At LeadGenerators, we are often asked to look at and improve our clients’ Pay Per Click campaigns. As a result we have looked into and fixed more titles and descriptions than we care to remember, but the point is that there are certain mistakes we see time and time again which consistently result in PPC campaigns underperforming, losing money and failing to convert into sales.
Below are the top 5 PPC mistakes we have observed over the years. I won’t lie to you: correcting these will be time consuming, but the work involved is essential if you are to get the best return possible on your investment.
Picture the scene: You’re looking for last minute breaks in Bavaria, and Google serves up a perfect advert – the advert describes exactly what you’re looking for, and you eagerly click it with credit card at the ready. Instead of a page of the company’s best Bavarian deals you’re greeted with the home page which links to all the company’s destinations all over the world. It’s confusing, you lose your interest and enthusiasm and leave.
On the surface it makes sense – if you advertise your business offline, then you expect your customers to turn up at the company’s door and browse, but PPC is different: You know the customer wants to visit Bavaria, so don’t force them to push their trolley all around your virtual Europe to find what they want!
In an inverted scenario of the last, while this often won’t cost you, it won’t get you a sale either. If the searcher is looking for ‘Villas in Tuscany” and your advertising copy reads “Italian holidays” then you’re being too vague to make them want to click on your ad. You may offer what they’re looking for but, if you’re not saying it explicitly in their language, then they will probably just move onto the next advert which promises exactly what they were looking for. Offer exactly what your company sells in the advert to ensure those who are holiday hunting can find it quickly and easily and know what to expect.
It is amazing what people actually type into search engines when they are looking for a holiday. If you sell holidays to the USA, you probably expect people to look for holiday to USA, holidays to America, etc. While this is true, it is not the whole truth. People type in searches for holidays in particular regions, particular states, different cities, mountain ranges, lakes, at specific hotels, types of holidays all over the USA (tours, golf, family, short breaks, city breaks, jazz and other music festivals, specific trails) …the list goes on and on. If you offer a wide range of holidays across the USA then you should have a keyword list that includes all of the above – and a lot more. We often inherit existing campaigns when clients begin to work with us and, whereas most start off with maybe a few hundred keywords at best, by the time we have completed a much more thorough keyword research process for them, they end up with thousands and sometimes tens of thousand of keywords. Every additional keyword is an opportunity to gain exposure to someone typing that keyword into search engines and, by expanding your keyword list considerably, you are expanding your ability to say “yes” to more people out there.
All the major PPC providers now offer a service where you can submit multiple ad texts and, over time, the most successful will begin to appear more regularly. If your company only submits one text for each group of keywords, you’re potentially missing out on receiving the best possible return on your investment. The system is automated, you just need to make the initial effort of creating and submitting several variants on a theme, and Google, MSN and Yahoo! will do the rest. Different angles to test can include an ad that focuses on price, an ad that offers a broad range of holidays, and an ad that talks more about the service, etc. Try it and see which one works best for you.
As well as monitoring the way each advert performs, campaign managers have the option to keep an eye on how well each keyword group is converting. If you spot that one particular group is costing you a lot of money without actually providing any sales or enquiries, then don’t just leave it there. Try playing with the ad copy to make it sound more enticing and make sure there are no misleading keywords in the mix. If it still fails to perform, then it may be that your site is not actually giving that traffic what it is looking for, or it may be time to lose that set of keywords to protect your advertising budget and your return on investment.
In our experience, a good PPC campaign is a great way of getting quick attention in the online world – especially for our smaller niche holiday operators. The downside is that it takes a considerable amount of time and meticulous effort to research the right keywords, come up with extensive PPC keyword lists and to write up different ad texts for each ad group. However, the return on investment inherent in a well optimised and monitored campaign is essential for the smaller companies who can’t afford to waste their smaller budgets.
Travel, Cat Litter and Infidelity
Top 5 Pay Per Click Mistakes Exposed
