It doesn’t take much for your pay-per-click (PPC) budget to disappear. Rather than wondering what happened, learn how to avoid costly mistakes and maintain your budget. Check out these mistakes you should sidestep and enjoy many more effective PPC campaigns:
Mistake #1: Ignoring RLSA Settings
Failing to pay attention to your RLSA settings is a good way to injure your PPC account. Do your research before using RLSAs and keep in mind that you have two extremely different options to choose from. The ‘target and bid’ option means only showing ads to those on your remarketing lists. The ‘bid only’ option involves adding the remarketing list to work in conjunction with standard search targeting efforts. It also means enjoying the opportunity to create specific bids for your remarketing audience.
Don’t make the mistake of copying your original campaign, adding “bid only,” and thinking you’ve created an RLSA campaign. You need to create a separate “target and bid” campaign to avoid serving ads to anyone matched with your keywords, especially if they have no idea what your site is about and have never paid a visit.
Mistake #2: Forgetting to Monitor Query Reports
If you don’t keep an eye on your query reports, you might start losing money. The more negative keywords you can predict, the more streamlined your PPC campaign will be. Yes, it’s challenging to predict what terms Google will match you with in regard to close variants, and most of the time you’ll be linked to queries that really are misspellings or variations on targeted terms. Yet poor matches still slip through, so the more you monitor your search query reports, the less likely you are to flush money down the PPC toilet. Review search query reports frequently, catch poor matches, and mark them as negatives.
Mistake #3: Not Taking Advantage of Google’s Super-Sophisticated Targeting Systems
Sure, you can sell your stuff to the whole world…but that doesn’t mean it’s a great idea. Instead, do the research to determine which regions are most likely to purchase your products. Focus on those areas first and expand over time as needed. Google’s sophisticated targeting systems are ideal for this. Keep in mind that the search engine giant will automatically default your location settings when performing geo-targeting services, as it wants to focus on the people located in your country, as well as those searching for your keyword terms in your country.
Put the work in, keep a close watch on reports and everything else relating to your PPC campaigns, and make sure the correct search terms are in play. Follow these tips and enjoy the fruits of your PPC labors.
