If you are running an online business, the use of Pay Per Click (PPC) ads for your product has a much higher significance over anything else. The more is the number of clicks on your ads, the more is the number of leads and customers you have reached.
However, there are some Google Ads common mistakes that if done, will affect the reach of your PPC ads, resulting in lower than desirable results. Here are the following common mistakes one makes while creating Google Ads:
1. Incorrect Keyword Matching
There are three types of keyword matching which are synonymous with Google Ads:
- Broad match – In this, your advertisement will be visible to the person searching about the exact keywords selected by you. This search is irrespective of the order of the keywords, in case if it is a long tail keyword. These keywords should be free of any punctuation mark.
- Phrase match – The Phrase match too employs on the idea of projecting on ad on the basis of your keywords which the person has inserted for searching. However, unlike in broad match, the order of the words should be in exact same order as the keyword selected by you for your ad’s visibility.
- Exact match keyword – This is a more enhanced and precise form of phrase match. For this, the spellings and order of the keywords you are targeting should be exactly the same as inserted in search bar. For this, the keywords designated should be written within squared brackets, which will lead to precise and optimum search result.
If any of the order or requirement of the keyword match type is ruled out, the Google Ad might not be visible optimally.
2. Lack of Ad Extensions
Even after the use of optimal keyword match type, the ad might still not be visible, if you haven’t selected the optimized ad extension. For best possible ROI, one needs to adjust his/her settings with ad extensions. With ad extensions, one can use sitelinks, call and location extensions, all of which optimize the ad. This encourages more customers to click on your ads, thus making your landing page high-converting. The ad extensions also help on enriching snippets for PPC ads. If you are using wrong ad extensions, the ad will appear misarranged or unappealing to the user.
3. Lack of Knowledge of Profit Margins
Whether a business is offline or online, complete knowledge of the margins of profit and tracking of conversion of your ad is a must. This is actually helpful in increasing both short term and long term profits, thus improving your revenue in a whole. For PPC ads, the conversion of incoming inquiries should be monitored through the ‘tools and analysis’ bar in the menu option, clicking on which a new tab of ‘add new conversion’ pops up. The correct profit margin for a PPC ad for a Google ad campaign can be calculated through the following formula –
[(RPC x margin) x clicks] – (CPC x clicks) / Total clicks
4. Lack of Use of Negative Keywords
There are some keywords which are not yet registered with Google but are of high-quality and less detrimental to bid. Such keywords are called negative keywords. Using a negative keyword will help a person in filtering keywords which might be popular but are unfit for his product/service. Using negative keywords can help in reducing the costs of ad and in turn, increasing the revenue and ROI of your search.
For more precise results, it is better to not mix negative keywords with commonly used keywords. Also, negative keywords can also yield more conversions, if Google ads are appearing in both search and display networks.
5. Avoiding Bidding on Your Own Brand
The biggest advantage of bidding on your own brand is that you are promoting your business and having a direct reach to your social media followers. However, sometimes, people avoid bidding on their brand, due to the fact that their keyword attracts less traffic or their brand might be big enough with a very high order of ranking. However, if bidding is done, it can increase reach and revenue even more.
In addition to this, bidding on your brand prevent any other competitor to hack your brand, reducing customer turnover rate and increasing the trust factor among customers for your brand, especially among customers who are loyal to your brand.
6. Unaware of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
If you are running a business online, your customers themselves are an asset and have a lifetime value associated with them. By assessing the customer lifetime value (CLV), you can monitor how much amount you are spending for acquiring one customer. For expenditure on advertisements, the cost per customer is comprised of cost of customer visits, cost of lead acquisition and cost of customer acquisition
Both CLV and ROI are inter-dependent on each other for the growth of your business.
If you are unaware of the CLV, it will be hard for you for adjusting your campaigns and bids on the strategic keywords for a filtered and consistent flow of prospects on your landing page. For increasing the CLV, you need to grow a trust factor among your customers by taking in consistent feedback and encouraging them to grow your business.
7. Inconsistency in Testing The Optimal Position of Ad
For ranking of ads, Google uses the formula of (CPC bid x ad quality score). As per this formula, the more you bid over other advertisers on a particular set of keywords, the more is the possibility of your appearance on top whenever those keywords are searched. Secondly, the ad quality depends on the quality of keywords used as well as click rate. Overall, you need to have a higher quality score to achieve a better rank position of your ad.
You need to consistently track the quality score of your ad and CPC bid, which will help you retain the high position in search results. Before you publish your ad, Google suggests a specific bid amount. You can test your ad based around that bid amount and check the position of your ads. Depending on the results, you can check you ad positions and make necessary changes.
So these were the google ads common mistakes that can turn down your expectations in PPC. Therefore, just ensure that you aren’t the one doing these Google Ads mistakes.