PPC presents a very difficult learning curve for some marketers. And many a Home Business owner has made at least one of the 8 mistakes listed below:
1. Fail to research their keywords properly
Keyword research is one of only two essential skills to master when doing PPC marketing. However, people who don’t understand their market properly usually end up bidding on keywords with high volume only. These are rarely suitable keywords and end up costing a lot of money.
More specific keywords such as home business vocabulary, eg, “downline”, “sponsor”, “upline”, “compensation plan” are less competitive and more likely to yield results.
2. Bid only on high volume terms
High volume terms are misleading. Keyword research tools may estimate that you can reach 30,000 searches a month–but this is only if all 30,000 were to click your ad.
Since you’ll not be able to afford a #1 placement usually on these terms due to high competition, you’re likely to end up on the 2nd, 3rd, or even 10th page of the search. Few searchers will keep scrolling that far which means your POTENTIAL audience is only a small fraction of that.
A better suggestion is to try medium-to-low frequency searches with less competition and get the #1 placement. This will require that you add much more keywords but is worth the effort because you’re ACTUALLY reaching a higher ratio of that target audience.
3. Selecting inappropriate keywords
An inappropriate keyword doesn’t always seem inappropriate at face value. For example, if you have a network marketing business opportunity you want to sell that markets vitamins. Should you bid on “vitamins”?
Probably not. Unless you send traffic from that keyword to a page that sells vitamins and nothing but vitamins.
However, if your landing page is about your business opportunity, you’ll waste clicks and never convert. Few people wanting to buy vitamins are also interested in starting a business to sell them.
4. Set their budget too low
Beginning advertisers are frugal with their ad budget. They fear that they will spend too much so they set their daily budget at $5.
This is painful and slow.
A better idea is to put the maximum you are willing to spend in a MONTH as your daily budget. Then control your budget by the number of keywords you bid on, the keyword matching type you use, the bid price, and the volume of expected search on the keywords.
At the same time, you should check up on your account regularly throughout the day, especially when testing new keywords.
This allows you to reach quick conclusions with a safety net you will probably never reach.
5. Poor choice of landing page
The landing page you send traffic to has to be very relevant to the ad you write. If a searcher responded to an ad that said they would get a free report on how to cure arthritis, then you need to give them a free report IMMEDIATELY on that page.
In fact, Google considers it dishonest if you ask them to opt in to get the “free” report. Because an email address is a price paid. So if you do use a landing page asking for an optin, try to make that clear in your ad too.
6. Their ad copy is not attractive
Writing ads that get clicks isn’t hard. You simply need to understand what the prospect wants when they search and put that in your ad.
Unfortunately, a lot of advertisers do this wrongly. Their ads are dull and irrelevant to the search, so they end up getting poor click-thru-rates and their cost increases.
7. No tracking
A horrible mistake I see sometimes even the experts make is not tracking every step the customer takes from search, to click, to opt-in, to reading your emails, to buying your product.
Knowing and understanding how many impressions it takes to get a click, how many clicks it takes to get an opt-in lead, and how many leads it takes to generate a sale is extremely important. They are what determine your profit.
After all, you will only succeed with PPC if you can minimise your cost and increase your revenue to get the highest possible profit.
8. They never test their landing page headline and layout
The difference between a winning and a losing PPC campaign could be as simple as using the colour red in your landing page headline rather than the colour blue.
A lot of advertisers don’t even know about all the money they’re missing by not testing this. There are easy to use tools provided by Google that make testing different versions of your landing page EASY.
I have found in one test that a harder to read font in the body of my landing page actually performed 20% better than the easier to read font.
That’s not something you can guess…it can only be tested. And had I not tested, I would have never found out.
Jim Yaghi, author of ppc domination is a Google Adwords PPC expert who generates as much as 15,000 profitable leads a month in the competitive google adwords training niche.
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