Stop It! Three Things to Stop Doing In Your PPC Campaign

(Reading time: 4 – 7 minutes)

A fair chunk of Website In A Weekend readers have a serious interest in making at least some sideline income from their online efforts. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is one way to drive traffic to your blog… if you know what you’re doing. Enter: The Clicking Chick, an expert in the arcane world of PPC.

Stop It! Three Things to Stop Doing In Your PPC Campaign

By The Clicking Chick

I’ve had tours of duty in almost every facet of online marketing that exists. Well, the major ones anyway. I’ve worked client-side and agency-side – I’ve found agency-side to be very enlightening. Why? Because you deal with a group of accounts, and more often than not, you see patterns. Issues. Things that clients all tend to do the same way, even if that way is totally, completely ass-backwards or detrimental to their goals.

One of the biggest places I see this is pay per click. Over and over.

Praise be to Google, they sure do make their maketing tools accessible, don’t they? Yeah. They do. It also makes your marketing budget very accessible to a system that is way more complex than it seems: pay-per-click.

The idea of PPC is appealing because you’re only paying when you GET something. The biggest mistake is thinking a click is “something.” It makes sense that it’s so appealing though – for small businesses who used to only have things like print, it feels concrete. It’s a faster setup. It appears cheaper. You’re not stuffed into a magazine where you don’t know if anyone sees you, or what action they take if they do. It feels like you’re really getting an action for your buck.

It’s also a mistake to think that throwing everything you have against the wall (including your money….and in some cases you might as well be flushing it down the toilet) is going to get your PPC campaign to work. It doesn’t. Planning, testing, and having someone who knows this stuff will help you immensely.

So how can you stop turning up your bids and ripping out your hair because nothing improves? Or, how can you give PPC another try and make the playing field a little more level instead of full of potholes that you fall into every.single.time?

Stop upping your bids if your campaign is simply sucking wind

Step awaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay from the “Max CPC” column. Stop it. You will thank me. If your campaign isn’t working well, why in the name of Zeus are you trying to give it more money? If your clickthrough rate sucks, offering more money isn’t going to bribe users. You’d get more users by smearing honey all over yourself and running around naked in your neighborhood. (Well, you’ll get more attention, anyway.)

Increasing your budget is not inherently a bad thing. But do NOT do it thinking it will fix all your ills.

Stop assuming a click means your campaign is working

You need to sell stuff. Maybe you sell art, maybe you sell cat mittens – I could set up a campaign that would kick ass for you, but how is that helping if your stuff doesn’t sell? It’s not. Remember, you are trying to sell stuff, not just get clicks. You’re better off getting less clicks that convert at a very high rate.

Don’t trick yourself. Look at what happens once someone clicks. If you don’t know or understand Google Analytics, get help from someone who does. You’ll be amazed at what you can learn by how users interact (or don’t, sometimes) with your site.

Stop trying to bid on everything

There are a few challenges with bidding on really, really general terms, or bidding on things that you personally use to define your business. First, general terms are expensive, secondly there’s a ton of competition. That’s just to start.
I know why you do it. It’s hard to give up on those searches…you check on some keywords and you see they get millions of searches – of COURSE you want a piece of that, yo. Be realistic, though. If you can only start with a few hundred bucks a month to spend, and those general terms are a few bucks a click, you’ll be burning through your budget on general terms that aren’t necessarily specific, qualified traffic.

Be specific about what you do. If you sell some specialized ice-melting product for driveways, don’t bid on “ice melting.” People could be trying to find ways to melt ice buildup in their freezer – you don’t know. But for searches like “melt driveway ice,” you know what they’re looking for, and you know that you’re relevant. Yes, there are far less searches, but um…who cares? You want more searches even though they won’t buy from you? You DO want to sell stuff, right?

I know the budget is tight, but I’ve lost count on the number of times my fees were a fraction of the money that the client wound up saving by not wasting so much money on stuff that wasn’t working. Save yourself from yourself….and don’t get frustrated. Everyone does these things when they first start a PPC campaign – the only difference is the ones that learn from it instead of stomping and throwing a tantrum that PPC doesn’t work. You’re reading up on this, so guess which group you’ll NOT be a part of now? Yay you.

The Clicking Chick rules the PPC world! CC has worked in online marketing departments for well-known brands. CC is adept at both writing and number-crunching; PPC uses both those skills. The Chicking Chick blog helps business owners succeed with PPC campaigns.

Tagged as: Clicking Chick, PPC