Ready to break up with pay-per-click advertising? It’s not you, it’s your ads. Check out today’s episode to learn some common mistakes that impact your PPC performance.

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You might’ve heard that pay-per-click advertising (also known as PPC or paid search) is a proven way to drive qualified traffic to your site in a flash.

You might also be wondering why your PPC efforts aren’t delivering on that rumor.

Most likely, the culprit could be your PPC ads themselves. For example, does your ad deliver on the promise that it’s making? Does your headline stand out from the clutter? Do the keywords included in your ad copy correspond to the search queries of potential customers? These questions are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to optimizing your PPC campaigns.

For more information, check out today’s episode for five quick PPC tips to help evaluate and improve your PPC performance.

Happy selling!
-Matt Winn, Social Media Manager, Volusion

 

Here’s the transcript if you’d like to read along:

Hi everybody! My name is Matt and I’m the Social Media Manager here at Volusion. Welcome to Two Minute Tuesdays, where we give you two minutes of ecommerce advice to bolster your online success.

Whether you’re spending a lot or a little bit of time on pay-per-click advertising for your online store, you always want to make sure that your ads are as effective as possible. Sometimes, however, that’s just not the case. But never fear, because today I’ve got five reasons why your pay-per-click ads just aren’t working.

The first reason why your ad may not be working is simply because your headline is off. To make sure that your headline actually works, make it enticing and give people a reason to click. You’ll also want to include the keyword of a user’s search, or at least make it close to the keywords the user entered into the search engine.

Secondly, your keyword list could be too short. Remember that there are a lot of big players that are spending big bucks on generic keywords, so if you’re only advertising using general keywords, you might want to focus more on the long tail, which are longer keywords. That way, you might get more bang for your buck, and more importantly, make sure that your ads show up a lot more often.

Thirdly, your ad quality might not be up to par. Essentially, your ad quality correlates the relevancy between the user’s search query and the content of your ad. This includes the headline, keywords within the copy and, of course, the information contained on your landing page. To help bust your quality socre, you’ll want to go through and see if your various keyword groups are serving ads that are actually relevant to the search terms at hand.

Fourthly, if your bid price is too low, your ad isn’t going to show up. Remember that the more you bid, the higher the chance that you’re going to have a great placement, so go through your bidding tool and make sure that you’re on par with your competition. This will help your ads appear and hopefully entice people to click through.

Last, but not least, you need to make sure that your landing page actually delivers on the promise that the ad is making. For some background, your landing page is where people go after they click into your ad, so establish a connection between the two pieces. For example, if you have a coupon listed within your ad, include that offer on your landing page as well, again, just to have that continuity.

Hopefully these notes will keep your PPC ads on par to make sure that your click-throughs are there and, more importantly, sales are coming through.

If you have any questions, just leave me a comment in the box below and we’ll get right back to you.

From me to you, happy selling!