5 Bad Habits to Avoid, in PPC Ads Management

It’s difficult to break bad habits, but now is the greatest time to rehabilitate your PPC ads management in order to boost your results in the future.

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The start of a new year is an excellent opportunity to break poor habits with your PPC account.

Sure, there are a lot of shortcuts that can help you save time.

We do, however, wish to have a robust PPC account in the end:

• Making the most of all ad platform options.

• Serving the most effective ads and keywords.

• Using keywords or placements to target the most relevant audiences.

Bad habit #1: Ads that are set to rotate indefinitely.

Advertisers frequently want to test their PPC advertising campaign in order to improve their results.

One approach to achieve this is to use AdWords and Bing Ads settings to serve ad text versions equally so that an analysis can be done to determine the winning creative.

The campaign setting in AdWords is labelled “Rotate endlessly,” but the ad group setting in Bing Advertisements is termed “rotate ads more evenly.”

This is “not recommended for most advertisers,” according to Google.

Why?

Because the test is frequently not followed upon. Instead, the setting is left on all the time.

As a result, a lower-quality ad gets served alongside a higher-performing ad, with no modifications to make the better ad serve more frequently.

Only use this option if you intend to do a test.

Schedule the campaign to expire at a specific time – or simply add a calendar reminder to review the findings – whenever you’re running a test.

Bad habit #2: Ads that are not geotargeted

You may double-check this by going to the Dimensions tab and then clicking on View: AdWords user locations or Geographical location (Bing Ads).

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Change Advanced Location Options to “people in your targeted locations” if you notice clicks from outside the geotargeted location. That implies that the people who will see your advertisement must be physically present in the area.

Here’s an example from Bing Ads (it’s similar in AdWords):

This is located under Locations > Edit Location Settings > Who?

Allowing advertising to offer to audiences outside of the location targeting may make more sense depending on the sort of business. On a campaign-by-campaign basis, determine if this is suitable.

The advertiser in the case below paid $15 in click expenses in Nevada but did not want to promote to the state.

While $15 isn’t a large sum, these unneeded expenses can quickly build up over the course of a campaign.

Bad Habit #3: Using the Search Query Tool Incorrectly

The search term report in AdWords and Bing Ads is a goldmine of data and resources for coming up with negative keywords.

Begin by going over your list and picking the keywords you wish to use as negatives.

As a default, AdWords will display negative keywords in the exact match format:

As Google says, adding the negatives in an exact match default is a typical bad habit. This will, however, only eliminate a percentage of what you truly need to exclude.

To capture the appropriate queries, we’d like to alter these to simply ‘HGTV’ broad match and ‘Houzz’ broad match.

Better yet, take advantage of this as an opportunity to generate proactive negative keywords.

Make a list of negative keywords that everyone can use.

Use this list to add the negative phrases to the keywords list, updating all of the campaigns at once.

Negative keywords are not added as precise matches in Bing Ads. Instead, Bing Ads displays negatives as exact or phrase matches, with a dropdown menu to adjust the match type.

Bad Habit #4: Ignoring Ads on Mobile Apps/Games

Ads are offered on mobile apps using all display targeting methods, including retargeting.

Except for advertising of B2C or broad-appeal items or services, traffic rarely converts (e.g., sweepstakes and other B2C lead generation).

View the locations and then filter by “mobile” to examine the scope of mobile app serving and performance.

Depending on whether you’re using the classic or new version of AdWords, this display will differ slightly, but you get the idea.

If an app isn’t working for you, remove it one by one.

Also read: How To Make Effective Landing Pages

Bad Habit #5: No Ad Extensions Strategy

Neglecting the ad extensions component is one of the worst bad habits in managing PPC accounts.

Unfortunately, they appear to have been inserted without any care for strategy, and they are repetitious, inconsistent, or simply missing.

Sorting these out and breaking this habit can take some effort, but it’s definitely worth it.

The best place to start is to organize the ad extensions with free-flowing written material and learn what each one is for:

• Sitelinks: Hyperlinks to more in-depth content.

• Structured snippets: Specific features of a product depending on the header, with no link.

• Callouts: No link to features or benefits.

Because there’s no guarantee that all of the extensions will appear at the same time or in the same order, make sure your most critical message is in the primary ad content.

Use each ad extension for its appropriate purpose to avoid message repetition.

The number of times these product features must be repeated in the other extensions must be kept to a minimum.

This enables you to use site links to link to other tools on the website, as well as structured snippets to list product models.

See 4 PPC Ad Extensions You Should Be Using Today for additional information on these and other ad extensions.

Conclusion

It’s difficult to quit bad habits, but now is the greatest moment to rehabilitate your PPC account for better results in the future.

Author:

Ahmad Sultan is a technical content writer for digital marketing company MightyWarner. He loves to write tutorials and helps people with his SEO + SERP strategies as well as his own website as a Digital Marketing Expert. He likes to travel, play video games and he also writes about entertainment, animals and lifestyle .