I wrote about PPC mistakes every pay-per-click marketer should avoid recently – 12 important ones to be exact. But in this article, I’ll share with you the 5 common ppc mistakes pros make that may seem obvious to even the novice ppc marketer.
From my years of experience in PPC management, everyone make mistakes along the way; from beginners to pros.
For the beginners, their mistakes are typically around conversion tracking setup, not optimizing negative keywords, excessive broad match, landing page mismatch, etc.
No matter how I slice it, the PPC pros err on the side of overlooking the obvious, period. And it’s more common than you think. Just because you hired a well-known PPC marketing agency, that doesn’t necessarily mean hired the best PPC pro out there.
In this article, I will cover the 5 PPC mistakes that pros are prone to making, so you don’t make the same mistakes with your Google Ads campaigns.
5 PPC Mistakes Pros Make in Top PPC Agencies
#1. Neglecting Diagnostic Tools to Observe Fluctuations
There are basic performance questions that needs to be answered by any ppc marketer. If you have managed PPC campaigns long enough, you will be asked one or all of these questions:
- My CPA went up 30% last month, why?
- Why did our click through rate drop so much last week?
- What happened to our conversion rates?
- and many, many more
In Google Ads, nothing should be analyzed myopically. Silo-analysis is a surefire way to deliver incorrect insights and end with misguided optimization.
If your spend increased, you should be able to tell right away if the increase is due to seasonality setting in, a surge in interest, or higher CPCs, etc.
Let’s say your spend increases by 80%, but your conversions are up by 150% and your AOV increased by 60%, then it’s a successful campaign.
Conversely, if your CPC increased by 20%, but your total conversions increased by 80%, it’s a win.
Granted, there could be other external factors and site issues that can affect things like PPC conversion rates. But questions like the ones above should be answered in minutes with a PPC campaign diagnostic tool.
#2. Leaving Losing Ads Running
PPC pros do a lot of ad copy testing — at least they’re supposed to. But not all do. Why? Because it’s tedious, and undeniably time consuming.
Depending on the size of the PPC account, it is common to have at least 3 ads per ad group running simultaneously. That’s the best way to see which ad copy gets you the best clicks and highest return on spend.
Google’s ad rotation must be selected for your ad rotation to work.
When you turn on Google Ads’ automation rotation, left ignored, you will end up leaving losing ads running and wasting your money.
You can set up alerts to notify you of ads that have no conversions, high/low CTR, higher CPC, etc.
Undoubtedly, you can learn a lot from testing as a PPC marketer. This ppc mistake pros make is laughable, especially when they tell you they’re doing it.
You can easily look at the “Change History” to see if any ad copy updates, changes, modifications were made. Boom!
Subsequently, you can leverage your insights in other marketing channels like email, SEO, social media, content marketing, etc.
#3. Not Optimizing Shopping Feeds
I have audited so many Google Shopping campaigns that should be doing better, but crippled by a poor feed structure.
PPC pros make the mistake of ignoring their shopping feed. Just so you know, not every ppc marketer is technical. That means, they may not know how to diagnose your feed if it gets too technical.
You can include a lot of valuable content, create rules to optimize fields, custom groupings, etc.
Using a “standard” product feed will not be enough to amplify the performance of your shopping campaigns.
In addition, if you have tens of thousands of SKUs, then you have even more reason to audit and optimize your product data for the best possible outcome.
All the pros know the importance of well structured shopping product groups. What they can’t see is when there are tens of thousands of SKUs and a handful of products are grouped incorrectly.
#4. Forgetting to Add Audiences to Campaigns
Most pros know that audience targeting can yield higher ROAS versus not.
A high performing audience segment suddenly stops converting and no one realizes. If ignored, this can be a missed opportunity to fine-tune who you are spending money to advertise to.
Imagine this scenario. Your brand team creates a new landing page. And then your social media team’s posts went viral and sends tens of thousands of new traffic to your website.
Even the pros forget to create an audience segment to retarget. It’s pretty common to hear “Why didn’t you guys notify us about your landing page?”
This is why I continue to preach creating a close collaboration with other teams with your organization. Even pros can sometimes be left out in the dark if they are not being proactive.
Pro tip: A simple alert in Google Analytics can send you notifications of traffic spikes. At least you’ll be aware, if not informed.
#5. Ad Scheduling Is Not Set Up to Maximize Performance
This is a screenshot of many campaigns we audit. The ads are left running 24/7 without any scheduling optimization.
Google won’t adjust your ads for you. If you have a sufficient daily budget, your ads will be shown at all times — with no regard for performance.
Because the pros frequently focus on the more advanced tactics like ad copy, landing page optimization, testing, keyword research and targeting, etc…ad scheduling is missed.
This is where simple adjustments can make a big difference in spend and conversions.
Knowing your performance window will help adjusting the hours you show your ads and adjust its bids.
You want to bid more aggressively during the hours that you’re getting traffic and conversions, and lower your bids or turn your ads off during off-peak hours.
That doesn’t mean you have to watch your real-time analytics like a hawk. The pros can analyze trends and identify pockets of opportunities and put an ad schedule into place.
#6. Not Using Negative Keywords
Keywords are not the same as “search terms.”
Keywords are words or groups of words that you can target and bid on within Google Ads.
But when people search, most of the time they type in fragments or sentences.
For example, you might bid on “White Sectional” for your furniture business.
That would be a great keyword to bid on since you sell white sectionals, right?
Well, the searcher might actually be typing in:
“contemporary white sectional couches with sleeper bed” or “white sectionals leather” or “where can I buy used white sectionals?”
Even though all these searches contain the keyword you are bidding on, they have different intentions. Clearly, the user could be searching on buying a cheaper white sectional, but you only sell brand new ones.
It is important to do your keyword research before launching any Google Ads campaign, and identify irrelevant keywords that do not match what you are selling.
In this case, you would add “used” to your negative keyword list.
Negative keywords tell Google Ads which searches you don’t want to show up for, so you won’t waste money on irrelevant search terms!
This “pre-optimization” is a crucial step in building an efficient campaign. Of course, negative keyword optimization doesn’t just stop here. In fact, negative keyword research is an on-going optimization tactic that every PPC marketer must be prepared to do.
Since negative keyword(ing) can be tedious, even seasoned PPC pros can miss the boat on this once in a while.
#7. Not Using Landing Pages
The experience after someone clicks on your ad makes a big difference in the searches funnel and your messaging.
Many people send traffic to their homepage (it’s OK if you were driving awareness), collection page, or product page — depending on the type of campaign strategy, these pages could have problems like:
- Mismatch what the user expected from the ad messaging
- Doesn’t provide a clear action for the user
- Too noisy; you know what I mean if you’ve seen a page with all sorts of buttons, navigation links, and everything else that takes you away from making the purchase!
This results in low conversion rates and high exits. BAD for Business!
I’m surprised at how few landing pages businesses have in their arsenal. Landing pages allow you to be laser-focused and super target your users with little to no distractions, well positioned call-to-actions, and persuasive messaging to close the sale.
Building a landing page has become less of a hassle with software like ClickFunnels or Instapage. You can easily easily build out high-converting and engaging landing pages without knowing how to code.
The key to a good landing page is in its simplicity. Less is more people! LESS IS MORE!
PPC Pros Are Humans Too
Everyone makes mistakes. But the PPC mistakes pros make are more difficult to forgive…simply because they’re experts, or self-proclaimed — be careful who you hire.
The difference is in the type of mistakes the pros make versus the beginners.
In most cases, pros make mistakes due to managing a large number of accounts and not having good diagnostic tools.
Everyone with 3 or more years of Google Ads experience has probably made at least one, if not all, of these mistakes.
The pros also knows how to fix all of these mistakes.
Find and fix your mistakes so your account continues to be thrive.
