There are so many marketing terms – analytics, affiliate marketing, SEO, impressions, and influencers. It may just make you want to go back to advertising on blimps or airplane banners. It’s true that we have to embrace the new and buzzy, but with PPC strategies, you are in complete and full control. There’s learning curve, but it’s important for you to take the time to learn. PPC is a short name but has a long list of pitfalls. Read on to help you avoid them.
Not Understanding Your PPC Strategies ABCs
It can be so tempting to rush right into any type of marketing or strategy plan.
After all, you need business now!
But when you’re planning PPC strategies, it can help to first make sure you understand what you’re getting into.
PPC stands for pay-per-click. It’s the process where you pay for advertising after the fact.
You may pay a small up front amount to get started, but in most cases, you are paying when people click on your link, advertisement, or pop up.
As the name says, you pay per click. Pay per click can grow your business if you do it right.
Ignoring the Penguin and Panda in the Room
Internet developers have to stay interested somehow, and by coming up with flashy names like “Penguin” and “Panda” for several releases of Google updates, you’d think those names would be hard to ignore.
But unfortunately, when it comes to PPC strategies, a lot of people did ignore the penguins and the pandas, changes to Google algorithms that caused a lot of PPC-pain.
These updates targeted things like “content farms,” websites that were bloating the internet with spammed and robotic “blogs,” scraping and ripping off content from legitimate sites. Panda pushed these sites down and out of the search results.
Penguin punished sites acting in a similarly black-hat-creepy way. This especially hurt companies relying on unnatural backlinks, shady anchor text, and “link farms.”
You never want to make any mistakes when you’re strategizing your online content, but some of the most deadly involve online search punishment.
If you’ve worked extremely hard to select the right PPC sites, agonized over your ad words, and invested big bucks, you don’t want to watch it go down the drain because you messed up with Google.
It can be hard to keep up, but it’s well worth it. If you don’t, you might miss major rule rollouts that can have devastating effects.
Sticking With the One Site
You already know and might already use pay per click as part of your marketing strategy.
What could possibly go wrong?
Well, you’ve probably heard of the “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” theory.
It can be similar with pay per click, so one of your PPC strategies should be to investigate, and then potentially invest in, multiple PPC sites.
We aren’t saying to stop what you’re using now, especially if it is bringing in at least minimal return.
Instead, we’re suggesting you study what you’re doing and make some tweak tests to see if you could improve.
This is similar to the marketing strategy of A/B testing. You test two or more types of positioning or marketing channels.
You see which gets the best response, most targeted response, highest revenue, etc, and then you make that the one you use.
With PPC, you are able to test out different options by trying multiple PPC vendors and multiple types of PPC ads.
If you only buy one PPC, how will you know if it’s really working? If you only use one provider, how will you know if that provider is delivering you the audience? And will you get the right traffic to generate revenue for your business?
Falling for Fraud
Let’s face it, the internet has many dark sides to it.
Even something that sounds as analytical-based as PPC strategies can get tainted if you’re not careful.
The good news is, you can make yourself smarter about PPC click fraud. Educate yourself what it is, how to notice it, and what to do about it.
PPC click fraud is also called impression fraud. While it may seem minimal from the name, it can really add up.
The process involves anything from a single person to an entire bank of programmed automatons deliberately targeting your ad. You pay for each click and hope that they provide the return on interest you need to fund the purchase.
But when you’re getting clicks from robots, competitors, or just hackers having their idea of fun, your data analysis gets messed up. Suddenly, you’re paying with more than just money. You also have to take the time to figure out what happened and how to fix it.
Squeezing Out Social
Quick quiz: Where will you find a huge contingent of your prospective and current customer base all day, every day?
If you guessed social media sites like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube, you’re right.
Quiz follow-up Are you there to meet them?
A lot of business owners know the answer to the first question, but they have the wrong answer to the second. Social media may seem like a fun way to pass time in line at the grocery store, but you can really ramp up PPC strategies using these sites.
Each site operates slightly differently, but many do allow “sponsored content.” You can configure different things different ways, such as ensuring your videos are shown to people in your preferred zip codes, for example.
Pay to Play
What you’ll pay for the words you pick is going to be as varied as the words themselves.
With PPC, you pay to play and the better odds you want for yourself, the more you’ll pay.
For example, you select to do a pay-per-click on a link that has a very specific term. If that term’s a “hot” commodity, such as one your competitors are all trying to rank for, you’ll pay more.
This takes some guesswork and also some decision making. You may want to spend more on fewer PPCs, but have those few really stand out.
You also may decide to pay a quarter a click for a less popular term (but one you can get a lot of clicks on for a quarter each) rather than pay $25 per click and only reach a few people before making out your link.
Not Being a Word Nerd
You know you need good content because you’ve got to keep up with what others are putting out in the world.
But did you know that bad content can actually penalize you?
Things like keyword stuffing, “recycling” content and other ugly practices can actually get your site banned (for rules like Panda and Penguin as well as many other regulations), no matter how smart your PPC strategies are.
Take the time to stock up on good, quality content your readers will really ravenously consume. This includes keeping an eye on things like grammar and punctuation so you’re not embarrassed by how your content comes across!
Going it Alone
Too many vice presidents of marketing, chiefs of marketing, and other executives get too close to the fire.
They feel like they’ve got to do everything themselves, but really, their skills are best used elsewhere, like leading the charge toward new business and taking care of existing customers.
A deadly mistake can be to try to do everything yourself.
Instead, rely on experts who are in the field and who know their PPC ABCs!
For an introduction on how we can help lift your burden, start by clicking here. We have long studied, practiced, and excelled at PPC strategies, and we stand ready to help you with yours.