Which five common PPC mistakes are being made by businesses?

When it comes to online marketing for businesses, it’s crucial to consider everything from search engine optimisation (SEO) to conversion rate optimisation (CRO). Although these are just two ways to increase rankings and sales for your brand, there are other areas that you should be looking at too.

Pay-Per-Click, otherwise known as PPC, is one way to position your brand at the forefront of your customers mind by bidding on keywords that are relevant to your product or service. This means that whoever is searching for a phrase that you’re appearing for, will be enticed to click onto your website with the pre-determined intent to convert.

However, PPC isn’t always plain sailing. Creative search agency Mediaworks has revealed five common setup mistakes made by a lot of businesses.

Granularity with your account structure

A lot of people who are new to PPC are quite limiting when it comes to their campaign structure. Many new paid marketers take the approach of setting up one campaign, with one ad group and all keywords bundled together with generic ad copy. However, splitting out your structure into multiple campaigns based on features such as product type or brand will allow you to group more specific keywords together, while displaying the most relevant ad copy possible to the searcher. This may initially take some time, but will no doubt save you money from lower cost-per-click (CPC).

Utilise as many ad extensions as possible

When it comes to paid marketing, a lot of people aren’t using ad extensions to their full capacity. A really quick win, and something you should set up from the start, is creating at least four different types of ad extensions.

With mobile quickly becoming the main source of online searches, using extensions such as sitelinks proves vital with a smaller screen. With the addition of multiple extensions, it is highly likely that your paid ad will take up the majority, if not the whole of the screen, and users are more inclined to click on your ad if it dominates the search engine results page (SERP).

Ensure your tracking is set up

Before you think about creating an account structure, you should consider what you want the outcome to be from running Google Ads. These are conversions and could be anything from form submissions, phone calls, purchases, downloads and page views, ensuring that you have these goals set up in either Google Analytics (which can easily be imported into Google Ads), or using Google Ads to create tags which can be implemented through Google Tag Manager.

Link Google Analytics and Google Ads

A key part of the set-up process is linking Google Analytics to Google Ads. This should be implemented once you have created a Google Ads account, but before you have created any kind of account structure. This allows you to easily import goals/conversions into the Google Ads interface, as well as any audience lists you may have built.

Set up a granular ad schedule

This is one of the most common, yet easiest mistakes to fix. During the campaign set-up process, there is a dropdown which allows you to create a granular ad schedule. This will default to ‘all days’ which will allow your ads to show 24/7. If you’re an ecommerce business, this may not be a bad idea.

However, if you’re more of a B2B business then you may not want to advertise outside of your operating hours. Either way, creating an ad schedule split into a three-hour time slot is a good place to start — think 12pm-3am, 3am-6am, and 6am-9am for example. This will allow your campaign to segment the data it gathers based on the time users interact with your ads, which allows you to see when the best times of the day are for you and your business via paid ads. This bit of insight could be the difference in you gaining tens, if not hundreds, of conversions when it comes to future optimisation.

Georgie White is a copywriter for digital marketing agency Mediaworks. After finishing his traineeship at the National Youth Film Academy and completing his studies in Creative Media Production, he transitioned into his current role in August 2017.