Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be the key to bringing in new customers, but that’s only if you execute it properly. Poorly managed campaigns can waste money, target the wrong audience, and drain your ad performance.
Below are some of the most common PPC mistakes and ways in which business owners like yourself can avoid them and run a campaign that gets real results:
Mistake 1: Ignoring Your Ideal Customers
Trying to appeal to everyone often means resonating with no one. Your ads need to address the people who most need your product or service. And that means knowing their ages, lifestyles, interests, and buying patterns.
Platforms such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads have complex targeting tools available, but inexperienced businesses usually end up misusing them. For example, if you don’t narrow your audience, your ads could go to users who don’t convert, which could frustrate them and inflate your costs, all while skewing your performance metrics.
That is a common but costly mistake, and its solution lies in precision — a focus on demographics, behaviors, and intent — that too many businesses don’t have the bandwidth to carry out.
Mistake 2: Ignoring Brand Name Bidding
If you don’t bid on your own brand name, your competitors will. When someone searches for your business, your competitors could show up first, sending potential customers to someone else before they even make it to your site.
Even small businesses would do well bidding on their names, protecting them from competitors who would otherwise grab loyal customers. Otherwise, they’ll be susceptible to traffic loss to those competitors willing to pay for hard-fought brand equity.
Mistake 3: Ignoring Location Targeting
If your ads appear in places where you don’t even conduct business, you’re likely paying for clicks that won’t convert into customers. With poor location targeting, you risk wasting your budget and getting lower engagement. Others in your area may take advantage of that gap, as well, taking local searches that you could have owned.
Mistake 4: Setting and Forgetting Campaigns
You can launch a PPC campaign only to let it run untouched for months. That might sound like a simple route to success, but it’s more like a formula for a wasted budget. One local business in Sioux Falls, for instance, may run the same ad for months, oblivious to the fact that competitors have optimized their message to get more eyes on their products.
PPC advertising does not work as a “set it and forget it” kind of tool. Unless updated, your campaigns will likely lose relevance. Competitors could outbid you, seasonal patterns could change, and your copy could become stale. The result? Increased expenses, reduced clicks, and lost opportunities to engage with your audience.
Mistake 5: Using Broad Match Keywords
Broad-match keywords cast too wide of a net, resulting in irrelevant clicks and wasted ad spending. For example, to bring in bakery customers, you may select “cakes” as a keyword, but your ads could still appear for searches like “cake recipes” or “how to bake a cake,” attracting clicks from uninterested passers-by. That disconnect drives up costs and decreases your Quality Score, as search engines typically charge more for irrelevant traffic.
Net Profit Marketing Can Help You Get PPC Right
When you need customers now and have the budget to pay for targeted traffic, PPC can provide the results you need. Reach out to Net Profit Marketing today, and we’ll set your campaigns up to meet your goals so you can get back to growth, not guesswork.