I personally believe pay per click advertising is a high risk high reward type of thing. On one hand, it can give incredible results. You can reach a set of customers that are actually searching for exactly what you are offering. Nothing can give you warmer leads than PPC ads on search engines such as Google.

On the other hand, if not done correctly, it can suck out your advertising budget faster than anything else. There are quite a few significant aspects in PPC ads that do not get the attention it deserves. As a result, marketers end up losing both money and time on campaigns that do not even come close to the desired result.

In fact many companies have been burned in PPC advertisements and have completely exhausted their marketing budget with little to spare for other activities.

While the failure of an advertising campaign can be blamed on a number of factors, here are some of the more common ones that usually result in negative results.

1) Poor Coordination between Ad Content and Landing Page Content.

We tend to spend a lot of our energy coming up with catchy ad content that grab the attention of search users. This is of course the right thing to do.

However, ad content is only the first step in grabbing attention. Your landing page is the one that needs to convert someone’s interest into action.

Far too many times the ad content and landing page content is developed by different teams with no real communication between the two. Landing page content should seamlessly takeover from ad content. There needs to be proper coordination between the two to make that final sale.

Another big problem is marketers get one single landing page done for the entire campaign. The reality is we are bidding on various keywords and depending upon the intent of the user, we need to serve up the appropriate landing page.

2) Not Creating Ad Groups

Continuing with the problem just described above, we have a variety of keywords in our campaign that end up triggering the same ad content and clicks redirecting to the same landing page. Some companies simply let users land on their website homepage regardless of which keyword triggered the ad.

This is completely wrong and a complete waste of time and money.

You need to divide your keywords, ads and landing pages into smaller ad groups.

Each group needs to have their own set of related keywords that bring up an appropriate advertisement. The landing page for those ads need to communicate effectively with the type of keywords in that particular ad group.

Most advertisers end up creating one big ad group that contains all keywords and ads. This is a huge mistake. Ad groups have been provided for a reason and you need to utilize them effectively.

3) Keyword Stuffing

How many times have we seen this? Google puts up suggestions based on your website and other data. The advertiser simply selects all and adds to campaign.

If you end up with a long list of keywords, the only thing that will happen is your budget getting exhausted faster than anticipated.

Remember you need to carefully select your keywords and create advertisements along with landing pages accordingly.

It is impossible to create both ad content and sales page content that caters to a huge range of keywords.

In fact Google had implemented quality score in its algorithms long back to keep a check on this issue. Quality score ensures your keyword, ad and sales page are all in sync. Poor quality score results in higher cost per click with poor overall return on investment.

4) Zero Competitor Analysis

Now this is something pretty much all advertisers happily ignore.

Unfortunately with the current competition and cutthroat bidding war on keywords, you need to know what your competitors are up to.

You need to find out competitor keywords and other details about your competitor’s ad campaigns.

Luckily there are several ways to do this legally and competitor analysis should be at the top of your to do list for campaign planning.

Knowing the keywords being bid by your competitors, at what rate and number of clicks received will only make your own campaign that much stronger.

5) No Remarketing Plan

Even the best Google ad campaigns have a tough time making people take immediate action after clicking an ad.

However, the most experienced and seasoned advertisers utilize remarketing techniques to bring back a user who had clicked on your ad and left without any further action.

Remarketing can be done in couple of ways. You can either use a landing page where you are simply looking at collecting email addresses of users to market to them at a later stage. Or you could use retargeting to display ads to those users who have already visited your website in the past.

So once a user has entered your website, they now get to see your ads in their social media feeds or even on other websites that use Google Adsense.

Remarketing is an important tool available to you and many advertisers should seriously consider implementing it for overall success of their ad campaigns.