Pay-per-click
(PPC) advertising is the fastest way to drive instant traffic to your website but it may
cause you to loss money if you
did not use the right techniques to create effective ads that can make
money especially if you use Google AdWords as your advertising platform.
AdWords PPC is the most competitive advertising channels where most of
online marketers are trying to utilize it to generate profits
A
very common mistake is to not turn off the content network ads. The
content network are all the pages that use Google´s AdSense and the
quality of this traffic is usually not very good. To forget to turn off,
or just not knowing about the content network ads being enabled by
default can cost you quite a bit of money with very little or no return.
Using mostly generic keywords and keywords everyone else is
using: Avoid generic keywords, they are usually expensive and they don't
convert very well. Mix in some
long-tail keywords and some very specific "buyer" keywords. Also, be
creative and come up with some new terms, no one (or almost no one) else
is using.
The second common mistake is using the most popular
keywords. Lets face it, the most common keywords are dominated by the
"Gurus" . They drive the cost per click of these keywords so high,the
average Joe like you can't afford to compete. You get a few "crumbs",
but never front page exposure.
The third mistake is electing to
show in the content network without changing your bid. The content
network tends to convert less than those showing in search. PPCs and
AdWords in particular give the option
of bidding different prices for content and search displays. Bidding
the same price for search and content when content converts less is the
definition of insanity in PPC.
You should be using a large list of keywords when creating your
Adwords Campaign. However don't just put them into one ad group. You
must create multiple ad groups with a small amount of related keywords
in each. This allows you to target your ads for only that group of
keywords. Using highly targeted groups will greatly increase your ads'
click-through rates.
One of the most common mistakes with pay
per click is not tracking the results, visitors and overall traffic.
Since all advertisements cost money it is best to know where traffic is
coming from. The best method for a particular site can be determined and
more resources can be allocated to that method. Now understand that
this might not work for all sites, it can be very different making it
important to track!
All search engines use a different method
for determining your ad's position and impressions. Google for example
use a combination of ad relevancy (how relevant your ad is to the
keywords you bid on and the relevance of the landing page your visitors
land on) and your bid price.
As it has been earlier, PPC is the
most effective way to drive highly targeted traffic to your website. So
if you want to make the most money from PPC, you have to do it the right
way. The deadly mistakes explained above will help you to focus on the
most critical PPC marketing
components and to avoid the so called PPC killer practices so as to get
the most success from your efforts and investment.
