What To Avoid To Increase The Performance Of Your PPC Marketing
Searching for answers online has become routine during the last couple of decades. People tend to look for everything on the internet, from local information to enterprise collaborations. This opens up tons of opportunities for businesses paving the way for some of the most popular aspects of current advertising, PPC strategies.
Pay-per-click marketing strategies have been around for long. A famous application of them can be witnessed in automated search engine advertisements. Google Ads, for instance, offers PPC as an option to any business that wants to advertise online.
As a general rule of thumb, PPC campaigns are becoming one of the most essential digital marketing tactics for eLearning businesses. Not only do they offer high ROI, which is the dream of every marketer, but they also tend to require less effort since they are automated and easy to implement.
Is it, though, as easy as it sounds? Can every PPC campaign offer high ROI with minimal effort?
The answer is no.
As happens in every aspect of marketing, PPC strategies require research and maintenance. It does not promise success, but it definitely offers the opportunity for success. In this article, we narrow down the most common pitfalls to avoid when you craft your PPC strategy.
Why Are PPC Strategies Important?
Many may wonder what is PPC advertising and why it is a preferable option. Well, the definition is implied in the name. In PPC advertising, you pay every time someone clicks on your ad or listing. More often than not, pay-per-click campaigns provide a fruitful outcome for businesses. That is due to multiple factors that surround the area of PPC in digital marketing in general. Among the most important ones are the following.
Massive Reach
As we mentioned before, Google Ads is among the most common types of PPC advertising. Taking this into consideration, you can already witness the scale of the group your ad will reach. We are talking about millions of people and trillions of searches per year. No wonder businesses tend to trust this type of advertising more than others.
However, search engine ads are not the only PPC marketing campaign you can do. Another famous example are the niche directories in your industry. An example of this can be found in our LMS directory, which focuses on LMSs and targets the right audience for your eLearning business. Remember that, when going niche, it is quality that matters and not quantity, making your audience more qualified for your lead generation techniques.
Do you want to learn more about LMS PPC advertising?
Feel free to download the complete PPC campaign guide for Learning Management Systems.
Mostly Automated And Easy To Use
As marketers, we know the struggle of doing everything manually. That is why we are constantly looking for ways to automate processes and save valuable time for other projects. Worry not, because platforms and websites that offer the availability of doing PPC allow autopiloting. Hence, you only need to add your target audience, the keywords you want to focus on, and geolocation options in case you target locally.
It is worth mentioning that this does not mean that every aspect of your PPC marketing strategies has to rely on automation. As we will mention below, you should be able to interfere and adjust manually your PPC ads or directory listings for optimization purposes.
Higher ROI
Now we reach the most important target of the marketing team, the Return On Investment. Yes, solid PPC strategies have generally better ROI. That is because a person clicked on your ad or your listing because they were already looking for solutions you provide, or because they were attracted by it. In either case, they have landed on your website, and now it is up to you to make them your customers.
That is also the moment in which your PPC marketing strategy comes into play. For example, a person may have seen your listing but never clicked on it because it was not appealing; or they clicked, entered your website, and left. In the latter scenario, you paid for the click but failed to generate leads.
In the following section, we address some pitfalls you should avoid to make your PPC campaigns thrive!
5 Pitfalls To Avoid In Your PPC Strategies
Now that we have covered the importance of PPC marketing, let us jump into some best practices to ensure its successful outcome. In this section, we provide you with the common traps to avoid in order to increase the performance of your listing.
Choosing Quantity Over Quality
First things first—you need to choose the PPC channel you want to advertise to. The most common solution for every business seems to be Google Ads. Yes, the reach Google offers is massive, but what happens if your target audience does not use Google for eLearning purposes? Maybe your audience enjoys hanging out on a certain platform, website, or forum. That said, you might want to take a step back and perform research on where your market is. An SEO competitor analysis will certainly help you with that.
The best PPC tactic for high ROI is to go niche. By that, we mean to look for niche directories where your audience is looking for solutions. A solid example for an eLearning company is our niche LMS directory. This directory, for example, is visited by L&D professionals or managers who search specifically for LMSs. In general, focusing on niche platforms is one of the best PPC practices because it provides you with highly qualified leads.
Avoiding A/B Testing
Another common mistake that companies make in their PPC strategies is not supporting their PPC ads with valuable data. Testing your ad or listing performance can prove extremely valuable for its success. By performing A/B testing, you may uncover certain areas for improvement or even the reasons your pay-per-click campaign is underperforming.
Testing is crucial for your PPC budget as well. By removing the underperforming aspects of your ad or listing, you can reduce the unnecessary clicks that do not convert. View the testing of your ad as an integral part of your pay-per-click marketing strategy and implement the data in its improvement.
Forgetting To Optimize Your Listing
Yes, your PPC may be already performing well. How about making it even better, though? Especially in the case of pay-per-click advertising, optimization offers a dual benefit. Not only does it boost your chances to increase traffic and leads, but it also reduces the budget spent. Some of the ways to optimize your PPC ad are the following.
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Updating Keywords
This is your chance to use the right keywords to show your eLearning business's unique selling point (USP) and attract the appropriate attention. Managing your keywords during the PPC campaign is essential in order to increase its performance. Some of the keywords you initially added might not work as intended, bringing irrelevant or no traffic at all. Moreover, after testing, you might uncover keyword opportunities to include in your PPC ad.
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Making Use Of Negative Keywords
Negative keywords can help you exclude your ad from underperforming keywords. This solution can be proven budget-friendly since you will avoid irrelevant traffic that will not convert into customers.
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Including Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords in PPC strategies are perfect for narrowing down your audience. In general, they tend to be more specific and niche. Also, long-tail keywords can increase your ROI in PPC ads.
When it comes to PPC directory listings, things are slightly different but equally important. In general, you can optimize your listing in multiple ways. The most common among them is to build a relevant description with the appropriate keywords and add the right features (or filters) that promote your unique selling point. In this way, you will ensure that your prospective audience will know precisely what you offer before they click. If they click and are redirected to your website, the chances of converting are high. Especially if you follow the next piece of advice.
Need more info? Check out this: How To Improve Performance In A PPC Directory.
Directing Audience To Your Homepage
Another common pitfall that businesses tend to fall into is leading the PPC traffic to their homepage. Even though it might seem like the easy solution, it fails to contribute as expected.
The reason behind this one is simpler than it looks. You attract a targeted audience with specific keywords through your PPC listing, right? Then, would it not be better to create an optimized landing page to focus their attention on your solutions? Such landing pages can focus on your industry's valuable keywords and address your audience's needs directly.
The disadvantage of a homepage is that it may sometimes lead to confusion or extra steps for the PPC traffic. Even though it is fruitful for organic traffic arriving at your website, a homepage can be considered "too generic" for the highly targeted audience of a PPC campaign. Therefore, consider building dedicated landing pages for your PPC listings and witness your ROI growing.
If you care about performance and increasing conversions, you'll enjoy reading about how iterative testing can lead your eLearning marketing campaigns!
Ignoring Mobile-Friendliness
Nowadays, a vast majority of the total internet traffic is surfing via mobile devices. In the same way, a large number of transactions are happening through mobile phones. Hence, an important factor to consider in your PPC strategies is to make your landing pages mobile-friendly. This will help you increase the ROI of your PPC marketing efforts on mobile devices.
How can you make your landing pages mobile-friendly? Basically, following the steps below will assist you.
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Check The Mobile Functionality Of The Page
You can check how your page looks on a mobile device via various programs online. Even if you do not want to use an external program, you can check the page by viewing it on your phone. Is it functioning properly? Is it appealing? Would it attract your potential customers from their phones?
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Check/Fix The Landing Page Loading Speed
We already know how important loading speed is to your website performance. In mobile traffic, this importance multiplies. This is due to the fact that people on mobile phones can be distracted easily and are more in a hurry than desktop users. They are usually on the move, so if your page does not load in seconds, they are off to your competition. Make sure that you check every single aspect that affects your page speed and fix it. The sooner you fix this issue, the less of the PPC budget goes to waste.
Conclusion
Overall, PPC marketing is a unique way to attract customers and showcase your solutions. You are bidding for keywords that your audience is interested in and you are there to solve their needs. Meanwhile, it is a sufficient way to handle the marketing budget since you pay per click, where a click means a visit to your website. Therefore, it is important to solidify its performance with PPC strategies.
However, even in PPC, things can go wrong if the process is not enhanced properly. To illustrate, let's take a PPC directory listing as an example. You need to optimize your listing frequently by analyzing and testing its performance. Find out what works best for your audience and what underperforms. And make sure to choose the right niche for your listing. The same goes for your website. A/B testing ads, leveraging performance metrics, improving on-page conversions, and optimizing your targeted keywords are key. Plus, you have to make sure your landing pages are appealing and mobile-friendly.
It is worth noting that "ad credits" from a PPC platform does not always mean there will be zero charges. Adriaan Brits explains in this article how Google Ads handle their ad credits and promo codes. Among other things, these insights clearly show that Google tends to raise a credit based on how much a company would spend on pay per click. Both Reddit, TikTok and Bing Ads follow a similar approach.
If you want your PPC ads to be successful, it's not only about testing how your ads perform. Your landing pages matter, and they have to be optimized so that visitors find them compelling. By following the above-mentioned advice, you can maximize the potential of your PPC marketing campaign.
Are you interested in PPC marketing for your eLearning business?
Make sure to check the differences between free directories vs. paid PPC listings.
Then feel free to explore our software directories and start PPC advertising to get qualified traffic for your website!
