your campaigns, you should be monitoring at least some of these key commercial metrics:
- Qualified leads
- Cost per lead (CPL)
- Number of sales
- Revenue generated
- Return on ad spend (ROAS)
- Conversion rate
Campaigns may also need new creatives, keyword adjustments, bid strategy changes, audience refinements or an entirely new campaign as performance data develops.
Your PPC performance could also really decay when campaign management becomes stagnant for too long.
The best PPC accounts aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones being continuously analysed, tested and improved.
4. Getting Audience Targeting Wrong
Your PPC targeting requires a certain balance. Casting your net too wide could waste budget on reaching people who are unlikely to become customers, but make your targeting too restrictive and you can limit the amount of potential customers and give the algorithm too little data to work with.
The best approach relies on your business objectives, audience and the current data available.
Existing customer data can be particularly valuable. Your current customer lists can help inform your audience strategies and give advertising platforms much stronger signals about the types of people that matter to the business.
Ad scheduling for your audience can also help to manage budgets more effectively. If your data highlights that certain times of the day consistently generate low-quality traffic, you probably want to adjust your approach rather than keep on paying for clicks that rarely convert.
Your PPC targeting shouldn’t be about finding anyone and everyone. It’s about reaching the people most likely to take positive action.
3. Neglecting Keywords and Search Terms
Keywords have always been fundamental to paid search, but quickly choosing a list of keywords and then leaving it untouched isn’t enough. You need to think carefully about both which keywords to target and which searches you don’t want to pay for.
Google Ads offers different keyword match types:
- Exact match – greatest control over the searches your ads can appear for
- Phrase match – a balance between control and reach
- Broad match – greater reach, but potentially less control without proper management
There isn’t one match type that’s automatically right for every account. The key is to find the right balance between volume, relevance and control.
Go too broad and your budget can quickly be spent on irrelevant searches. Go too exact and you may restrict your campaign’s ability to find valuable new traffic.
Don’t underestimate negative keywords
Negative keywords are equally as important. Adding these tells the advertising platform which searches you really don’t want your ads to appear in. This can be quite important during the early stages of a new campaign, when your search-term data is low and still being collected.
At Starlight Digital, we use nine proprietary negative keywords lists as part of our account setup process to help prevent wasted spend on any obvious unwanted searches. For our client accounts, search term management is an ongoing process, we never just choose keywords at campaign launch and forget about them.
2. Not Setting Up Proper Conversion Tracking
This is the second most common PPC mistake we see with businesses. If you can’t accurately measure what happens after someone clicks your advert, how do you know whether your campaign is working to convert?
Clicks, impressions and traffic are useful indicators, but they’re not the end goal.
Depending on your business, your conversions could be any of the following:
- Online purchases
- Lead form submissions
- Phone calls
- Bookings
- App downloads
- Account registrations
- Quote requests
Accurate conversion tracking is also important when using automated bidding and machine learning. Google Ads and Microsoft Ads count on conversion data to understand which people and searches are most likely to produce the best outcomes.
We regularly see businesses arrive to us with what they believe is robust tracking, only for our audit to uncover broken, duplicated or missing conversion actions.
This creates two problems: it makes performance difficult to measure and can feed poor-quality data back into the tracking.
Server-side tracking
With privacy regulations, cookie restrictions and changes to browser tracking continuing to change digital advertising, you also need to think carefully about how first-party data is collected and used.
Server-side tracking can form an important part of a measurement strategy, helping you to build a more reliable view of your customer journey where traditional browser-based tracking may have its limitations.
1. Sending Paid Traffic to a Poor Page
This is perhaps the biggest mistake of all. Why spend money getting someone all the way to your website if that website isn’t ready to convert them?
Your PPC campaign might be generating relevant clicks, but if visitors land on a slow, confusing or outdated website, those clicks are unlikely to turn into conversions such as inbound leads or sales.
A poor user experience can mean:
- Visitors can’t immediately understand what you provide
- Important information is difficult to find or read
- Landing pages aren’t relevant to the advert
- Forms are too long or overly-complicated
- The website isn’t mobile-friendly
- Pages load too slowly
- There isn’t a clear call to action (CTA)
The result ends up being that you’re paying for traffic that doesn’t convert while also potentially damaging the perception of your brand.
Before you invest in PPC, make sure your website and landing pages are doing their job correctly. Paid media can drive highly targeted traffic straight to you, but it can’t help with a fundamentally poor user experience.
Bonus Point…
As you’ve read this far, here is an additional bonus mistake we often see businesses make: expecting PPC to make a company rich overnight!
A brand-new ads account will need time to collect data, understand which searches and audiences are valuable, establish benchmarks and identify what actually shows results.
For a new PPC account, we’d generally recommend you think about it in stages:
Months 1-3: Building the foundations
The initial focus should be on getting the fundamentals right: tracking, keywords, audiences, campaign structure, landing pages, negative keywords, creative and data collection.
Months 4-6: Optimise and stabilise
With new data available from the previous months, performance should begin to normalise. This is where ongoing testing and optimisation can start to make a more noticeable difference.
Months 6-12: Grow and improve
Once the account has established a stronger performance baseline, there will be greater opportunity to scale what’s working well, identify any new opportunities and improve the efficiency.
12 months+: Scale strategically
For established accounts with strong foundations, this can become the point where scaling becomes more strategic with increasing budget in selected proven areas, while continuing to test new opportunities.
Every business and account is different, so there is no guaranteed PPC timeline. A good PPC agency may be able to get an account performing strongly sooner, but expecting huge returns after a couple of weeks is rarely realistic.
So, What You Could Get Wrong With Your PPC
Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing isn’t just about putting a set sum of money into an ad campaign and waiting for the customers to arrive. It needs the right foundations, accurate conversion data, continuous optimisation and a clear understanding of what your business actually wants to achieve.
Understanding the fundamentals of PPC from the start and getting your account and campaigns set up correctly will give you a much stronger chance of success over time.
If you’re investing into Google or Microsoft Ads but aren’t sure whether your campaigns are optimised or just thinking about getting started, get in touch with our team for a free PPC account audit.
