Top 5 PPC Myths
There are a lot of myths, fables and just plain wrong facts about PPC out there. This week’s blog post looks at my favourite top 5 myths and what the actual truth is.
1. Use as many keywords as possible in your PPC account.
Whilst in theory the more keywords you have in your account the more traffic you’ll get, it won’t all be targeted traffic. As your paying for every visit, you want any traffic you generate from PPC to be as qualified as possible which is achieved by being selective with your keywords. If you dump a lot of keywords in your account, the most likely result is you’ll burn your budget quickly and generate very little ROI.
2. You Should Always Run The Display Network.
Running ads on the display network can be an excellent source of traffic. However, you should be careful to operate within certain parameters on the display network rather than just turning it on and letting it run as this will almost certainly end up costing you a lot of money for very little return.
If you only have a limited budget or don’t want to heavily manage ad placements on the display network, you may be best off simply running your ads on the search network.
3. Quality score is calculated on click through rates only.
I don’t deny quality scores are certainly affected by click through rates but they are not solely based on this. Quality scores are also affected by the relevance of your ad copy and landing page to your keywords and other factors Google doesn’t like to talk too much about. So if your CTR is good but your quality score isn’t improving, it may also be worth looking at your account relevancy.
4. PPC visits are mainly competitors clicking on your ads.
All of the search engines are very good at keeping track of fraudulent traffic and have departments specifically set up to monitor and stop people clicking on the same adverts multiple times. The search engines will actually refund your click cost if they feel a click has being invalid or fraudulent.
5. You don’t need PPC if you’re ranking well organically.
Ranking well organically is great but PPC can always help increase the amount of traffic to your site and brand exposure. If you think about it, organic results service about 65-70% of traffic on search engines whilst PPC services the other 30-35%. If you made cloths, you wouldn’t only make sizes that fit 65-70% of the population so why would you only want to be available to a percentage of search traffic?!
With PPC you can also target many more keywords than SEO, meaning you can increase your brand exposure and target keywords you haven’t got in your organic campaign.
