How To Ensure That Your Paid Search Campaigns Are Not A Waste Of Money

Paid search campaigns require you to pay a free each time one of your ads is clicked, and that’s why it is essential that you take the right steps to ensure that your campaigns are not a waste of money. For starters, it will be good to establish a basic understanding of how paid search campaigns work and clear up any misconceptions you might have.

Do What’s Best for Your Business and Prospects

When it comes to running paid search campaigns, there are things that are far more important than algorithmic scores. What are more important are the principles behind providing a positive customer experience and the fundamentals of your marketing plan. There is a big difference between the Quality Score Indications and real-time auction that appears in your account.

Also, be sure not to just chase a number, as you need to have an idea of the real goal of your campaigns, which is to be more profitable and meet customer expectations. Good marketing is also focused, compelling and relevant, and that’s why your written advertisements must be interesting to your customer personas and deliver on what you promise.

Use AdWords as a Diagnostic Tool

Some business owners do not understand the true concept behind a Quality Score and focus on all the wrong elements instead. A Quality Score is not a performance indicator for your ads and campaigns’ effectiveness but how well you can match sets of metrics that are pre-defined. Your real focus should developing a positive experience for your customers, as this leads to improved sales, more return visits, engagement and more.

It is possible to think your Quality Score as a leading indicator. If so, you can break it down to three components which are landing page quality, expected click through rate and relevance. When you examine these components, you can determine how happy is your visitor going to be with his or her decision to click on your advertisement, and their level of user delight when they found your page.

Never Look for Instant Results

Just like day trading stocks, the elements in any PPC campaign is constantly changing as well. Sometimes you may hit upon a good idea, but you end up expending your ad budget without achieving the desired results. It is essential to note that success with PPC advertising is about quality and relevance. When you lose sight of these two elements, you may risk resort to micromanaging every aspect of your campaign. You may end up increasing your budget continually, changing headlines and swapping keywords, without actually knowing whether these changes are helping you and your business.

Never fall into the trap of looking for instant results. If you do, you can easily overlook opportunities and bigger trends that are actually right in front of you. For example, some people make the mistake of creating many ads variants and then filtering them with negative keywords. They also do so without considering how those words or ads align with the content that is found on destination landing pages.

If those elements are not properly matched, or you do not meet your searcher’s expectations, lead generation is going to dramatically affected. It is good to experiment and test from time to time, but if the changes are happening on a daily basis, this is an approach you should drop.