Together, these four PPC mistakes probably cost companies – small, medium, and large – well over a $1B every year in wasted marketing expense. If you perform a search on “biggest ppc mistakes” you’ll get plenty of lists of 3, 5, 10, 17, 24, even 40 “Biggest PPC Mistakes” blog posts. Even with all of those, the situation doesn’t seem to be improving – so here is my stab at making things just a little better for my blog readers.
This will be the first of four short countdown-style blog posts detailing the critical mistakes that too many companies make with PPC marketing. Let’s get to it!
4. Bidding on keywords that are very general
To illustrate what I mean, imaging you are selling Halloween costumes online. Imaging you have an inventory of 100 children-sized Halloween ghost costumes you would like to sell. So you fire up Google AdWords and bid on the keyword “costume”. A quick peek at Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool shows that over 9.1M searches were performed in one month for “costume” (Feb. 2010). How many of those searches were for Halloween costumes? It could be that over 500,000 of those searches alone could be for pimp costumes.
You’d only be a little better served if you bid on “Halloween costumes”. Even bidding on “ghost costume” may be too generic of a term to make money on. Remember, you are selling children’s ghost costumes. So “children ghost costume” or “child ghost costume” would probably be good keywords to start with.
How it costs you money
This costs money because you are paying $1, $2, or more per click for everyone that clicks your ad. Because the keyword “costume” is so general, over 99.9% of your visitors aren’t interested in children-sized ghost costumes. So you spend $1,000 to send 500 people to your website and only 1 visitor buys your $100 costume.
Don’t make this common PPC mistake
When you are setting up a PPC campaign, only bid on keywords that are very specific to the product you are selling. If you are selling EMR software, don’t bid on “software”. If you are selling jumbo widgets, don’t bid on the keyword “widgets”. Not making this mistake will save you a lot of money and could make the difference between a negative ROI and a positive ROI.