Paid ads look pretty straightforward.
You pick keywords, set bids, create an ad copy, add negatives, and make changes whenever needed.
However, paid ad platforms have now become more and more complex. Thus, even making small mistakes along the way can be costly in the long run.
Let’s discover some costly mistakes that hurt your paid advertising ROI and how you can fix them.
Most Common eCommerce Paid Ads Mistakes And Solutions
1. Not doing your homework
You might have some money to spend. But before jumping straight to pay-per-click advertising, you have to ensure that your paid marketing strategy:
- Segments your audience
- Differentiates your products from the rest of the competition
- Goes back to your business objectives
- Defines your key performance metrics (KPIs)
Not doing your homework questions the very foundation of how your campaign is loaded out. So make sure that you keep these points in mind. That way, you’ll have a solid base on which your brand’s goals and business objectives could depend.
It’s also vital that you set measurable goals to know what you’re trying to get from your online efforts, whether it’s branding, leads, or sales.
2. Paying too much for clicks
If your budgets are capped, then sometimes it makes sense that you try to see if lowering bids will allow you to get more clicks as you maintain your conversion rate. Usually, in this scenario, we recommend that you continue to view conversions and conversion-oriented metrics as KPIs.
However, you can run tests with different bid levels. Doing so allows you to see whether or not the results have enhanced your conversion metrics in a way that drives more traffic to your site.
3. Not optimizing and using a landing page
Another overlooked mistake plenty of marketers make when they advertise a particular product or service is to send visitors directly back to the homepage.
If so, then you might want to reconsider your approach if you think that visitors will have time to skim through your entire site to look for pages that have their desired products.
When you make an eCommerce website, it’s never enough to have the standard and product pages. You’ll need dedicated landing pages for your marketing efforts. Whether seasonal offers or unique campaigns, these require a page where your traffic will land and convert.
You can optimize your eCommerce landing page for conversions by incorporating the right mix of keywords as well as a highly targeted CTA that’s designed to support your business objective. For instance, if you run a local business, adding a call now button to your website can increase the number of people calling into your store(s), allowing you to forge new client relationships regularly.
To ensure that you get the most out of your landing pages, then you can do an A/B test from time to time to see which one of the two pages performs better.
4. Not optimizing your ads
Tracking your metrics is essential. But if you don’t optimize your targeting or pricing, then you’re losing out a lot.
Make sure you test your targeting to help you find the most responsive audience. It would help if you also wanted to change the message or appearance of your ads so that you’ll know which one works best for every segment.
You can also try experimenting with your bidding strategy. That way, you’ll know where your ad will show up and how much exposure it gets.
5. Targeting segments that are too wide
Another thing that you need to keep in mind is that targeting a segment that’s too wide can be either of these two things:
- You don’t understand your customer’s online behavior, buyer journey, or personas.
- The money that you’re spending isn’t yours.
When you analyze data, you should know how to read between the lines and ask yourself the following questions:
- Why am I seeing the results that I am seeing?
- How can I enhance the ROI of my ad campaign before it gets too much (and I get too little) in return?
That’s why you have to help your target audience find you faster by creating buyer personas and optimizing audience segments in a rather precise and discriminating way. That way, you can exclude people from your core target audience that you don’t want to see in your ads.
6. Neglecting your ad copy
A compelling ad copy is crucial to the success of your ad campaign. A common mistake marketers make is their focus on including keywords. However, they forget the actual content in their ads.
The copy that your target audience sees on search results can make (or break!) you. Thus, your ad copy should be polished by a copy editor to ensure it’s free from any grammatical, formatting, or spelling errors. Keep in mind that your ad copy targets human readers and not search engines.
You might even add ad extensions to convey critical information such as the price, contact details, and location without wasting space on the ad.
7. Not tracking the right metrics
No matter how many clicks you get from your ads, you know there’s still something wrong when you’re not getting the conversions you want.
So, make sure that you track the right metrics that way, you can easily leverage all relevant conversion actions. It would help if you also decided what conversion means for every PPC campaign.
That’s because some campaigns will focus on brand awareness rather than sales. Others will pay more attention to conversions themselves.
In the same way, you also need to identify the right KPIs so that you can measure whether your paid ad campaign is viable or not in the long run.
Use critical metrics when optimizing your ads. You can also try experimenting with your bidding strategy to know how well your ads work in the future.
But to truly track your ROI and understand how your ads are contributing to your overall business goals, you need to implement CRM and Google Analytics integration. It will allow you to see which leads and customers are coming from your ads, as well as which channels and campaigns are driving the most conversions. With this data, you can make informed decisions about where to allocate your budget and optimize your ad strategy for maximum impact.
8. Neglecting negative keywords
With PPC, you’re supposedly going to pay for every click you get from your ad. That’s why you need to get quality clicks only.
Because Google will show ads for keywords like ‘cheap’ or ‘free,’ you have to target negative keywords. This keeps those people who will click your ads but have no intention of buying your products in the first place.
9. Treating desktop and mobile traffic equally
The thing is, mobile phones are now a lot more popular than desktop computers. It’s also much simpler to segment traffic into multiple categories for mobile devices.
Another excellent feature of mobile devices is location tracking. If you want to know where your target audience is and where they spend their time, mobile traffic should be your top priority.
One way that you can get your ad campaign right on track is by raising bids for some mobile devices (like iPhones) and then filtering out others (tablets.)
Conclusion
The PPC landscape is constantly evolving. Marketers need to make the most out of their paid ads to avoid these common yet relatively common paid ad mistakes that can help you boost your conversion and ROI.
Following these tips and getting assistance from ReVerb’s professional PPC management team will put you on the right path to enhance your traffic and conversions!
