Are your PPC campaigns spending your money with no return? There are many ways a campaign could be costing you too much money and it is usually down to some easily-missed mistakes. Read our list of Google Ads mistakes to see what may be causing your spend to rise, and also learn how to cut this wasted spend out ASAP!
1. Sending visitors to your home page
Many people make the mistake of sending traffic to the home page which is the top page across all websites which has the highest bounce rate. By sending your traffic to the home page, they are not finding what they are looking for which causes them to leave. If you run a PPC ad for a specific product and they get directed to the home page, they haven’t found what they are looking for and this may jeopardise your performance. Whenever possible, drive PPC visitors to targeted landing pages to ensure that the user is landing on a page that is directly linked to their search. If you don’t have a product-specific landing page to refer visitors to, why not create custom landing pages that provide the exact information the reader is looking for? Using landing pages for specific products and services can lead to increases in click-through rates (CTRs) and even sales/leads.
2. Sending visitors to your contact page
Some businesses send visitors from their paid search directly to the website’s contact page with the aim of pushing people to contact them. This is not only going to annoy your visitors but make it even harder for them to actually convert. Imagine that you are looking to purchase some trainers but, instead of being directed to the page that contains said trainers, you are sent to the contact page. This would be of no benefit to you, right? Searchers want to see information on the products/services that they are looking for rather than being directed straight to a form or phone number. Doing this will decrease the likelihood of a user converting and will lead to spends in areas that bring no return.
3. Not split testing your ads
It is absolutely vital to have multiple ads within each ad group that you run. By having only one ad, you may struggle to make a judgement on the performance of this as you cannot compare it to others within the same ad group. Therefore, to produce the most effective results, you should avoid running PPC ads without testing them first. You can split test ads by creating multiple versions with different calls to action (CTAs) or keywords from that ad group to see how these perform. After a while, you can compare the multiple ads to see which one is a front-runner and then make optimisations around this.
In addition to slight changes in the ad text, you can always run different ad types such as call-only ads and responsive ads. Running these against one another can determine which ad types work best for your audience.
4. Location Settings
Your location targeting could be running away with your ad spend budget without you even knowing. When setting up the locations within your campaigns, it’s important to pay attention to the settings underneath the Location tab. Google Ads have a default set up where once your locations have been added, Google will show your ads in those in your targeted location and those interested in your locations. This can cause international traffic to trigger your ads which is not relevant. To stop this from happening make sure to change your settings to only target those interested in your locations.
5. Negative Keywords
Not adding regular negative keywords can cost your campaign a lot of money, Negative keywords stop your ads showing for irrelevant terms and to do this, you need to regularly go through the search terms report and add terms that are costing too much, poor performing and those not relevant, as a negative keyword. This will help reduce your wasted spend by cutting out on search terms that will waste your money.
6. Keyword Match Types
Broad match keyword ads are displayed whenever all or part of your target keyword phrase is searched for, offering the greatest traffic potential but also risking your budget, CTR and quality score. But you may be sacrificing relevance for reach. For example, suppose you’re a law firm targeting the phrase “divorce attorney” with a broad match keyword. Your ad should appear on the results page for the search query “divorce attorney,” but it could also show up for the phrases “reasons for divorce,” or “dealing with divorce for children.” In these cases, you may be wasting money on irrelevant searches. Setting your ads to phrase or exact match might decrease your traffic potential, but help ensure that your ads appear for search queries that are most relevant to your business.
There are many ways in which your PPC campaigns could be costing you too much money. Want to learn more? Enquire for our FREE Google Ads audit to uncover areas of wasted spend.
