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If you’ve been trying to tackle the ever-evolving world of PPC, we can help. We’ve been in the industry for over 10 years and understand the insurmountable amount of information there is to go through when attempting to create, maintain, and optimize ad campaigns. Forget the do’s, below are the list of don’ts you want to run through regularly to ensure that your marketing efforts are paying off.
Pinching Pennies On Bids
Let’s say that you are a jewelry vendor, and you’ve set your bids low for keywords that are highly relevant to your brand. Examples of essential keywords can be:
- Fashion jewelry
- Statement rings
- Baguette rings
Let’s go with the assumption that the $50 bid made on the keywords is too low. Depending on the field, you may be up against someone bidding $150 for the same keyword, which probably resulted in your campaign having performed poorly.
If you were to up the ante on your bids and paid more for clicks, you could:
- Improve that Quality Score on your campaigns
- Get back to that initial bid range
- Achieve the conversions you were aiming for
Why does this happen? Because higher bids will usually get a jump in impression shares, which contributes to your Quality Score and competitive enough to win the placement in the user’s search results.
Having Similar Campaigns Across Different Networks
Search and Display networks are very different ad platforms, but some marketers make the mistake of creating similar campaigns for each.
Ads within the search network are based on the keywords that users use in their search query. Once triggered through a user’s search, your ad could appear on the page of their search results. Check out an example of a text ad for the search network below.
Separately, the Display Network is composed of a humongous list of sites that display ads. Ads should go up when cued by:
- Keywords and topics related to your product or service
- Selecting certain websites or pages
- Selecting audiences based on interests, demographics, or activity on your website
Below is a banner ad in the Display network. It includes a fixed image, a message, and a call out!
There is a different dynamic behind each, so it doesn’t make sense to set them up in a similar way.
Slacking Off With Updates
To understand PPC today is not to say that you will understand it tomorrow. Machine learning and technology is evolving at a pace that is extremely difficult to keep up with. This is one of the reasons that marketers hire PPC experts to stay on top of their campaigns. A lack of time or resources can lead to blind spots and poor performing ads.
You can be proactive about staying aligned with the industry by:
- Subscribing to industry blogs (such as this one!) to stay informed of changes in features, tools, and strategies
- Periodically visiting the Help Centers on either Google or Microsoft
- Using tools such as AdInsights by White Shark Media. The AdInsights tool will walk you through performance insights of your PPC accounts and will showcase exactly what you are doing wrong or not doing at all on your Google Ads or Microsoft Ads accounts.
You can begin applying the points mentioned above to your strategy today. Stay tuned for Part II on What Not To Do in PPC. Subscribe to our blog and get it sent in your inbox as soon as it posts!
