It’s often said that eCommerce PPC is like this magic panacea to all sorts of woes associated with selling online.
That may have something to do with the fact that it is often positioned as the antithesis of SEO, which takes months to years to bear fruit.
It also couldn’t be further from the truth. While it is conceivably possible to make money overnight with PPC, the truth is PPC is a lot like the poker table: there are a lot more losers than winners.
It is very easy to throw money away by investing it, poorly, into a pay-per-click marketing campaign.
Here are five big ways merchants lose money with PPC.
No Discernible Bid Strategy
The hard reality is you need to spend money to make money, and it is true in paid search marketing as it is in any marketing channel.
The bid strategy of an eCommerce PPC campaign is determined by what keywords you want to target and how much you want to pay for them.
If you don’t bid aggressively enough, you won’t be getting impressions. You may still be getting clicks for some keywords and not getting conversions.
Clicks with no conversions in a PPC campaign, as you will see, costs money and returns nothing.
Letting Competitors Drive Up Your Cost-Per-Click (CPC)
If you set and forget a PPC campaign, perhaps because you are making money, the second a competitor enters your market and bids on your keywords, your operating costs go up.
Through no action of your own, an entrant into your corner of the market will force you to pay more.
You have a few options: charge more for what you sell or adjust your current bid strategy. It might be time to target some new keywords
Otherwise, if you sit on your current campaigns without changing anything, your costs will go up, eating into your margins.
You’re Getting Clicks but No Conversions
Arguably the worst fate that can befall a PPC campaign, and ironically, is that it gets clicks, but not sales.
It’s called pay-per-click because you literally pay for clicks. If your ads get clicked but you don’t get any sales, you’re paying but getting nothing.
If you get clicks but no conversions, it could mean a few things. Maybe you’re bidding on the wrong keywords; maybe your ads send users to a landing page that is not aligned with what the ad is selling.
Perhaps, the landing page is categorically correct, but not optimized for conversions. Any and all of these conditions may be true.
You’re Not Sticking with It
It is also true that if you’ve never run an eCommerce PPC campaign before, or done any other marketing for that matter, entering for the short term will just bleed money and unlikely return anything.
PPC, like any marketing channel, takes time to launch, refine, and optimize. It also takes time to gather data based on performance and A/B testing so you can even find out what works and what doesn’t.
Whatever you do, make sure you give it some time.
You Haven’t Hired an eCommerce PPC Management Company
Lastly, if you’ve tried all else and still aren’t seeing the returns desired but are still confident that pay-per-click marketing is a viable avenue for your business, consider hiring an eCommerce PPC management company.
There are two ways this may benefit you. One is that, despite the management fee, a specialist can help optimize your campaigns for the highest ROI.
The other is that an eCommerce PPC management company can help you identify if PPC is actually a viable option for you. It may not be, in which case you may want to consider pursuing other marketing channels and drop PPC. Their expert insight can help you determine whether or not this is the case.
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