Common PPC Mistakes - How Costly Could This Be?

By Peter Shuker

When you enter internet marketing for the first time, as a newbie, the mis-information you have most likely received, is that Google AdWords is the most fruitful, and they would be right, if you know what you are doing, and if you don't, it could be very costly to you.

What I will try and do is to point out, the most common PPC mistakes (pay per click) that most people make, when starting a new AdWords campaign. These are tailored to beginners but intermediate marketers might find them useful also.

Common PPC Mistakes #1 - Using Content Network

When you start a campaign you MUST always disable the content network tab, you do not want t receive traffic from these sites that contain AdSense ads as these are often riddled with click fraud and irrelevant or un-targeted traffic. You should only attempt content if you are an expert in PPC advertising. Google will assume you wish to use this option as a default, so be careful.

Common PPC Mistakes #2 - To Many Keywords Per Adgroup

You need to limit the amount of keywords per adgroup, again as a newbie you will be probably keen to get on with your first campaign, to do this you will have probably obtained a keyword list from either descriptive words option or website content option in Googles keyword tool (FREE) and then added all the returned results to your adgroup, this could run into 100's of keywords. You should aim to have between 5 and 20 keywords per adgroup, 15 - 60 if you are using all broad, phrase and exact match types.

Having more than 20 can negatively affect your quality score and therefore you CPC (cost per click) and your ad position.

Common PPC Mistakes #3 - Keyword Grouping

When you insert your keywords, into your adgroup, you MUST have at least one common keyword or phrase common in all, you will also want to use your chosen keyword in your ad title and description as often as you can.

Example

Adgroup name - internet marketing

Common keyword - internet marketing

keywords - internet marketing, internet marketing resource, internet marketing guide.

Ad - Internet Marketing Guide Learn How To Earn A Fortune Top Internet Marketing Guide ReviewYoursite.com/InternetMarketing

You can see from the example above that the common keyword has been used in the ad, all the keywords use the common term Internet Marketing. This is how to set up an adgroup properly.