How to Pin Point The 10 Most Common PPC Mistakes and how to avoid them

1. If you are just starting out with Google AdWords and you find the performance of your campaigns less
than satisfying than all you need might just be a little bit of patience.

Byron Walker did a very interesting case study where he compared the performance of 2 nearly identical
campaigns with the same landing pages on 2 different accounts.

Here are the major differences between the 2 campaigns/accounts:

Campaign 1:

Established Google AdWords account – good history
Campaign already running for several months
Domain that hosts landing page is several months old and gets consistent traffic

Campaign 2:

New Google AdWords account – no history yet
New campaign running only for a week or so                                                                                                                
Domain that hosts landing page is new and didn’t get much traffic until now

Now, the difference in terms of performance and ROI between these 2 campaigns were more than
surprising. For example, campaign 1 showed the following performance indicators:

Average CPC: $0.40
Average Position: 2.4
ROI: 97.10%

And for campaign 2:

Average CPC: $0.57
Average Position: 4.4
ROI: 7.5%


Well, we all know that account-, campaign- history plays a role in the calculation of your quality score,
which defines your ad position for a specific max. bid price, but honestly, I didn’t expect such a huge
“indirect” influence on your campaign ROI of this parameter.

2.Step 2

The 10 Most Common PPC Mistakes And How To Avoid Them


Almost every day, new products are launched that promise to teach you how to succeed with Google
AdWords and other PPC search engines. And it’s true, many of these products contain some very
interesting tips and strategies that allow you to improve the performance of your campaigns.

However, as long as you don’t get the very basics right, all the great tips, tricks and secrets won’t be of
much help. Secret tips, bells and whistles won’t allow you to turn a badly performing campaign into a
successful one. On the other hand, simply getting the basics and fundamentals right will allow you to do
so.


So, here are the top 10 PPC mistakes that might prevent you from being profitable. Avoid them and your
campaigns will thrive:

1. Too many (unrelated) keywords in your adgroups: Keep your adgroups tightly focused and very
specific. If you are not sure about a certain keyword, create a new adgroup.

2. No- or not enough negative keywords: Your negative keyword list is as important as your actual
keyword list. Check your web-logs and reports on a regular basis and keep your negative keyword list
growing. A large negative keyword list allows you to rule out most irrelevant searches and improve your
conversion rate.

3. Lack of testing: You can’t succeed in this game without constant and continuous testing. Be sure to
always have at least 2 split tested ads per adgroup and rotate them evenly. Test various elements on your
landing pages. Test your sales page. Test, test, test…

4. Not having enough keywords: It’s not sufficient to have 10, 20 or 30 keywords in your campaign. You
should at least have a few hundred keywords per campaign. Use keyword search tools, be creative, get
into your customers mind, check other websites… to come up with a big enough keyword list.

5. Using mostly generic keywords and keywords everyone else is using: Avoid generic keywords, they
are usually expensive and they don’t convert very well. Mix in some long-tail keywords and some very
specific “buyer” keywords. Also, be creative and come up with some new terms, no one (or almost no
one) else is using. If you only rely on the Google Keyword search tool, you will be bidding on the
keywords most of your competitors are using as well.

6. Irrelevant ads: Your ads need to be closely related to the adgroup and the keyword(s) they belong to.
Ideally you should use the keyword in your ad headline. And that’s another rea

3. Step 3

A Few Simple Steps To Improve Your Google Quality Score


To get more traffic (clicks) from Google for less money, you have to make sure that your website and
AdWords campaign follows certain rules. Now, your quality score (and as a consequence the profit
potential of your campaign) depends on how well you follow these rules.

Unfortunately, only Google knows the exact rules that are used to calculate the QS. However, the simple
steps listed below should allow you to get a sufficiently high QS:

* Put a privacy policy on your website

* Add some valuable content to your site - 5 to 10 short articles containing 300 - 500 words should be
enough.

* Create some back-links to your site: For example, submit your articles (or at least a few of them) to
various article directories.

* Add a “Contact” page to your site.

* Add an “About Us” page to your site.

* Add a “Resources” page to your site with links to valuable and relevant sites. Consider sites with a high
Google Page Rank as well as .edu and .org sites.

* Add a sitemap to your site.

* Make sure your site is clean, has a professional look and feel and doesn’t contain any “under
construction”- or similar pages.

* Make sure your ads are relevant. A good practice is to use the keyword you are bidding on in the
headline of your ad.

* Make sure your landing page is relevant. Don’t try to sell guitar lessons on your landing page when
your ad is talking about an easy way to learn piano.

Tweaking Your PPC Campaigns For Maximum Profits


If you are having difficulties to make your PPC campaign profitable or if your profits keep on declining it
might be time for a rigorous campaign checkup.

Here are a few points you might want to verify on a regular basis:

* How well do your keywords perform? Ok, there are actually 2 levels of performance: Conversion rate
and click-through rate. If both of them are bad, simply delete the corresponding keywords. If CTR is bad,
but conversion is good, keep the keyword.

* If a keyword is far from being profitable – for example, if your click cost per sale is about 1.5 – 2 times the
profit you make per sale – delete is as well. On the other hand, if a keyword is just slightly unprofitable, try
first to optimize your campaign (ads and landing pages) before deleting the keyword.

* How tightly focused are your adgroups? Make sure that all keywords in your adgroup (if you are using
adgroups with multiple keywords) build a tightly focused th
Tips & Warnings

*
If you are using Google Analytics, you should check out the Firefox Plugin at Analytics Talk. The plugin
allows you to easily add notes to GA which allow you to better analyze your business data. Notes are
shown at the top of every report. Also, no data is stored on your own machine, everything is hosted on
Google’s servers and that’s also where all the data processing happens.
*
Do not use Google Adwords before learning it because it can make you or brake you. Click here to get
this great tool that will make it a lot easier for you.
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