Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Identifying Causes of PPC Campaign Failure

Most businesses especially the small ones would employ all sorts of cost-effective marketing methods available in order to boost their business’ productivity in terms of generating customers and sales. One such marketing tool is the Pay Per Click or PPC ad campaigns.

PPC advertising is the placement of a small ad on the search results page for a specific keyword for a small fee each time a visitor clicks the ad and diverted to your site. Payment will be based on agreed amount (usually by bidding) and only when the ad is clicked and the visitor ends up in a landing page on your site.

Despite its concept simplicity, PPC tends to fail for the following reasons:

  • Recognizing the importance of keywords
Almost every marketing guru will tell you that for online marketing, the use of proper keywords is very, very important and critical to achieving your goals. By using the properly identified useful keywords in your ad copy, your PPC costs will be less. If you don’t use proper keywords, there will be more clicks with less converts. If your keywords present the accurate information required by the searchers, whoever clicks the ad will turn out to be potential customers.

  • Landing Spot
This is a usual sticky problem. Failure to provide a comfortable landing page or spot other than your homepage causes the PPC ad campaign to fail. PPC trails should never end to a non-directional page where the users get lost. Make sure that you have provided a good landing spot where users will find a similar ad content leading to the target page (not the home page) in your site.

  • Exclusion of Domains thru Negative Keywords
You shouldn’t pay for what you don’t want. Use negative keywords and exclude specific domains which give you traffic that will not make your website profitable.

  • Identifying your Target
Clarity is PPC’s number 1 friend and vagueness is its number 1 enemy. You need to have lots of specifically-focused ads instead of just a few. The results for each ad will vary and you can identify which one garners the best results. Top performers will be displayed more often as they would bring in more conversion. For ads that are not giving you the target results, you can easily dump and replace them with another. This is why it is important that you are ready with more ad materials for PPC.

  • Targeting Position
The ultimate target is to be at position number 1. However, just being in a position that shows up on page one of any search results will be good enough for your campaign. People are more inclined to click all sites that appear on page one anyway.

  • Changes in Panic Mode
Sometimes goals are not met because you missed something on your PPC ads, rendering it not working. Changes should be implemented at a time and not in a rush. This allows you to carefully inject the changes without damaging the content or purpose of the ads.

  • Set and Monitor
Some advertising managers set their target and completely forget about it along the way. Targets are set and monitored to know if the marketing methods are working to your advantage.

  • Monitor your Competition
What use are ad campaigns if they don’t generate sales. One good way to check what people want is to check your competitors to know the kind of press release they have for their sites and their products. The foundation of PPC advertising should focus on what you can offer that people want.

A wrong map will take a traveller to a wrong destination. Similarly, searchers that are not led to the right direction will cause your campaign to fail and go to waste.

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