10 top issues that are destroying your ppc campaign

10 top issues that are destroying your PPC campaign (and how to fix them) You’ve been investing in PPC ads but it’s no longer yielding any results. The reason? You or your PPC Manager aren’t keeping up with the current trend. The solution? Awareness, time and effort to readjust your optimization strategy can help you get better results.

In our last blog on PPC, How to Tell if Your PPC Manager is Ripping You Off, we briefed you about how we think the questions you must ask your PPC manager. In this blog, we are covering the top 10 issues that are the common roadblock to PPC campaigns.

You need to understand that your customers are changing. Second, you need to get it right as thousands of dollars are spent on advertisements. Some businesses tend to get benefited from paid advertising more than the others. It is hugely beneficial for startups and small businesses as it gives them the required exposure. The dream for any PPC campaign is to minimize the ad spend and maximize the quality score.

It is natural for your PPC Manager to make some mistakes but if they are repeatedly making the mistakes and keeping you in the dark-it is time to switch to another PPC campaign manager. To check the health of your PPC campaign, check if your campaign is suffering from the following issues.

Issue 1: You don’t have a clear goal Without a clear strategy or defined goals, the PPC campaign can be a costly mistake. The most important part of a PPC strategy is to define your audience. Understanding of the target market will help to optimize your landing page and message accordingly. The PPC Manager must segment the target audience and identify the intent behind every segment.

Issue 2: You aren’t targeting right These days companies are much more aware of their customers than ever before. Targeting options are getting more focused and advanced. For example, if you’re an event planner in San Francisco, you can’t target each person in San Francisco. You must target the people who visited your website last night.

There are many platforms which already provide advanced targeting options. Once you improve your targeting, you understand your intended audiences and segment better.

Issue 3: You optimize for hard conversions rather than soft conversions PPC Managers tend to optimize for an action and add to the sales funnel even in a situation when the campaign is not backed up with enough budget. The solution is to optimize for soft conversions so that you can create behavioral predictions and build a stronger strategy henceforth.

Therefore, you need to optimize your PPC campaigns for soft conversions, gather behavioral data and drive hard conversions.

Issue 4: You’re looking only at the bigger picture

There is a high likelihood that you’re running your PPC campaign on multiple platforms and analyzing each campaign in isolation. If you have different teams or different agencies to manage different aspects of the PPC activity, chances are that you aren’t looking at the bigger picture.

You need to analyze all the PPC campaigns in totality and see how one PPC campaign affects another.

For example, a campaign that you’re running on Instagram will have an impact on a campaign that you’re running on Google. The exposure that your brand got on Instagram has an impact on other platforms.

You must analyze the complete picture and measure cross-channel impact of your campaigns.

Issue 6: Mismanagement of exclusion lists Once a prospect is already a customer, you want to exclude them from the retargeting lists. One of the ways that PPC Managers have been using is creating an IP-based exclude list. Another way, which is apparently more effective, is to use your customer data in exclusion list that can be used for both Facebook and Google. In case of a one-time purchase, you can target the customers for another product/ service/new offer rather than just focusing on new acquisitions.

Issue 6: Relying on traditional keywords The CPCs are rising and it’s difficult (almost impossible) to compete with the giants for traditional keywords. The PPC Manager needs to get more creative with the choice of keywords to leverage from the low-hanging and business relevant keywords.

Issue 7: Mobile searches are ignored Mobile touchpoints and ads are gaining importance. As a best practice, PPC Managers must test their mobile ads separately as compared to desktop ads. Mobile and desktop users think differently and need to be served different kinds of advertisements.

Issue 8: You don’t test the conversions If you process a test conversion without testing it first, you are risking your PPC efforts. For example, you spend thousands of dollars to make potential users come to your ecommerce website only to realize that there was a broken link at the time of checkout. Before starting a PPC campaign, remember to test conversions and confirm that everything is working properly.

Issue 9: Running junk ads on bad keywords For each of your PPC campaign, ensure that you write superior ads with carefully selected keywords.

Users don’t want to be bothered with irrelevant and ads that seem like spam. If you have interesting ads, it will reduce the cost per ‘conversion and enhance the quality score. One of the most effective tactics for impactful ads is to introduce emotional triggers. It motivates the users to click on the ads.

Issue 10: Using ‘bid only’ targeting setting The purpose of remarketing is to bring back the users who’ve already visited your website. You must create the audience for this and target in AdWords. If you select the option of ‘target and bid’ instead of ‘bid only’ then you’re basically instructing Google to target the users who are already your audience in addition to the audience that Google is already targeting. Ensure that for remarketing audience, the

display campaign is set to ‘target and bid’ that will direct Google to show ads only to your users from your audience.

Conclusion If you don’t serve the right kind of ads, you can lose a lot of money on PPC campaigns. It’s most critical that your account is optimized for different segments, which are search, social and display. The goal is to improve your quality score and bring down the CPC. You can do that only if you effectively address the issues listed above and ensure that the minute details of the PPC campaign are taken care of.

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