Pay-Per-Click Pitfalls To Avoid
By Anna Johnson on November 5th, 2009In her recent Search Engine Watch article, Melissa Mackey provides a useful discussion of the common pitfalls to avoid when constructing and running a pay-per-click advertising campaign.
Check out the article for more details, but here’s a summary of the pitfalls – all of which can cost you a significant amount of money:
1. Not setting up your account properly. This is possibly the biggest mistake you can make, since setting up your account is the foundation for your ad campaigns. A good point that Melissa makes is to ensure you run distinct campaigns for not just distinct offers, but for distinct OBJECTIVES.
2. Failing to edit the default settings – failing to review (and probably change) all the default settings can mean the difference between getting paid and paying Google, Microsoft or Yahoo (i.e. depending on who you’re advertising with). For example, you almost always want to change the default ad delivery from ‘optimize’ to ‘rotate’ so that you can decide which of your ads gets the most click-throughs.
3. Sending traffic to your home page rather than a dedicated landing page. I see this mistake all the time and it gets me excited and crazy at the same time. You are leaving loads of cash on the table by sending traffic to a generic landing page such as the home page, rather than a landing page that speaks directly to the search engine user, based on (a) the keywords they searched on and (b) the ad they clicked on.
