A client comes to our offices. His clothes are shabby and threadbare, his face is dirty and his children are hungry. Immediately, we know what has happened: A big slice of cash has gone into a badly managed pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, either by the client themselves or by some fly-by-night bunch of jokers, skilled in the art of eliciting cash for doing bugger-all. So what are the major pitfalls of pay-per-click advertising and how can you avoid them?
Keyword research is absolutely critical. The biggest single mistake people make is attempting to advertise on keywords that are far too generic to the products or services they sell. If you sell Ferraris, don’t advertise on the keyword "cars". Think "Ferraris", "Ferraris for sale", "Ferraris for sale in London" etc.
It sounds obvious, but I see this problem everyday. Research the keywords and phrases that people actually use and be specific to the area in which your business excels.
We'll take our Ferrari example again. You’re a super-car dealer and you also sell Lambourghinis, Maseratis and Bentleys. You need a specific advert to appear whenever keywords associated with these brands are searched for. Do not just write on advert that appears for all searches!
E.g. Someone searches for "Bentley for Sale". Your ad should say "Bentley for sale" and then take the searcher to a page, with all your Bentleys (that are for sale) on it. Don't send them to your homepage, where the link to Bentleys is buried at the bottom of the page.
If you don't do this, you'll either get no visitors (because your ads are poorly focused) or lots of vistors who don't actually convert into customers (because they can't actually find the product they originally searched for).
Pay per click advertising is a means to an end. If you're not measuring how successful your campaign is in terms of generating new business, then the chances are that at least a proportion of your cash is going to waste. Combine this with the mistakes mentioned above and it's likely all your cash is going down the drain.
Software is available (known as 'analytics', and available for free) that can directly measure which of the visitors you are paying for actually complete what you wanted them to do (buy something, ask for a quote). Use the reports from such software to refine and improve your account to focus on the areas that are actually generating business.
If you're in a position where your budget isn’t high enough to buy every click possible from Google or Yahoo's search network, then I strongly suggest you are opted out of the content network by default.
Content advertising can be very dangerous (a quick way to waste your money) unless it's very tightly controlled and monitored. Chances are your money's better spent elsewhere, so unless you've exhausted the possibilities in other areas I wouldn’t bother with it.
The problem is that Google will opt your campaigns into the content network by default, so unless someone who knows what they are doing has switched it off, you could be wasting your money.
Get these 4 points right and you're well on your way to running a successful pay-per-click campaign, but really they are only a starting point. If you're managing such a campaign yourself, then keep refining, learning and improving your campaign. If you haven't got the time to do this then employ a professional business to do so (that'll be us then).
