The inspiration of this post is that I have a fairly new client that I’ll be setting up some PPC work for next week and was reviewing my game plan. Here are some of the obvious things I’ll need to make sure I am NOT doing and correcting if it was being done previously.Top 5 PPC Mistakes:

1. None or Poorly Handled Tracking
2. Poor Quality (Score) Landing Pages
3. Over Reliance on One Source
4. Too Few Keywords & Ego
5. Bad Adcopy & Layout

Let me explain a bit on each point…

Tracking — If you are just buying hits and not tracking things such as amount of traffic produced from each keyword (or phrase), the cost for that click, versus the ultimate sale or creation of a lead…well then you’re shooting in the dark. Imagine how much better this money could be spent with even the most rudimentary tracking systems being put in place.

Landing Pages — If you are sending your traffic to some generic front end of a domain that is not custom tailored to the search term/phrase, you’re clearly walking in the ’shooting in the dark’ place again. Also, specifically with Google Adwords there are some quality signals that can decrease the CPC for your campaign. Totally worth hooking up. Here’s a few links to keep you busy reading on this topic:

https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=21388
https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=10215
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2005/12/new-addition-to-quality-score.html
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2006/07/landing-page-quality-update.html
https://adwords.google.com/select/siteguidelines.html

Eggs in One Basket — Why would you want to base your entire business on one source of traffic? Just ask yourself that question 2-3 more times and if it’s not making lightbulbs go off, uhm, well, it’s going to be challenge to help you. I get wanting to start off slow or get one thing right before moving onto another, but once the process is working it’s time to start throwing more nets and evaluating.

The Longtail — Oh no, not that buzz word again! Yes, buying the keyword “mortgage ” or “real estate” and getting those crazy expensive clicks and a lot of them might be fun…but honestly, what’s your ROI on those in comparison to the less expensive 3-4-5-6 keyword phrases? Not sure, see item #1 in this post. Check the ego at the door and rake in the cash on those wider phrases (unless the tracking shows that your expensive keywords are paying off nicely — again see item #1).

White Space, Fonts and Colors - Oh My! – Yes, the old school adcopy is important even on the Internets. I recently helped a guy go from ’spending 30 to make 30′ to ’spending 30 to make 100+’ by changing the font style, font color, font size and location of some links and white space issues. Pretty amazing eh? It works, not sure exactly why but tried and true is, well, tried and true.

type-atcha-later,

Sean

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