Pay per click (PPC) advertising is the most popular form of advertising online. In addition to a whole host of benefits, one of the primary reasons for this popularity is that it offers you the ability to control your spending on advertising and receive detailed information on results. Pay per click advertising is also a much more affordable strategy for small and medium businesses as compared to other forms of advertising.



PPC advertising is not easy, however, and it is easy for those who are not very familiar with it to waste huge sums of money on advertisements that bring no benefit whatsoever. Take a look at 5 common mistakes that most people make with PPC advertising and you will know what you should avoid if you want to use pay per click as part of your online advertising campaign.

1. Making the landing page the same page as the home page

Many people make the mistake of setting their home page as their landing page. Visitors to their sites are interested in the particular product or service advertised in the pay per click advertisement, and they are not interested in navigating your entire site in order to find what they are looking for. Your landing page should be highly specific, and highly relevant to the keywords used in your pay per click advertisement. Get straight to the point and tell the customer what he or she should know about your business. This way, visitors to your site will be more satisfied overall and you are much more likely to experience a higher conversion rate than if you were to deposit visitors to your site at your home page.

2. Not designing the landing page according to the keywords used

For example, a website that specializes in e-mail marketing will bid for the keywords 'e-mail marketing' and 'email marketing' to cover all bases. People who use these search terms will see the advertisement, click on it and be brought to a landing page that is purely about e-mail marketing. The chance of the prospect being converted to a customer is high because the prospect sees exactly what he or she was looking for.

3. Using PPC advertisements containing generic ad copy

Google Adwords allows you only 70 characters while Yahoo gives you 190 characters to work with, so you have limited space with which to design your ad. With so little space to work with, you have to make every character and every word count. Certain words are used everywhere and by everyone and will do nothing whatsoever to distinguish your advertisement from the ones above and below it. You must include statements that describe your business accurately while separating it from the other advertisements around yours. Put in specific keywords that your prospects will be looking for in your advertisements.

4. Not bidding enough to get good placement for your ads

All the top search engines use different methods of determining how your ad is positioned. Google and Yahoo, for example, utilize a combination of your bid price and the relevancy of your ad to the keywords you have chosen. In order to secure high placement on web search engines, your ad must be tightly connected to the keywords that you choose to use.

Such placing is important because studies have estimated that almost 85% of all clicks on pay per click advertising takes place on the first three advertisements. This means that if you do not secure one of these top three positions, then you will be missing out on most of the clicks and most of the potential customers. Keyword tools are available that will help you determine what the best keywords to use are and also help you think of variations of your current keywords that might prove more effective.

5. Failing to test the effectiveness of new advertisements

While there is a template of sorts to creating an effective pay per click advertisement, slight changes to an advertisement could have a significant impact on the volume of traffic it brings to your site. All of the best search engines offer the option of creating variations of your advertisements and you should make use of this function to test different versions of your advertisements in order to determine which one is the best.

Small and medium-sized businesses can benefit greatly from the proper use of pay per click advertising. Simply avoiding the 5 common mistakes listed above will save you time, frustration, and money when starting your new pay per click advertising campaign.