Five Pay-Per-Click Mistakes

After all the examples, tutorials, seminars, webinars and books on Pay-Per-Click (PPC), you’d think advertisers would have a fairly good grasp of how to use it to benefit their organisation. Sadly, not. Craig Dunn, The Gate Worldwide online marketing guru, is consistently amazed by the lack of awareness of even the most basic PPC techniques. Here he outlines the classic mistakes you can make in PPC campaigns. If you’re doing any of them, it’s a simple fix to more effective PPC campaigns.

Some firms might as well throw bucket loads of money out of their office windows. They could save a fortune and make their online marketing effective so easily. Here are the 5 biggest mistakes in pay-per-click marketing – based on real life examples I’ve come across.

#5. – The “I’m advertising my product in the wrong geographical area” award.

I know it’s a simple thing, but the chance of a local car tyre garage with one branch in a small English town getting business from the U.S. is pretty slim. It could only handle business within 30 minutes of its location. But there it is, for the world to see. This tiny car tyre company trying to compete with global organisations.

#4 – The “My ad makes no sense whatsoever” award.

Not as rare as you think. One ad I saw recently on Google Pay-Per-Click went like this – “Cheapest prices on” “Guaranteed.” That’s great. Fabulous. Not as bad as “Do you have a fare. Callanytime for the.” Seriously, that was the ad, spelling mistakes, missing words. That’s a crazy waste of cash.

#3 – The “Bad choice of keyword” award.

I was asked to look into a PPC campaign for a friend of a friend. They noticed they were spending a small fortune on clicks and only getting a minute number of leads – somewhere in the 0.02% region for the lead generation rate.

When I ran my reports the reason why was immediately evident. They called one of their product categories “sexy designs”. Unfortunately, they had chosen “sexy” as a keyword. Needless to say, the traffic from the sex industry is huge and hugely competitive. Using one of the keywords from that industry is a complete no-no, unless you want to grab a JCB bucket full of cash and throw it away.

#2 – The “I think I’m clever, but I’m not” award.

There’s been a recent trend towards companies placing their phone number in their pay-per-click ads. They hope that users will call the number, and save the cost of the client actually clicking on the ad.

This sounds reasonably intelligent and plausible. But, as far as I’m aware, there is no evidence that suggests this gives you a better return for your investment. Indeed, there is anecdotal evidence to suggest the contrary. However, this is not the worst mistake you can make. Unbelievably I came across a company who were “testing” this policy out – which is fair enough – but had the wrong phone number in the ad. Just incredible.

#1 – The “I’m advertising something for sale that I don’t have” award.

I was looking at how different industries used PPC and the techniques employed. I decided to look in to the housing market. and came across a very well known UK house builder. After a few minutes of looking at their campaign I suddenly noticed a startling error. They had a Google pay-per-click campaign advertising houses and flats I a town they weren’t even building in. I was more taken aback once I got through to the company that was supposed to be managing the campaign for them. After a brief conversation I was assured that this wasn’t some kind of market research and thanked for pointing it out. They also let me know that the ad should have been taken down 12 months earlier. After a few checks I conservatively estimated that this one ad was costing the company a whopping £50,000 over the 12 months and could have been costing as much as £180,000. PPC is a remarkable way of advertising and can reap companies huge rewards. Just make sure you know what you’re doing. Measure on a regular basis, and if you don’t know, get someone in who does.

About the author

From the age of 19 - when he worked for an Internet startup - Craig Dunn has been hard-wired to the Internet. He formed his own consultancy at the age of 21. For the last five years he has concentrated on internet marketing having enviable ROI figures for his clients. He brings a usability viewpoint to every online project he is involved in.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 10:07 am and is filed under Insights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.