Pay-per-click campaigns can be one of the most effective inbound marketing strategies, but they can also run through a budget quickly if they’re not carefully managed and optimized. In fact, you can often run a very successful PPC campaign with a small budget if you have the right product, audience, and expertise.
Here are five common PPC campaign mistakes and how you can overcome them to ensure success:
Problem #1: You’re Getting Clicks, But No Conversions
This is an extremely common and annoying problem, but there unfortunately isn’t a simple solution. You’ll have to test all aspects of your campaign to see what’s effective and what isn’t. Start by A/B testing your Call to Action, including the actual offer and the placement or sizing of the button. You might also want to do some A/B testing on your ad. Just because it’s generating clicks doesn’t necessarily mean it’s effective. It could be attracting the wrong kind of audience, which would lead to people clicking but not converting.
Problem #2: Mobile Traffic Doesn’t Convert
Considering that the majority of search traffic is now mobile, it’s important to optimize everything for mobile users. Your keywords, ads, and especially your landing pages should be built with mobile users in mind. If you don’t have content that’s ready for mobile users, your best option is to disable mobile traffic until it’s good to go.
Problem #3: Running a Single Campaign
Unless you only offer a single service or product, you don’t want to run a single general campaign. Every single product and service is found using different search terms, so you should optimize a different campaign for every single one of them. Decide which features, benefits, and target audience are most important for each segment, and create your ads and landing pages accordingly. This way, your ads will perform better and you’ll know exactly what is and isn’t working.
Problem #4: Wasting Money on Worthless Keywords
If you’re spending money on keywords that are outside of your target audience or simply won’t produce the kind of results you’re looking for, you’re going to blow through your budget quickly. It’s important to create a list of negative keywords and constantly update it. Make sure to include terms like ‘cheap’, ‘free’, and ‘used’, unless those are your target customers. Simply reducing the amount of money wasted on bad keywords will drastically improve the value of each PPC dollar spent.
Problem Number 5: Communicating With Leads Effectively
It’s extremely difficult to convert people on the first try, which is why you want to focus on collecting information and continuing to funnel them through the sales process. When you’re looking to effectively nurture your leads, mobile SMS marketing should be your natural next step. By using one of the best mass texting services, you’ll be able to segment users via shortcodes to send them unique SMS campaigns based on the keyword that they clicked through. Since text messages have an open rate of over 98%, you’ll know that your leads are receiving and looking at information specifically relevant to them.
Have your been able to improve the results of your existing PPC campaign by identifying any shortcomings of your own? Do you have any questions? Make sure to leave us a comment in the section below!