There are many urban legends and rumours of success when it comes to how PPC campaigns should and should not be operated. One of the most effective ways to reach large numbers of people in a short period of time, PPC can often be thought of as the “’no time wasted’ solution to SEO”. By throwing together some ad copy, content and a little bit of cash, PPC campaign users can quickly specify their targets and begin serving ads to users of search engines and social media in just a few minutes. Unfortunately, some recommendations and methods associated with PPC are really dumb moves – even though many consider them to be smart tactics. Below, we’ll lay out these strategies so that you can avoid them.

Cramming Keywords Into Campaigns

Many people have the idea in their heads that associated as many keywords as possible with their campaigns is a really good idea. After all, what could be wrong with targeting every relevant keyword and then pulling in traffic from each? Unfortunately, pinging search engines and social media networks with dozens or hundreds of keywords for a given campaign can negatively impact your campaigns’ Quality Scores and can actually reduce future overall performance. This is due to the fact that Google recently implemented close variant keyword matching; you no longer need to specify keywords for every misspelling, typo or variation of a keyword. Instead, focus on adding keywords that are truly unique from one another but that all have a real relevance to your PPC campaigns.

Using Uniform Strategies for Different Markets

If you are deploying PPC campaigns across multiple markets – particularly in different countries – then traditional logic has suggested that you streamline as much of the campaign deployment process as possible. After all, it can be very difficult to implement several truly unique campaigns for the same product. Despite this challenge, PPC campaigns should strive to be different from one another in different markets, largely due to the concept of A/B testing. In addition to this, it should be obvious that pinging search engines and social media networks with the same content in varying markets fails to take into account the need to adapt campaigns for cultural or other differences between markets.

Focusing Only on One Network

PPC campaigns can quickly become expensive, requiring smart decisions to be made in terms of where resources are allocated. Because of this, many people think it is better to focus their spending on one particular network, but this is not a good idea. Not only will it result in “putting all of your eggs in one basket”, but you may also miss out on opportunities to find more cost-effective PPC campaigns elsewhere. In addition to the most popular PPC platform – Google – there are other solutions, such as Bing Ads Search, Google Shopping (for products), and many different social media ad networks (Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, to name a few).

By following these simple tips, you can avoid making some really big, dumb PPC campaign mistakes.