Pay per Click: Mistakes to avoid

The world of Google Adwords Pay per Click is becoming more aggressive and competitive. It is more important than ever to make sure your campaigns are optimized to all of their potential. You should make sure to get the maximum return for your investment, for the keywords and phrases that are most relevant to your business, and are most likely to bring the right kind of traffic to your web site.

Prices on the PPC for search engines are constantly rising, so it is important you avoid certain mistakes that will result in a poor performance of your PPC campaigns and a high cost for you. The 10 common mistakes to avoid are:

• Long list of less than targeted keywords - When you set up your Pay per Click campaign it is very important that you don´t go “keyword nuts”. This means don´t create an endless, useless list of keywords that will only raise the cost and bring you little to no results in return. Only use keywords or phrases that are absolutely relevant to your business and are an indication of what people will find on your website.
• Not identifying unique aspects of your product or service - Before deciding to go for an Adwords campaign you need to make sure you are clear on what makes you stand from the competition. Once you´ve identified your unique products or services you will know which keywords or phrases are unique to your business. It is highly recommended to analyze the competition, see what they´re offering and which keywords they´re using. Next, determine which products or services you offer will put you on top of the competition. When writing the ads it is very important to maintain a balance between keywords, clarity and relevance.
• Lack of keywords in your ad text - Placing an ad that contains random words, as opposed to one which describes your site's content and the products or services you offer, will represent a complete failure of a Pay Per Click campaign and wasted money.
• Directing users solely to your home page - Deciding where are you going to link the ads to is very important. After spending time and money setting up your Pay per Click campaign, why would you link all your ads to your home page and let them navigate all over your site in hopes on finding the information they clicked looking for? Instead, make sure they will land on a page that contains exactly the information your ad promised.

• Creation of single Ad Groups - Categorizing your ads by related keywords or phrases will make your campaigns much easier to monitor. Let's say you own a book store. You would start by grouping together all the books, magazines and movies you have on Picasso. Similarly, categorizing your ads allows you to perform a deep analysis of your campaign's performance.
• Utilizing single campaigns - Once you´ve organized your single ad groups put them on group campaigns. Once you have all Picasso’s books, add the ones on Rembrandt, Dali and have a campaign titled “art books.” Do this with several groups and determine which ones are really working.
• Using broad match only - When you do not take advantage of the phrase matching options that are available to you, chances are you are missing out on potential customers and creating a higher CPC. Broad matches are usually less targeted than exact and phrase matching. Broad matching is the default option your ads will appear for expanded matches such as plurals or relevant keyword variations. When utilizing phrase match your ad will appear for search terms in the order that you specify and sometimes for other terms. Exact matching is by far the most targeted option to use. You will appear for the exact keyword specified. Negative keyword is also a fantastic option to utilize in order to specify which keywords you do not want to appear for.
• Failure to optimize Ad serving for your ads - When you take advantage of Adwords Ad Serving service basically what you will be doing is showing your most popular ads more often. The Adwords platform will give weight to ads with the highest click through rates, and display less those that are not working well.
• Not tracking results - For your Adwords campaign to really work you have to be able to see the keywords that work, and those that don´t. Determine both the flaws and the positive points of your campaign has in order to make it better and avoid spending useless money on clicks.
•  Entering the content network without modifying bids - Within the AdWords platform you have recently been given the ability to set different bids for the content network compared to that of the search network. If you do not set different bids on the content network for certain keywords, you will be paying more per click than you should be. After lowering the prices on certain keywords you will notice that the number of clicks remain the same as they were at the higher bid.