Why your PPC results stink

If you’re reading this, then you’re likely frustrated with your search engine marketing efforts. Maybe you’re losing money on your ads, and even worse, you’re not sure why.  It’s probably one or more of the following.

Your focus is too broad.

It’s easy to think about your business in general terms. But don’t make the mistake of applying that thinking to your Adwords. You’ll get much better results by creating tightly focused ad groups around specific categories.

Say, for instance, you have a shoe store. In addition to an ad group for “shoes,” you’d want to target people searching for specific types of shoes with ad groups for “sneakers,” “men’s dress shoes,” “women’s sandals,” etc.

You aren’t using negative keywords.

This mistake is one of the fastest ways to waste money in SEM. Remember, you’re paying for each click, whether the person clicking has any interest in your offer or not. Negative keywords can help ensure that your ads only show up to your best prospects.

If you ran an adult baseball clinic, you might want to add “youth” as a negative keyword for example. You might also use negative keywords such as “discount” or “cheap” if you don’t have any sort of special offer or lower pricing.

You aren’t using ad extensions.

Ad extensions let you provide additional information, such as a phone number, additional links, reviews or a map with your location. There are a couple of reasons to include this information.

First, it can help improve your click through rate. Not only does it provide more information for people to decide whether to click your ad, but it gets more attention because it takes up more real estate. Plus, if offers more opportunities to include those specific keywords you’re targeting.

Notice how the ad in the middle draws more attention that the other two? That's the power of ad extensions.

Second, this expected increase in response rate also leads to a better ad rank. That means you’ll get better ad placements at lower cost.

Your landing pages aren’t optimized.

People these days are busy and have short attention spans. If they don’t immediately see the information they were expecting, you’ve lost them. Yet so many search marketers send visitors to the home page rather than a specific landing page.

Make sure your landing page is optimized for the goal you’re trying to achieve. Run A/B split or multivariate tests to determine the best placements, colors and copy for key elements such as calls to action, forms and other page content.

You don’t measure and adjust.

You don’t need to obsess over your PPC campaigns on a daily basis, but you will want to make sure to log into your account at least a couple of times a month to analyze results.

See what’s working and what isn’t. Run a couple of ads in each group and compare results. Look for which terms are performing best and delete those that are not providing a positive ROI. Search for ways to optimize your campaigns. For instance, if you notice most of your clicks are coming at a certain time of the day, adjust your settings to show your ads during those peak hours.

Now that you know what you’re doing wrong, you can do something about it. With a little hard work and some time, you should start to see better results.