For years, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising has served as one of the market’s most efficient methods of promoting products and services. While recent marketing trends focus on a plethora of new strategies, PPC remains a solid and generally profitable method of marketing products.
Despite this aspect, many businesses complain that PPC is not as effective as it used to be, whereas other marketers believe that the costs associated with this campaign are too high. As usual, the truth is situated somewhere in the middle. It is believed that PPC marketing inefficiency is generally brought forwards by a series of mistakes few marketers make.
As such, this article will focus on the main mistakes associated with PPC campaigns, while also giving several tips on how these mistakes can be avoided. The information included in this article is backed by a series of statistics on PPC advertising.
No marketing strategy can ever be effective if it is not properly understood. In this regards, marketers should have a clear comprehension of what PPC is and how it works.
As a brief explanation, PPC represents a digital advertising model where marketers are charged a specific amount of money every time a web ad is clicked by another user. PPC campaigns include several elements, such as the main keyword, Click-Through-Rate (CTR), Cost-Per-Click (CPC), and quality score.
The keyword is essential to allow the ad to match what people are looking for. CTR is responsible for measuring how many times an ad has been clicked, while CPC determines how much marketers pay for each of the clicks.
Lastly, the quality score provided by Google represents a rating concerning the relevance and quality of your PPC ad. This score depends on a series of factors, including the CTR rate, target keyword, page/ad relevance, and account performance.
Full comprehension of all the elements involved in a PPC campaign can lead to better judgment when launching a campaign, thus providing a better conversion rate for PPC ads.
Optimization of digital marketing campaigns is a process that never finishes. A campaign that yields great results today may fail to do so in a couple of months due to a series of factors, including user interest or search engine algorithm updates.
Because of this, it is essential for all PPC campaign managers to spend at least 20 minutes every week working on optimizing their Google Ads account, alongside the live PPC ads. Additionally, optimization has always been a process where no decision is 100% correct.
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The key element here is to remember to carry out maintenance of your PPC campaign, especially if the resulting conversions aren’t impressive.
This score has a definitive influence on the performance of your PPC ad campaigns. If Google does not appreciate your ads, they’ll be displayed less or even removed completely.
Unfortunately, maintaining a proper quality score is getting more difficult. To put things into perspective, a WordStream study showcases that today’s above-average quality score is 200% higher when compared to the quality score four years ago.
Therefore, ensure that you have a proper understanding of how your quality score is determined, and work on those which are not up to speed.
PPC isn’t a cheap marketing campaign. In fact, recent trends indicate that the overall cost of PPC is growing. For instance, by the end of 2019, 67% of marketing clients will have significantly higher budgets for the campaign. Additionally, 62% of marketers are planning to further increase their budgets in the next 12 months.
As such, while PPC can bring results on a low budget, the true conversion potential is only achievable if your budget scales accordingly. Another increase in spending can be expected granted that recent marketing trends point towards an increase in the usage of video for PPC ads, rather than images.
Last but certainly not least, marketers throughout the world should consider a further diversification of their strategies and campaigns. As such, relying on PPC alone for increased conversions will likely not work. Marketers have to employ a variety of strategies to ensure customer engagement and brand awareness.
Some of the other strategies that are currently trending include proper, high-quality search engine optimization, mobile marketing, video marketing, social media marketing, and viral marketing. A combination of these strategies will result in an exponential increase in overall business profitability.
Based on everything that has been outlined so far, PPC represents a fairly time-consuming strategy until it is fully understood. However, by avoiding the above-discussed mistakes, any business can ensure that their PPC efficiency rises.
