Pay-per-click advertising can help businesses quickly generate website traffic while increasing brand awareness. 

Since PPC ads appear at the top of search engine results pages, they receive a fair amount of attention. And while those clicks come at a cost, properly designed and managed ad campaigns can result in more customers and conversions than you might otherwise receive within a short period. 

That said, PPC advertising campaigns can be complicated to manage. And if you make any of the following mistakes, you might end up wasting time and money with little to show for it.

Here are just three missteps you’ll want to avoid when developing and running your PPC ads.

Bidding On the Wrong Keywords

Keyword research is important for both SEO and PPC, but keyword selection can really make or break your advertising campaign.

If you bid on keywords that don’t align with your customers or buyer intent, your ads will be much less effective. Your ads could appear before people who have no interest in your products or services. Worse yet, those users might not realize you don’t have what they’re looking for until after they click.

That will ultimately lead to missed opportunities and wasted money for your business. 

When selecting your keyword bids, make sure that the keywords you choose have relatively strong search volume and that those words are actually relevant to how potential customers would search for the solutions you can provide. 

If you insist on using keywords that don’t convert, your PPC campaigns won’t be successful. 

Not Putting Thought Into Your Copy

With display advertising, you need to grab a customer’s attention with your imagery. But with PPC ads, it’s the copy that counts.

Too often, we see ads with poorly written copy. It’s not enough to list what you have to offer; you have to help customers understand why it matters and how you can help them.

Unfortunately, Google Ads and other PPC platforms may not provide you with much guidance here. But the good news is that you have a lot of freedom to test out different options to see what works best.

Make sure to consider emotional investment when creating your copy. It can be helpful to tap into a fear or struggle your customers might have (even if it’s just FOMO, or the “fear of missing out”). Of course, you’ll want to create a catchy headline and include a strong call-to-action.

If you don’t feel comfortable writing your ad copy, enlist the help of a professional with a proven track record of PPC excellence. Once your ads are running, you can analyze their performance and tinker with small changes to create the most effective campaigns.

Forgetting About Quality Score

There are a number of metrics that you can monitor when running a PPC campaign. It’s easy to let some of them fall by the wayside. But quality score is one you shouldn’t forget about.

Your quality score in Google Ads doesn’t necessarily measure ad quality. It’s actually a keyword metric that lets you know how relevant and valuable your ads might be to web users. It’s determined based on the relevance of your ad, the relevance of the ad’s landing page, and the anticipated click-through rate of the ad.

It’s important to monitor your quality score for each ad because any ads that are deemed “below average” simply won’t be as successful. Not only will you obtain fewer clicks and conversions, but you’ll probably end up paying more to run the ad. Google actually charges more money for ads with lower quality scores to make up for the expected lower number of clicks!

Be sure to examine your quality scores and take a look at why they aren’t rated as highly as you’d hoped. You can fix these issues by choosing different landing pages, changing your ad copy, or amending your keyword bids and groups.

Before Spending More on PPC, Prevent These Problems

We know that PPC can be effective, but it can also become incredibly expensive – especially if you’re making these sorts of mistakes. To stay within your advertising budget and get the most out of your campaigns, be sure to prevent or address these errors.