5 Common Mistakes In PPC

Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) is one of the most powerful and effective marketing channels. However, it’s easy to fall into common pitfalls if it’s not managed properly and can easily become the biggest hindrance for your company. 

As an agency we audit many accounts that make the same common mistakes that can significantly hinder the success of campaigns. Luckily, today we’re covering 5 common mistakes we’ve frequently identified time and time again throughout our years of managing a wide range of PPC accounts. But the good news is that these mistakes can easily be rectified or even avoided completely, making sure you’re achieving the most out of your paid activity. 

At Embryo, we pride ourselves on carefully planning and managing PPC strategies to yield results. For more information on how you can work with Embryo feel free to get in touch with a member of our team after you’ve read this blog by phone at 0161 327 2635 or email [email protected].

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Ever Made These Common Mistakes?

1. Auto-Apply Mode Activated

I’m sure we’ve all seen changes within an account that have left us questioning our own ability. We continue to see multiple accounts that have auto mode turned on which can cause detrimental changes. 

Although Google always intends to help advertisers some auto-apply recommendations can be beneficial to an account. Some recommendations, particularly for accounts with little data, can automatically generate non-relevant headlines, adjust bidding tactics or expand location targeting which can lead to unexpected outcomes and ultimately financial loss or wasted budget.

For best practice, we’d recommend being selective with your auto-apply recommendations or turning them off completely and manually applying the relevant changes allowing yourself to take back full control.

2. Neglecting Google Merchant Centre

Now this may sound obvious, but it’s surprising how many companies set up Google Merchant Centre and then never look at it again. GMC is the bread and butter of ecommerce and not checking it on a regular basis can lead to your pool of products getting smaller and smaller due to disapproved products or feed issues that you aren’t aware of. The moral of the story – check your GMC account every day as a matter of routine.

3. Testing Too Much At Once

With Google continuously bringing new updates to our attention, it’s normal to be eager and want to try them out on your accounts. As a matter of fact we encourage testing at Embryo because it allows you to grow and develop your knowledge of PPC instead of playing it safe. However, testing too many things at once within an account makes it virtually impossible to attribute anything. Therefore, when it comes to testing, slow and steady wins the race. Make sure you’re testing one thing at a time so that you can analyse the results and see whether these changes have had a positive or negative impact on the account.

4. Failing to Refresh Ad Copy

This is a very common mistake that we see across many different accounts, seeing the same ad copy across all campaigns or ad copy that hasn’t been refreshed since the account was set up. Refreshing, testing or rotating new ad copy is critical for grabbing and keeping your customer’s attention and preventing an ad from getting stale. 

It’s recommended to refresh your creatives once a month, particularly if your campaigns have a low per-day spend. If performance continues to improve MoM and you haven’t seen a dip in conversions, this doesn’t mean you should neglect your ads. Instead of editing your existing ads, you can test different versions of your ad whilst your original ad is still running to see how the new versions perform.

5. Not Fixing Tracking Issues

Tracking issues can vary from basic mistakes to more advanced ones, but arguably this is the most important issue to avoid/fix. Common mistakes we tend to see across accounts are tracking the wrong conversion actions and setting all conversion actions to primary. Tracking the wrong conversion actions or revenue tracking being inaccurate means you aren’t able to measure the success of your campaigns and therefore can’t make any informed decisions, essentially pouring your money down the drain. 

Setting up accurate tracking is essential for a successful PPC account and should be the first thing you do before setting any campaigns live. It allows you to get a better understanding of your user’s full conversion journey, gaining a better understanding of your target audience. Without this, you’re taking a stab in the dark when it comes to optimisation and wasting your budget. 

Our PPC Team Don’t Make These Mistakes, We Run Award-Winning Campaigns Instead

There are 5 common mistakes we typically see in PPC, however by no means is this an exhaustive list – otherwise we’d be here all day. I hope this blog has given some insight into at least some issues that can be easily avoided. The crucial thing to take away is to ensure you have a solid PPC strategy (including tracking) in place and when it comes to optimisation use your knowledge to make changes and trial new updates rather than relying on Google’s auto-apply recommendations. 

To learn more about how we do PPC, get in touch today! Hit the contact button below, call us on 0161 327 2635 or email [email protected].

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