Common Paid Search Mistakes You Must Avoid   

The complexity and competitiveness of digital marketing are truly overwhelming, especially for start-ups and new online businesses. For instance, you may be wondering why your paid search marketing campaigns are not yet showing any significant increase in your business sales, despite allotting a huge budget. Well, it could be a real upset, but quite frankly, it is not always about the money.        

So, in this article, we’ll discuss some of the biggest and most common paid search mistakes you must- avoid. Let’s dive in!    

1. Wrong targeting and bidding 

The first common mistake that some businesses and companies tend to make is not bidding on their own brand name. Yes, no matter how popular your business or company is, bidding on your brand name can significantly step up your game in paid search marketing campaigns. It will definitely be a shame if your competitors are actually the ones to bid on your brand name and use it to their advantage.

Geo-targeting is also one of the most effective features on various PPC and digital advertising platforms (such as Ads Supply, Google Ads, Bing Ads, etc.) that you simply cannot neglect, as web users tend to base their searches according to their respective locations. By using this targeting feature accurately, you’ll be able to get a higher CTR (click-through-rate), thus lower CPC (cost-per-click).  

2. Not creating high-converting ad campaigns  

Creating boring, predictable, and unappealing online advertising campaigns is one way to drive users away from your site or landing page. If you were a web user, of course, you would rather click on an ad that’s more inviting and enticing, i.e., gives a more explicit message, and appeals to you personally, rather than a generic one with bland and disorganized content.   

Similarly, some business owners and entrepreneurs tend to desperately blend in with the “community” that they are targeting and design their online advertising campaigns closely similar to their competitors’. If you want your campaigns to succeed, you must make sure that each of your paid ads is unique and stands out while being enticing enough to encourage more clicks and, eventually, generate more leads and sales.   

3. Not investing on a good landing page

Surprisingly, many PPC advertisers these days do not spend much of their time and budget on improving their landing page quality, which is a huge mistake that can be fixed quite easily and save the advertiser a lot of money.          

Once the user has clicked on your ad and it does not redirect him/her to your landing page within up to 6 seconds, at most, you cannot expect the user to stay and wait for it to load. On average, a good landing page should load in just under 3 seconds; otherwise, the chances of your potential customers committing to your call-to-action (CTA) will significantly decrease.

4. Not making a split test on your ads

Many marketers tend to make a mistake of saturating their online advertising campaigns with the same ad copy over and over again, not knowing that this strategy might cost them much more than split testing two or more versions of the given ad. By split testing your ads, you will not only be able to identify which version appeals to your target audience more, but it will also prevent them from being too exhausted and annoyed seeing your rehashed advertisements across all major online platforms.