Are Your Ads Not Working Or Are You Not Properly Working Your Ads?

When you’re not seeing results after pouring money into a pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaign, it’s only natural for your reaction to be to stop. For many people, this is where their PPC story ends and they swear it off for good. Big mistake. PPC ads take time, care, and attentiveness. But more than just monitoring your ads for effectiveness, much like you do with SEO, there are common mistakes that lead to PPC failures. We’ll examine why PPC campaigns sometimes fail and how to keep tweaking them to make them work for you.

Skipping Testing

Running a large scale PPC campaign without testing your ads is like buying a house without seeing if there’s something better on the market – jumping to spend a lot of cash before you know if it’s right for you. Even if you’re running a smaller campaign as a small business can feel like a pretty large investment. A/B testing your ads is one of the best ways to get insight into what will work for your campaign. Deploying two simultaneous ads and seeing how they perform against each other lets you know what your audience responds to. By testing different images, copy, and placement on the page you can see what really works. Without testing, you’re just guessing, and guessing leads to failed PPC campaigns.

Neglecting Geo-Targeting

It’s easy to just throw all your chips on the table with PPC ads and hope that they reach your audience with general keywords. However, especially if you’re a locally owned business serving people in your area, geo-targeting your ads gives you a leg up on conversions. If you’re a plumber in Shoreline and you’re running ads for plumbing related keywords without targeting them for your service area, you’re running a pretty big gambit. Your ads might be showing up for people in New York, meaning you’re paying for clicks by people who might never, ever use your business. The more localized the better your results you’ll see.

Not Optimizing for Mobile

People are on the go more than ever. There’s a high chance you’re even reading this blog post on your phone. It only makes sense that your audience will stumble upon your ads on a mobile device as well. So, how do your ads look on a mobile device? AdWords has functionality for mobile optimization, but not all users take advantage of this. You want your ads to look stunning across all platforms. Not just that, but you also want your ads to link to mobile optimized pages. Which leads us to our next point…

Unclear Landing Pages

Nothing kills a user experience after clicking an ad than opening a page and not immediately seeing the information they want – or the ad opens a messy page that looks and disorienting. You already have mere seven seconds to grab a user’s attention and if they’re confused about your site then you can say goodbye to any hopes of a conversion. Even if you have a great, mobile friendly website, dropping someone on your homepage is still not a good idea. Your best bet is to make a customized landing page that pertains to the content that’s in your ad. Let’s go back to our plumber friend. If they’re running an ad that says “Our Approach to Septic Tank Malfunctions” but the link just goes to a generic homepage, the user’s probably just going to hit the back button and search for another site that can give them the information they need right away.

PPC can be a tough pursuit for many business, but it doesn’t have to be. Mostly it comes down to considering the user experience and adjusting your ads to what they’re responding to best. Need some help getting an effective campaign setup that will start bringing you in more business? Drop N2Q a line and we’ll discuss with you how our expert PPC team can take your ads from dead-ends to vital assets to your company.