5 Very Common PPC Mistakes To Avoid

If you’re getting the word out on a product either as an affiliate marketer or a product owner there’s no doubt you’ve heard about PPC advertising. PPC stands for Pay Per Click and it’s a very common way for marketers to put themselves, their products, and even their services out in front of a target audience by paying for ad spots within various platforms such as individual websites, blogs, and even social media sites like Facebook.

Here is a short yet helpful list of common mistakes to avoid on your next PPC advertising campaign:

Poorly Optimized Ads

Any platform you choose to advertise on with PPC will have a ranking system which is based on the performance of your ad. Though it is true that how much you pay for an ad to be displayed is a big determining factor in the placement of your ads, if you have an ad which is performing poorly chances are that the platform you’re advertising on will automatically rank your ad lower than a well optimized ad.

You want your target audience clicking on your ad, it’s that simple. If your ad is getting very little engagement then the ad platform will assume your ad is not wanted and it will be pulled down lower in the ranks. This means you’ll need to pay more to boost it and it’s never guaranteed you’ll reach a high enough position with a poorly optimized ad.

How an ad is typically ranked is the CPC (cost per click bid) multiplied by the Ad Score.

There are a few different elements that contribute to your over-all ad score but the big one is your CTR (click through rate). That CTR combined with how much your bid price is will determine the placement of your ad.

Irrelevant Ads

If the ad copy within your ads are not relevant to the landing page and its associated keywords you’re going to have a hard time ranking your ads where you want them to be for a reasonable price.

Keep in mind that when the quality of your ad is higher and that ad is getting more a higher click-through you’ll probably start to pay less for that ad which will in turn make it possible to get more ads served up for a lesser cost per click. Cheaper CPC’s are always a good thing.

Where Is The Call To Action?

It is very important that you always include a very specific and clear call to action in every ad you create. Not only is it important to have a call to action, but the verbiage used in every one needs to be specific to the desired outcome. If you want the person reading your ad to click on it to get more information, maybe to lead them to a blog where they will be pre-sold on something then “click for more info” would be great- or anything along those lines. If you are targeting someone looking to buy something your ad should always have a call to action based around that such as “Buy Now” or “Click Here For A Discount” if your ad is leading back to a discount on something. Keep every call to action specific and obvious to the outcome desired by the ad it’s in.

Not Enough Testing

In some cases, even a total lack of testing. Testing is the corner stone of any ad campaign and should be done on a continuing basis. It’s usually a great idea to have at least two or three ads all running at the same time, each with a slight variation, to see which one performs best. You stop the one’s not performing as well and then try to improve on the winner and start over again. The aim here is to boost your CTR (click through rate) as high as possible so that your score will increase and you wind up paying less per click of every ad.

It should be noted there is something called “Ad Blindness” and it’s a very real phenomenon in the advertising realm. If someone is exposed to an ad too many times they eventually become blind to it and no longer pay it any attention. This is bad, you want to avoid this by simply keeping new and freshly optimized ads running at all times. Never keep the same ad running when you discover it’s CTR is dropping below a reasonable threshold- you’re just throwing away money by that point. To to make money with PPC affiliate marketing, your ads have to be fresh and well optimized.

Ignoring The Best Practices

As with most things, there are some best practices you can follow to help ensure your ads are the best they can be. Here is a list you can follow to help guide you on your next campaign:

• • Always keep your ad copy relevant to the keywords and over all theme of your landing page.

• • Spy on your competitors’ ads. There are a number of tools available to help you do this. You want to see what they are doing so you can do better, keep up with trends, and just see what’s working for them.

• • Make your ads stand out by using bold words and catchy verbiage. Some might suggest you should capitalize each beginning letter of every single word but some platforms will penalize you for this and some may not even run an ad if they see this sort of activity so you should stay away from doing this.

• • Be sure to always highlight special promotions or offers your ad may be referring to. If your ad is meant to promote a limited discount in price be sure to emphasize this.

• • Never forget your Call To Action!

• • Always test your ads if you want to boost that CTR.

Some like to say a proper PPC campaign is finessed by a combination of art and science, meaning that it’s not always about following set rules to get the best results but that a bit of creativity is needed to really see your ads shine. This seems to be true but there are always techniques used by those successful marketers who have been doing this stuff for years and one place you can go to learn more of those techniques is the Affiliate Forum.