Paid Advertising
Paid advertising can be a great avenue for companies to reach a bigger audience and begin to drive sales. Unfortunately, there are many mistakes that marketers make, especially new marketers, that waste a ton of their advertising budget on wasted clicks, hurting their overall campaigns. To ensure that your paid marketing strategy is a success, avoid these paid advertising mistakes at all costs:
Bad Audience Targeting
One of the worst Google Ads mistakes that you can make is being really poor at targeting the audience. You can fall into the trap of spending thousands of dollars on an audience that is not right for your product – you can end up with clicks that are worthless.
What to do:
Use audience segmentation according to demographics, interests, and behavior.
Explore Facebook Ads best practices – like audience look alike and retargeting.
Review your audience insight regularly to better your targeting.
Neglecting Ad Copy and Creatives
Your ad copy and creatives are your best opportunities to garner attention and increase engagement. If your ads are irrelevant or boring, you are going to have a low CTR (Click-Through Rate) and provide for wasted ad spend.
What To Do:
Write an ad headline and description that garners interest and offers value.
Use A/B testing against the ad creatives to best determine which editions of the ads performed the best
Make sure that your visuals are on par with your brand and that they will attract your target audience.
Not Optimizing Landing Pages
Even if your ad is optimized, bad landing pages can still result in high bounce rates and lost conversions.
How to Fix It:
Make sure you have a mobile-optimized, fast-loading landing page.
Be sure to carry over the messaging that was in the ad on the landing page.
Have clear CTAs (Call-To-Actions) to help direct users into conversions.
Not Tracking and Measuring Performance
Businesses frequently run their paid ad in PPC advertising and forget about tracking their performance KPIs.If you are unsure what you’ve been measuring, then it will be hard to understand what works and what doesn’t.
How to Fix It:
Set up conversion tracking in Google Ads and Facebook Ads.
Utilize Google Analytics and audit users’ click behavior on your website.
Take a rule of thumb approach of making small tweaks to your campaign based on the data you collect.
Forgetting to Test and Adjust Campaigns
One of the most common PPC mistakes is to set up ads and let them run without adjustments. Going in and spending money is not enough in this ever-changing landscape. Paid advertising has the potential for success and failures.
How to Fix It:
- Make regular A/B tests of variations on your ads to keep adjusting and improving your performance.
- Take the data you obtain from your campaigns and alter your bids, keywords, and targeting.
- Stay aware of emerging changes in for ads and as needed, utilize advertising recommendations in Google Ads for example – both for your advertising accounts on a routine basis.
More Tips for a Paid Marketing Plan to Be Successful
Budgeting and Bidding Strategy
Being able to manage your ad spend is one of the most important things when it comes to paid advertising. Many of the time businesses will over or under spend creating campaigns that are ineffective.
- You should make an appropriate budget for PPC advertising based on industry benchmarks.
- During your auction, you can use automated bidding strategies like Target ROAS (Return of Advertising Spend) and Maximize Conversions in Google Ads.
- Be sure to be looking at your CPC (cost-per-click) and CPA (cost per acquisition).
Choosing the Right Advertising Platform
Not every platform works the same way, for every business. The paid marketing strategy you select should be based on your audience.
- Google Ads: Good for intent-driven search basis and lead generation
- Facebook & Instagram Ads: Good for brand awareness and visual advertising
- LinkedIn Ads: Good for B2B marketing
Mobile Optimization
Mobile traffic is becoming greater than desktop, so your creatives and landing pages must be optimized for mobile audiences.
- Make sure your ad creatives are responsive to fit a mobile screen.
- Use short copy and make your ads engaging for mobile-friendly advertisements.
- Make sure your mobile page load speeds do not result in high bounce rates.
Conclusion
You can improve your paid advertising strategy and return on your investment (ROI) by avoiding these paid advertising mistakes. When working on your targeting, ad copy, landing pages, performance tracking, and campaign optimization; you’ll be able to produce successful ad campaigns and meaningful outcomes.
