Clicks 'n Conversions Blog

This article was first published April 9, 2008 on the Tatum Marketing blog

Pay per Click advertising (PPC) makes it dangerously simple to waste a lot of money. I see it happening all the time. We could blame it on Google Adwords – which makes it deceptively easy to set up a PPC campaign and leads advertisers to believe that the whole thing is a cake walk. But, even many so-called pay per click pros are taking a very lazy approach to campaign management.

Effective PPC campaign management is time consuming – especially if you’re managing your own campaign. But lazy campaign management means money is being burned – your money.

Here then are the 6 most common ways to waste money with pay per click advertising. These are in no particular order.

6 Best Ways to Waste Money with Pay per Click Advertising.

1. Buy only a few, very broad keywords. There are two things wrong with this approach. The broader and more generic the keyword, the more diverse competition you will have and the less effective your ad will be. Also, searchers use an amazing number of different keyword phrases to find the same thing. They will also vary their keywords according to where they are in the buying process. You need to think of all the phrases your prospects might use to find a product like yours. This goes beyond simple keyword phrases such as “purchasing automation” or “software development”.
2. Run one ad at a time. Seemingly minor changes in a pay per click ad can make a significant difference in click-through rates. Search advertising networks such as Google Adwords make it a no-brainer to test ads against each other. This is the only way to know what works best.
3. Send click-through traffic to your homepage. Getting people to click on your ad is ultimately useless if you can’t get them to take whatever action you want them to take. An effective homepage has many jobs to perform and therefore can’t be perfectly optimized to convert your click-through traffic. Instead of sending click-through traffic to your homepage, send it a specialized landing page.
4. Set up one landing page and let it run. Just as with pay per click ads, it’s often easy to test different versions of a landing page to find out which one produces the most conversions. There is no way to know which landing page is most effective unless you test.
5. Put all of your keywords in a single category and show every searcher the same ads. One of the most important requirements to get searchers to click on your ad is relevance. Your ad must match what the searcher is looking for. The person who searches on “project management software” and the person who searches on “task management software” may ultimately buy the same application; but at the time of the search, they are in two very different frames of mind. By organizing your keywords into separate categories you can deliver ads that are relevant to each.
6. Let your campaign run on autopilot. Search advertising is very dynamic – other advertisers change their strategies; new competitors come and go; your prospects change their search habits. You have to stay on top of this. An effective pay per click campaign manager will monitor click-through and conversion rates and will consistently update your keyword list.

These are the money-wasting mistakes I see over and over again. What about you? If you have a favorite mistake, let us all know by posting a comment.