First and foremost – choose the right keywords. Before switching on a campaign, think about the unique products or services your organisation offers that will encourage the potential visitor to click your advert. By identifying and leveraging your USP, you can easily rise above the competition by using keywords or phrases unique to your business. Always have a look at what you consider competition, see what keywords they are using (www.keywordspy.com offer free information on this). The danger however is bidding on generic keywords without using copy that will help you stand out.
Workbooks CRM will actually let you know what keywords the prospects used to first find your site, tracked all the way through the sales process to close. It will identify what combination of unique keywords attracts the most targeted traffic that is most likely to convert into a sale. For example, most tools at best will let you know what keywords are driving traffic to the ‘Contact Us’ form – but that information offers no insight if you then can’t track which Contact Us forms converted into sales.
However, a great campaign needs more than just Workbooks’ innovative reporting tools – we need to know how to best use these tools to continuously improve a campaign, and the common mistakes to avoid that organisations are likely to make when trying CPC advertising for the first time.
Here are 5 common CPC mistakes to avoid:
- Forgetting to identify Negative Keywords
Negative keywords help filter out irrelevant traffic. When you enter your list of negative keywords into your CPC campaign, your advert will not show if that negative keyword is used alongside your bid keyword. Common negative keywords are ‘free’, ‘cheap’, ‘tutorial’ for example. Taking ‘Web Design’ as an example keyword, you want to show for that keyword, but why pay for someone looking for ‘Web Design Tutorial’. Constantly refining and adding to your negative keyword list means you’ll only end up paying for relevant traffic.
- Putting everything into one group
You are able to make multiple ‘groups’, so use this to categorise customer types reflective to your various services. If you simply put all your keywords into one group, everyone sees the same advert, lands on the same page, and ultimately you will have a low-scoring advert that costs a fortune per click (Google will charge more the lower the percentage of click through). It takes time, but separating into AdGroups (as Google calls them) is the quickest way to drive and track specific traffic.
- Only using a few adverts
If you use only a handful of ads (some companies just have the one!), then you have no comparison to check how it’s doing. Google will rotate several adverts and over time, prioritise the advert that gets the most clicks. While this is good in practice and fixes 90% of the problem, Google has no visibility on what that user then did when they arrived on your site. One advert may send more traffic than another, but what if that traffic isn’t relevant and they click straight off, or the advert is attracting an audience from the wrong price bracket? Experimenting with advert copy, and reviewing their success in both Google Analytics and Workbooks is the only way to continuously fine-tune and optimise.
- Starting off with a large budget
More budget will mean more clicks, and if a marketing department’s KPI is to increase traffic, then why not just fix the problem with a large budget? The problem with this is you’d be wasting a lot of money; no matter how much time you spend setting up a campaign, it will never be 100% efficient first time. It’s frustrating when you know the customers are out there, but start small and increase budget with confidence.
But the cost doesn’t stop there – the campaign may convert into lots of leads to follow up, each one taking a call, email, possibly even a meeting – the cost of sale will sky rocket. This is of course a great problem to have if they are all converting, but the chances of driving quality, targeted and qualified traffic from day one are fairly slim. Overtime, reporting features in Workbooks will show results as to what adverts led to the meetings that converted into sales, enabling you to stop wasting money and time on unqualified leads. Regular tinkering with an advert campaign using the valuable information Workbooks collects about the source for each lead, will soon drive down your cost per acquisition way below the competition who may just be relying on Google Analytics (which has no idea what leads actually convert if your website is used for lead generation).
- Getting discouraged too easily
Too many people make a few botched attempts at using CPC, see no instant results and give up immediately. CPC will fail if you’re not doing it as well as your competitors, and giving up is giving your competitors an easy ride. Regardless of sector, getting your website in front of the right people is key – and those that ignore how to effectively market themselves in this internet age will quickly fall behind. CPC takes a lot of time and patience to master, but get it right, and there’s no limit.