If you are not getting results from your PPC ads or wasting money without getting any conversion at all then you need to STOP doing the following mistakes which are going to discuss in this article.

There are some things which marketers can never notice if they don’t pay attention to them.

If you are thinking about how to get the most out of your PPC campaigns then you should really avoid these simple yet very crucial mistakes.

So, let’s see the mistakes or should I say the sure ways to waste your money in PPC Ads.

No Proper Tracking Set-up:

Okay. Let’s get this straight. Setting up just conversion tracking is not all the things you need to do. It’s a basic thing to get the Ads started. 

But, are you tracking Bounce Rate, User Actions, Page Speed. If not then great you are doing great in wasting money.

If you are still relying on CTR, PPC, and Impression then you are living in old age. You need to track other things to determine the true value of your clicks and users.

Too Many Broad Keywords

What is the easiest way to target all the possible search queries for your product/service?

I have seen people so nervous to miss any search query to target that they use almost all Broad Keywords type in Ad group.

You need to understand that you are not paying for the keyword but search query.

You should make an equal effort in finding your relevant keyword and creating an Ad copy.

Using the Wrong Network

If you are using Display Network without even knowing the difference between Search and Display then sure you are wasting money very efficiently. 

Display Network can give you a really good number of impressions. But, those Ads can be on any site. Literally any sites. (blog, business site, forums and unrelated pages) Which leads clicks from totally unrelated people. 

When you get lot’s of clicks from unrelated people it will also increase your bounce rate and ultimately decreasing your quality score. Which will lead to an increase in your CPC.

Isn’t it a great way to waste money? Yeah..let’s avoid this then.

Not Using Negative Keywords

If you think finding good relevant keywords which your target users use to search for your product is enough then you are on the right way to waste your money.

Finding good keywords and using proper match type is a must. But, if you are not using the negative keywords then you will be wasting money for good reasons. 

You need to at least put some efforts to brainstorm where your Ads should not be showing up.

Even if you can’t find them right away. Then you might want to use general negative keywords and later as the campaign goes you can keep adding new negative keywords and get the most out of your campaign.

I have created a general Negative Keyword List. You can download it from here. General Negative Keyword List

Early A/B Testing

When I was in my internship doing PPC. After running Ads for like a week we didn’t get the expected results. 

So, I told the person who was the strategist (I was an intern then) that we are not getting many conversions.

After checking some data he said we need to do A/B testing. So, we did.

We created a new landing page with some new colours and more spacing.

It worked better than the first page. But, for 5 days only. After that, we noticed that the first page was performing better and improving too. The second page continues to go down and then after a week, it was performing lower than the first one. 

Almost every other marketer out there gives this advice to the newbies that do A/B testing when they hit a stone and can’t improve or don’t know what to improve.  

If you are low in budget then it is better to stick to one page and try to improve it rather than doing A/B Testing. 

If you still want to do that then great you are on your way to waste money.

Conclusion

These are the main things which I found to be very useful to optimize the PPC campaigns for more ROI and stop wasting money.

Some of them are from my own experience too. Which was a great lesson in itself. 

If you want to stop wasting money then you should at least check these things in your campaign before making any conclusion.

Let me know your views in the comments below.