If you were part of the earliest generation of internet users, you might cringe when you see the term “banner ads.”
But the reality is, banner ads are a remarkably effective advertising strategy in the modern era – and they’ve come a long way from the obnoxious, flashing prototypes of yesteryear.
When you place banner ads, you can pay for them in any number of different ways. You might purchase banner ads with a pay per click (PPC) strategy where you only pay for the clicks you receive. But it’s more common to pay for impressions.
For example, if you have an ad with a $5 CPM rate, you’ll pay a meager $5 for each 1,000 views of the ad on a target website.
If you’re optimizing for brand awareness or the highest stages of your sales funnel, impressions might be enough. But for the rest of us, it’s important to optimize for clicks in this scenario. After all, if you’re not generating clicks, you’re probably not generating revenue. And if you’re not generating revenue, you’re not going to have a positive return on investment (ROI).
So what steps can you take to increase banner ad clicks?
Most of us remember the troubled history of banner ads.
Aggressive banner ads were on almost every website, flashing and shaking to get our attention while advertising some truly questionable products and services.
But modern banner ads are much more refined. These advertisements are highly targeted, they’re designed to be both relevant to a target audience and appropriate for the website on which they’re featured. And they must be as noninvasive as possible – or else, they’re going to be removed by the hosting website or the distribution network.
You also need to keep in mind that most web users remember or at least acknowledge a past in which banner ads were spammy and annoying. People, in general, don’t like obnoxious advertisements, so they’ll willfully ignore most of the overt banner ads they encounter in the wild. In other words, you have your work cut out for you.
If you’re going to keep your ads rotating and relevant in modern times, while simultaneously pleasing your target audience, you need to optimize those ads to be as relevant and attractive as possible.
Let’s look at the strategies that can help you get there.
Now for the meat of this article: how to increase banner ad clicks.
These are some of the best tactics for earning more clicks from your banner ads across your entire campaign:
Your first priority should be better understanding your target audience. Who are your target demographics and how are you going to appeal to them? Some advertisers make the mistake of appealing to the most general, universal audience, with the hope of reaching a greater number of people – but this is a mistake. It’s typically better to have very specific content that’s relevant to a defined niche, even if that niche is relatively small. Do the upfront work of conducting market research and thorough surveys so you can understand more about how your demographics think, how they make purchasing decisions, and how they might respond to different types of advertising. With this information, you’ll be able to craft ads and messages that are much more appealing and persuasive.
Google has some important rules and guidelines you’ll want to follow for your website banner ad campaigns. Even if you’re displaying these ads on a different network, these are good rules of thumb to follow.
Your banner ads can’t contain any flashing or shaking elements designed to hijack the attention of users; they also can’t masquerade as part of the website, tricking users into taking action through deception or false information. This type of display advertising should always follow ethical guidelines to ensure you don’t fall victim to banner blindness, where users instinctively ignore ads that feel intrusive or deceptive.
In general, if you treat your users with respect and commit to straightforward honesty, you should have no trouble getting through these filters.
Your banner ads will attract far more clicks if they’re placed on websites that are relevant to your users as well as what you’re selling. This is why ad placement is crucial. For example, let’s say you have a business that sells mountain biking gear. Do you think your website banner ad will attract more clicks on a forum for outdoorsmen or a website that brings together a crocheting community?
There’s probably some overlap between crocheters and mountain bikers, but we can safely assume that the outdoorsy website is going to yield better results. Fortunately, Google Ads and other digital advertising networks give you considerable control over what types of websites host your banner campaigns.
The design of your ad is arguably the most important variable to perfect, since it’s going to be responsible for forming first impressions and attracting the attention necessary for your words to have an impact.
It’s important that the aesthetic is specifically appealing to your target demographics and aligns with your brand identity. For example, younger audiences might prefer brighter colors and more exciting, dynamic content, while older audiences might appreciate more subtlety and minimalism.
Young parents might appreciate relevant images of children and families spending time together, while wealthy buyers of luxury products want to see images of a lavish lifestyle. A great example of effective display advertising is ensuring that visuals match the emotions and aspirations of your potential customers.
Banner campaigns come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but they generally occupy a minimal amount of space on a website. It’s tempting to cram as much information as possible into this relatively small canvas, but minimalism is a safer strategy.
If you make use of white space, and only include the designs and information that are truly valuable, you’ll make the most of the space you have while simultaneously avoiding the risk of overwhelming your audience. A well-balanced ad can boost traffic to your website and help increase brand awareness among new and returning users.
A clever tagline or hook is another way to capture user attention. Website banner ads don’t typically provide you with much space, so you need to reduce your message to its simplest possible form. Instead of giving your users a bulleted list of advantages granted by your product, or explaining to them why your services are useful in a full paragraph, you have to get your point across and motivate action in the span of one or two sentences.
This can be a difficult task even for the best copywriters, so spend some extra time brainstorming and whittling down your list of possibilities. Try to motivate action without resorting to clichés; the more original and exciting your hook is, the better your average click-through rate will be.
Search ads may drive traffic to your site, but a well-designed website banner ad with a compelling hook can be just as effective in digital marketing. The right balance of visuals, copy, and strategic placement will help you get more clicks, drive conversions, and enhance your overall advertising success.
If you want people to click through, you need to give them a clear motivation, so try to include a clear call to action (CTA). Action words tend to be more effective than other types of language; for example, a phrase like “clean your kitchen faster than ever – shop now!” will probably generate more clicks than “wish your kitchen was cleaner, faster?” even though both phrases are topically similar.
People will be much more likely to click if you stimulate their curiosity. Instead of telling them or showing them everything up front, get them thinking about the possibilities. For example, a phrase like “ever wonder what a better dating app could look like?” will probably generate more clicks than a phrase like “the dating app you’ve always wanted” accompanied by still images that show off the best features of the app immediately.
I know this goes against most design fundamentals, and will probably irritate half of our audience, but the reality is, ugly ads can perform well. Why? Maybe some of us have a morbid curiosity. Maybe “beautiful” ads are so abundant that people long for something different. Or maybe especially ugly ads are simply better at generating initial attention. Whatever the case, we’ve found that deliberately ugly ads have the potential to generate clicks in a powerful way. It doesn’t always work, and you have to be careful not to damage your brand reputation, but it’s a worthwhile strategy to keep in your back pocket.
Just because the ad is displayed on a website doesn’t mean that people are going to see it, even if they’re counted as an impression. If you want to get more user attention, and therefore more clicks, you need to stand out with bolder visuals. The best visual elements are ones that provide strong contrast; ideally, you’ll break away from the style of the website hosting the ad while simultaneously presenting something visually stimulating, like complementary colors. Experiment with different placements to see how your ad might fit in the context of different types of websites. You might be surprised to find how much it blends in without a deliberate effort to help it stand out.
There’s no rule that says you can’t have any animation in your banner ads, though aggressive animations like flashing and shaking could get your ad removed. When used responsibly, animations can draw more attention to your banner ad, ultimately inviting more clicks and forming a better impression with your users. If you choose to do this, make sure your animation is eye-catching, yet subtle enough to avoid disrupting users unnecessarily. Slow pans or zooms could be exactly what you need.
Before we conclude this article, we need to stress an important truth: clicks aren’t everything.
In following this guide, and developing more banner ad campaigns, you’ll be tempted to optimize for clicks at the expense of every other metric. It’s true that clicks are a good thing for your campaign, but you can’t afford to neglect other performance indicators and important variables.
For example, you’ll still need to think about the engagement value and conversion rates of your landing pages. Even if you have the best banner ad in the world that generates an insane number of clicks, your strategy will fall apart if your landing page is unengaging or incapable of facilitating conversions.
Put simply, clicks are just one part of a “balanced diet” of banner ad metrics to track. Try not to lose sight of this in your pursuit of advertising greatness.
Hopefully, our strategies and tips have been helpful in reshaping your banner advertising strategy.
But there’s no such thing as a perfect approach to advertising; you can always make your ads more relevant and better at generating clicks.
If you want to continuously optimize your banner ad campaign, this is the process you’ll need to follow moving forward:
Banner ads are easy to display, but tough to master.
If you want your banner ads to stand out and get more clicks, or if you just need help fine-tuning your existing display ad strategy, we’ve got you covered. At PPC.co, we have a robust team of seasoned experts to help you accomplish all your digital advertising goals.
Contact our expert PPC agency today for more information!
Now that most businesses operate online, the competition has increased exponentially in many industries.
It’s becoming harder to increase revenue without employing advanced eCommerce marketing strategies. When running paid ads, it’s getting more expensive to acquire new customers, and successful ads require more planning than ever before.
Although an increase in competition doesn’t mean you can’t be successful. It just means you need to work a little harder to get results. The good news is you can start driving more sales by using the following 9 simple and effective eCommerce marketing strategies.
Remarketing, also called retargeting, is a PPC ad strategy that can go deep. This is a strategy that anyone can employ, with any level of experience, but there is no limit to how detailed you can get.
Retargeting is when you run PPC ads that specifically target only users who have previously interacted with your brand, either by visiting your website or clicking on your ads. Since 92% of first-time visitors don’t intend to buy, you can influence them into making a purchase by showing them more ads. This keeps them in your marketing funnel even when you don’t know who they are; you don’t need their email address to nurture them.
The statistics vary between organizations, but generally speaking, a solid remarketing campaign can boost conversions by around 50%. Those are not small potatoes!
When people see your ads more than once, your brand becomes familiar to them and makes them more likely to click, provided the ad is relevant to what they want. This is why market research and selecting your target audience are important.
Google’s Shopping campaigns are the perfect way to reach consumers right when they’re searching for something specific that you happen to offer. When a user searches for a phrase related to your products, your ads will show up at the top of the search results. You can include important information in your ads, like product images, prices, special offers, customer ratings, and anything else designed to persuade users to click.
How it works is pretty simple. First, you create a master list of product data in a spreadsheet that identifies your products and all the pertinent information. This gets uploaded to Google’s Merchant Center, which you’ll connect to your Google Ads account. From there, Google’s algorithm will automatically spin up ads for your products based on user search queries.
Instead of creating one campaign with one Ad Group that gets divided into product groups, consider running separate campaigns tailored to attributes that are important to your market. For instance, you can run a generic campaign, a brand campaign, and a campaign that runs ads based on brand and size queries.
This way, you’ll reach people searching for generic terms (like “men’s hoodies”), brand-specific terms (like “Nike men’s hoodies”), and size-specific searches (like “Nike men’s hoodies XXL”). This type of structure is superior because you get better control over negative keywords, and increasing your bids will yield more targeted impressions and clicks.
If you don’t use this more nuanced ad structure, you’ll have to remove items from your entire feed if you want to exclude them, and some of your products might never be seen. Implementing a content marketing strategy alongside this structure can further improve your ad effectiveness by engaging customers with valuable content that complements your paid advertising efforts.
You’ll have more campaigns to manage, but it’s worth the effort because it will get you more targeted traffic in the long run. If you’re looking for ways to drive a bunch of relevant traffic to your ecommerce store, you need to run Google Shopping ads. These ads not only help you generate sales but also improve your brand’s visibility across search engines and other marketing channels.
One last tip is to use remarketing with your Shopping ads. The average conversion for Google Shopping ads is just under 2%, which doesn’t seem like much. However, these ads work well as the foundation for a powerful retargeting campaign. Leveraging digital marketing techniques like customer retention strategies can increase your repeat conversions and long-term revenue.
Did you know that Amazon’s brand ads convert an average of three times higher than Google Shopping Ads? Running ads on Amazon is crucial for your online store. The sponsored brand ads, in particular, will promote up to three products at a time and get displayed in search results across the site.
Since they show up when users are looking for something specific, it makes sense that they’d see a high conversion rate. Additionally, incorporating user-generated content such as reviews and testimonials can boost credibility and engagement, further improving your ecommerce sales.
Are you against using pop-up ads to avoid annoying users? This is common among marketers, but it’s based on a myth. Pop-ups have a reputation for being off-putting to web users, but that’s not actually deserved.
In spite of this reputation, there are plenty of effective pop-up ad strategies that are proven to generate higher conversion rates, whether it’s sales or email list signups. Pop-ups can be an excellent content marketing tool when used correctly, as they capture leads and encourage immediate action.
You can use pop-ups with your marketing efforts as long as they adhere to Google’s guidelines. If you place a pop-up ad on a landing page, it needs to directly represent the offer in your ad, or else people will bounce. It’s risky, but when combined with search engine optimization and social media campaigns, it can yield big conversions when done right.
If you’re not cross-selling and upselling, you’re leaving money on the table. Both of these strategies are proven methods to increase conversions.
Upselling is when you aim to increase the value of each purchase. Cross-selling is increasing the number of items on the sales ticket. For example, if you run a custom t-shirt shop, cross-selling might include offering customers the same designs on a baseball hat, or providing a discount on additional t-shirts. Upselling might involve offering an upgrade to a higher quality, more expensive t-shirt fabric (like organic cotton or hemp).
These marketing methods will boost revenue, increase customer satisfaction, and support your efforts to build long-term relationships with loyal customers. However, the items you cross-sell need to be relevant to the customer’s needs or it won’t work.
One of the best examples of cross-selling can be seen in the marketing for Dollar Shave Club. Before a subscription box is mailed out, customers get an email asking if they would like to add any additional products to their order, like aftershave, wet wipes, or hair care products.
Cross-selling and upselling are convenient because they won’t cost you any additional marketing spend and they can help you acquire more customers affordably. With the right application connected to your shopping cart system, all you need to do is program the offers once and they’ll run on their own.
You may have heard expert digital marketers say that social marketing is only good for building brand awareness and isn’t ideal for sales. Well, that’s not entirely true. It depends on the platform and your market. For example, Instagram has a built-in shopping feature that makes it easy for people to buy from businesses. All you need is a Facebook product catalog, and you can tag your products in your Instagram posts. Now, when your fan base sees your posts promoting your products, they can click on your tags to visit your product pages instead of having to search your website for the awesome products they just saw on Instagram.
Social shopping on Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms, reduces the friction users feel when searching for products. Your followers can buy from you seamlessly and easily right from your posts.
You’ve probably visited a website or received an email from a company that was promoting another business. This is called cross-promotion, and it’s one of the most effective eCommerce marketing strategies around.
The basic idea is that you find a company to partner with who will promote your products. Sometimes you’ll land a mutual agreement, but not always. These kinds of deals usually require payment as a percentage of sales brought in by the company promoting your business. For example, if company A promotes your t-shirts and their efforts generate $5,000 for the month, you’ll pay them a percentage of that amount that you agree on ahead of time.
One eCommerce marketing tactic that gets big results is social proof. Your potential customers need to see proof that you are a trustworthy business and that you have great products. Social proof (like reviews and testimonials) goes a long way to impress potential customers and influence them to buy from you.
Your leads are most likely on a budget and they don’t want to risk wasting money on something that doesn’t work or live up to their standards. They’re going to be selective, so you need extra reinforcement to convince them to make a purchase. Reviews and testimonials are exactly that.
Make sure you display product ratings and customer reviews on all of your product pages. At first, it may take you a while to generate a substantial amount of reviews, but after a while, you’ll get them and they will help persuade new customers.
You don’t need to get only positive reviews, either. Having a mix of positive and negative is actually seen as more trustworthy than having a 100% five-star rating. Your products won’t be for everyone, and some reviews under five stars will still be helpful. Knowing what didn’t work for others might help people choose between different items, for example. Even if a review deflects sales from some people, that’s okay, because you can’t please everyone.
Referral marketing is another term for word-of-mouth marketing, and it’s one of the most effective methods you can employ. People take the opinions of others very seriously, and that includes friends, family, and online reviews. According to a BrightLocal survey, 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they trust recommendations made by friends. That’s some big trust for opinions posted by strangers.
So, how do you start referral marketing? How do you get people to post reviews and recommend you to their friends? The short answer is to start incentivizing referrals. The simplest way to do this is by offering a cash bonus to anyone who refers a paying customer to you. Give people referral links, and anyone who makes a purchase from a link will generate a cash reward for the link’s owner. This is simple and effective.
If you want a successful marketing campaign, you need the right tools and the expertise to turn leads into sales. We can help you with this. Whether you need high-converting PPC ads, Facebook and Google ad management, a PPC audit, better landing pages, or a full package deal, we have you covered.
We work with Google, Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, and LinkedIn ads, plus we offer display ads and retargeting management. We can create, manage, or improve any paid ad campaigns you need.
Contact us today to learn more about our PPC ad management services and get a free proposal for your business.
04/When it comes to PPC advertising, getting people to click on your ad is only half the battle. From there, you also need them to click on the call to action (CTA) on your landing page.
That’s the only way to actually convert leads. So if your landing pages are struggling to convert visitors, maybe it’s your CTA.
Fortunately, there are many ways to get more users to click on your CTAs. You just need to learn the tricks of the trade.
In this article, we’ll go over what those landing page CTA best practices are, but first, let’s define what a CTA is in the first place.
A call to action (CTA) is the most important part of a PPC landing page. It’s what converts visitors into leads and drives your conversion goals.
Basically, a CTA is a prompt that invites users to take a specific action.
Most CTAs offer something valuable (like a free ebook download or newsletter signup) in exchange for the user’s contact information (like their name and email address).
The point of the CTA is to lead potential customers into your sales funnel. From there, you can nurture them with more valuable content until they eventually make a purchase.
So how do you make the CTAs on your landing pages as effective as possible? Here are ten tips:
The call to action button is just what it sounds like. It’s a virtual button on your landing page that contains the CTA text. For example, the call to action button might be a green rectangle that includes the words “Download Your Free Ebook.”
Whatever your call to action button is, you want it to stand out from the rest of the page. To do this, you can use a different text font (e.g., bolded or italic) and contrasting colors.
Humans are visual creatures, which means (among other things) that we are naturally attracted to sharp variations in colors. You can use this to your advantage by playing off different color contrasts. For example, if your landing page background is blue, you might make your call to action button orange so it really stands out.
You can also try using a free online color scheme generator to come up with ideas. A good CTA example would be one that blends seamlessly with the rest of the page elements while still grabbing users’ attention.
Source: https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/color-scheme-definitions-types-examples
Another way to make your call to action button stand out is to play with its size. Make it big enough to call attention but not so big that it becomes too distracting from reading the rest of the page.
By focusing on the visual design of your call to action button, you can encourage users to click on it and improve the overall conversion rate of your marketing campaigns.
When writing a call to action, it’s easy to resort to phrases like “contact us” or “learn more.” But such calls to action are so overused that many people gloss over them.
Instead, try to put yourself in your target customers' shoes. What are their pain points? Then craft your CTA according to that.
For example, if your target customers have a hard time remembering birthdays, lure them in with a CTA that says “Install this scheduling tool to never forget another birthday.” It’s much more specific and tailored to the value proposition your service provides.
That said, you also need to make sure you keep your CTA clear and to the point. Most people skim the internet, whether they’re reading a blog post or browsing an online store. So if your CTA copy is too long or clever, people will probably move on. And if you can’t convince them to click on your call to action button the first time, they probably never will.
So make your CTA crystal clear. Say exactly what you want the web visitor to do and exactly what they’ll get by clicking. Use action words to evoke a quick reaction.
By writing clearly and directly, your CTA will be much more persuasive.
The last thing you want is for visitors to be looking for a call to action button on your landing page and not find it.
To ensure people always have the opportunity to click the call to action button, place it somewhere it can always be seen. For example, you could include it in a floating header or footer that moves along the web page as the user scrolls up or down.
The point is you want the CTA placement to be visible, no matter where the web visitor goes on the page. If you only place it at the end of the page, visitors may never get to it or see it.
The call to action button should be easy to locate. So, place it where it makes the most sense, whether on desktops or mobile devices.
That said, you don’t want to include so many calls to action that you come across as too pushy or spammy. This will only turn people off.
But you also don’t want web visitors to leave your page without clicking on the call to action button. Otherwise, what’s the point?
So, find the right CTA frequency balance.
Even if you place multiple CTAs across your landing page, you want to stick to just one kind. Here’s what I mean:
If the landing page’s main purpose is to get visitors to sign up for your email marketing list, don’t also include CTAs to order a product off your website.
You can have multiple CTAs, but they shouldn’t call on visitors to perform more than one action.
Why? Asking target customers to do more than one thing can be confusing. In fact, this may overwhelm them so that they don’t click on any call to action button at all.
If you have multiple marketing campaigns running, create separate landing pages for each of them. That way, each blog post or landing page is focused on one specific value proposition and action.
Having an attractive CTA is not enough. You also need to direct visitors’ attention to it with visual cues.
You can do this in two ways: subtle or not-so-subtle cues.
A subtle visual cue could be images or converging lines whose linear pathways indirectly point toward the CTA—like a photo of someone whose eyes are looking at the CTA. Users will then subconsciously want to look there, too.
Source: https://instapage.com/blog/what-are-visual-cues
A conspicuous visual cue could be bright red arrows that point toward the CTA. This can also be effective, but you must be careful not to make it appear too distracting or promotional.
Whatever you do, you want your landing page to have a clean visual flow that ultimately directs users to the CTA button.
Another way to make your CTA stand out is to put white space around it.
White space (aka negative space) refers to the areas of your landing page that don’t have any text or images—nothing.
While you might think white space is a waste of precious real estate, it’s not. It actually helps provide some balance to your landing page and, if used artfully, can actually make your CTA stand out.
For one, if you leave a lot of white space around the CTA, it won’t look cluttered—like it’s drowning in text and graphics. Instead, it will stand out because it’s set off by itself.
Play with the white space around your CTA to call more attention to it.
Source: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/the-power-of-white-space
To stand out, your CTA also has to offer something unique. What are the benefits of clicking on it? How will it improve your visitors’ lives? What’s in it for them? If your CTA doesn’t answer these questions, you may want to rethink it.
Consider your typical visitor’s pain points. Then show how your offer is a solution to their problems.
For example, if your CTA is to sign up for a weekly newsletter that offers actionable tips on how to double your productivity, point that out. In this case, your CTA might read “Sign Up for My Weekly Newsletter to 2X Your Productivity.”
At the end of the day, concrete and relevant benefits help sell visitors on your CTA.
People are heavily influenced by their emotions. Though the rational brain plays a role in the decision-making process, emotions play an arguably bigger one.
That’s why it’s important for your CTA to appeal to people’s emotions. If you tap into people’s emotions, visitors are more likely to pay attention and click.
For example, you might create a sense of urgency by promoting a limited-time offer. This may activate their fear of missing out (FOMO). Or you might appeal to their sense of danger with a CTA that says “Sign the Petition to Keep Your Neighborhood Safe.”
Don’t forget to also surround the CTA with relevant images (where appropriate).
So if, for example, the CTA calls on the reader to improve their life by getting a copy of your new self-help book, include a photo of someone reading the book with a smile on their face next to the CTA.
This will draw a more immediate emotional response from the user than words alone ever could. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.
Last but not least, subject your landing page CTAs to A/B tests.
An A/B test (aka split test) refers to developing two slightly different versions of something (in this case a CTA) and then running a test to see which performs better according to common marketing metrics like click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate.
You could test a CTA’s button size, copy, color, font, placement, page frequency, and more. Just make sure to test only one variable at a time so you can narrow down what exactly is contributing to a CTAs performance.
By constantly conducting A/B tests, you can gradually fine-tune your landing page CTA until it becomes a reliable conversion machine.
Now that you know the best practices for crafting effective PPC landing page CTAs, you’re ready to take your marketing to the next level.
Don’t have the time or manpower to handle your ad campaigns? That’s okay. We’re here to help.
Partner with PPC.co to take advantage of our managed PPC services. We can help you run ads across Google, Bing, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more. Whatever your advertising needs, we have you covered.
We’ll also help you optimize your landing page CTAs so that they bring you more business. To get started, contact us for a free proposal. We look forward to chatting!
Keywords are, arguably, the most important piece of your pay per click (PPC) advertising strategy.
Choose the right keywords and you’ll reach the right people. You’ll get more impressions and clicks. You’ll get more purchases from the clicks you generate. And you’ll even spend less money in the long run, since you won’t be wasting money on bad matches or weak opportunities.
The problem is, choosing and controlling keywords in PPC advertising is challenging.
Yes, even for the pros.
There are so many keywords to choose from and so many different controls you can use to tinker with your campaign that it’s almost inevitable to make conversion mistakes – and if not outright mistakes, then inefficiencies that reduce your potential.
Fortunately, once you understand some of the most common and impactful keyword mistakes in PPC advertising, you can take caution to avoid them and optimize your campaign for the better.
These are some of the most common keyword mistakes in PPC advertising we see from clients, competitors, and other advertisers online.
Optimizing a PPC ad campaign is all about improving efficiency. It’s almost impossible to be efficient if you’re using too many keywords at once. On one hand, we understand the temptation to keep adding keywords; each new keyword is a new potential demographic segment and a new opportunity for your brand. But it’s usually better to keep your selection of keywords relatively narrow and focused.
There are a few main problems with using too many keywords. For starters, your attention is going to be split across too many different areas; instead of becoming a true expert on a small handful of keywords, you’ll end up knowing very little about the dozens you’re following. Additionally, you’ll be wasting money on keywords that are strictly underperforming your best options.
If you want to fix this problem, simply focus on a narrower range of keywords. Generally, you should only keep the keywords that are generating around 200 clicks or more – and filter out any keywords that seem to perform worse than your best ones (as well as ones that seem irrelevant).
At first glance, using broad match keywords seems like a no-brainer. With broad match turned on, your keywords are going to appear for a wide variety of different searches, including those that are synonymous with your main keyword and some types of related searches. That means your ad is going to appear to a wider range of people and earn more impressions.
However, using broad match keywords recklessly and without strategic focus is usually bad for your campaign. More isn’t always better in the world of PPC advertising; in fact, it’s usually worse. You’re better off targeting a small handful of people who are positioned to buy your product than targeting thousands of people who are practically irrelevant. This is one of the common keyword research mistakes that can drain your budget without delivering real results.
You can fix this in a few different ways. For example, you could stop leaning too heavily on broad match keywords and start focusing on phrase match and exact match keywords, which give you much more precise targeting options. This aligns better with search intent, ensuring your ads are shown to users who are genuinely interested in what you offer.
You can also use broad match more effectively with the use of modifiers, which allow you to control how your keywords are considered with respect to search engines and user searches. As examples, adding a + to a word will ensure it appears in every search – and including phrases in [brackets] will make sure the entire phrase is present in every search. Implementing these refinements is a crucial part of a strong SEO strategy and effective keyword research.
Ad groups exist to give you more insight and control over your PPC ad campaigns, so try to avoid misusing them by compiling keywords into bulky and unnecessarily large groups. If you put all your conceivable targeting options into one gigantic mass, you’ll have difficulty delineating the different elements of your strategy.
Instead, make sure each of your ad groups is laser-focused on a specific theme (such as a product or service you offer, a geographic location, etc.). The exact theme doesn’t matter much, as long as you’re using ad groups strategically.
Most newcomers to the PPC game are so focused on finding the perfect keywords to add to their campaign that they don’t realize how powerful negative keywords can be. In case you aren’t familiar with them, negative keywords are keywords that you don’t want to appear for a given search. You can use these to filter out specific types of people who may not be interested in what you’re selling – and save money in the process.
If you don’t use negative keywords at all, you’re probably missing out on your true potential in this field. For example, imagine you’re advertising a bakery and you’re placing ads for people who are searching for “chocolate chip cookies.” You want to appeal to people who might buy your chocolate chip cookies, but people who search for this phrase might be looking for recipes or instructions for how to make their own; you can filter out this traffic simply by adding negative keywords like “-recipe.”
There’s a certain point in most PPC ad campaigns when managers begin to feel confident in what they’re doing. Your ads are working period you’re getting clicks. You can claim the campaign is profitable. What do you do at this point?
Novices are typically tempted to keep things running exactly as they are, potentially indefinitely. After all, if it ain’t broke, you don’t fix it, right?
The logic here makes sense, to a degree, but if you go this route, you’ll be crippling your potential. You’ll miss out on all the experiments that could push your campaign further and all the little refinements that could make your campaign even more efficient. Instead of remaining complacent with decent results, you should always strive for better results. That doesn’t mean you have to change your entire campaign, but you should be allocating at least a portion of your budget to pushing for more.
What’s your ad conversion rate like? If this metric is disappointingly low, it could be an indication that your ads aren’t relevant for the keywords you’re choosing. This may sound like a simple and obvious problem, but it’s something that many advertisers run into.
Remember, the people searching for this keyword phrase are looking for something specific. If your ad isn’t carefully crafted to appeal to those people, it’s not going to get much interaction. Always make sure that your keywords and advertisements are very closely aligned.
When it comes to audience targeting, you have to think beyond mere demographics. You also have to think beyond simple product or service searches. If you want to add more power to your campaign, you need to think about your specific sales funnel and how searchers might fall into that sales funnel.
Different businesses and different industries model their sales funnels in unique ways, but usually, sales funnels follow a process similar to awareness > consideration > purchase. Targeting the right people at the right stage of the sales funnel could dramatically increase your results. Choosing specific phrases and including keyword modifiers targeted to people at the end of the sales funnel could greatly increase the number of people making purchases after clicking your ads. At the same time, targeting people earlier in the sales funnel could help you avoid some of the most prominent competition in your industry, saving you money while earning you customer loyalty.
The only wrong approach is to ignore the sales funnel in your strategy entirely.
Landing pages play a massive role in determining the success of your PPC campaign. No matter how well your ads perform or how much traffic do you generate, your campaign is going to fall flat if you aren’t able to convert your new visitors.
The critical flaw here for most PPC advertisers is a landing page that doesn’t match the ad or doesn’t match the keyword phrase. If you promise a special discount in your ad, that discount better be present on your landing page. If you’re advertising running shoes, don’t take your visitors to a landing page that features boots.
Obviously, you’ll also need to spend time optimizing this landing page so it’s as persuasive and perceptibly trustworthy as possible.
The bulk of your campaign is going to focus on product and service keywords, but if you totally neglect brand keywords, you’ll be sabotaging your own potential.
Many people ignore brand keywords entirely because they feel like these targeting options are practically irrelevant. After all, if a customer already knows about your brand, there’s no use trying to raise their brand awareness further. And there’s a good chance your brand website is already ranking at position one for brand keyword searches.
However, there are some good reasons to bid on your own brand keywords. Branded keywords have the potential to increase your account’s quality score. They almost guarantee your brand will be featured at the top of the search results page. You’ll generate more traffic to your website. And perhaps best of all, this serves as a competitive defense – so your worst competitors can’t try and dethrone you by targeting your branded keywords.
Targeting competitor brand keywords, eh? If you’ve never considered the option before, you’re certainly considering it now. Bidding on the branded keywords of a competitor can be a powerful, if cutthroat move. You can siphon traffic from a major competitor, increasing your traffic while dealing a blow to your peers simultaneously.
However, it’s reckless to approach this without an effective strategy. If your ads aren’t relevant to the people conducting these searches, you’re not going to generate clicks, and your quality score could go down. If you don’t have a plan to convert these prospects, you’ll end up wasting money trying to sabotage competitors rather than building your own business. And the worst part is, if you’re actively trying to sabotage your competitors, you could end up harming your brand reputation.
None of this means that you have to avoid targeting competitor brand keywords. It just means you need to have a carefully considered strategy in place for them.
We’ve covered 10 of the most common mistakes that people make with keywords in the PPC world, but this list is by no means comprehensive. There are many other strategic flaws and examples of poor decision-making that can negatively impact your campaign.
On top of that, the PPC ad world is always changing with new controls and features for advertisers, new competitors, and changing consumer attitudes. Search engine algorithms are constantly evolving, which means what worked yesterday might not work today.
If you want to avoid all PPC ad mistakes (or at least as many as possible), you should follow these important golden rules:
Are you tired of PPC advertising mistakes bogging down your otherwise profitable campaign?
Do you need some extra guidance in targeting the best possible PPC keywords?
PPC.co is here for you. We’ve got the experts. We’ve got the experience. All you need to do is reach out and we’ll send you a free proposal. Contact us today!
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