Expensive Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Call 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about digital marketing services from WebFX, or keep reading for four common marketing mistakes that could be negatively impacting your campaigns.

1. Not using negative PPC keywords

When you launch a PPC campaign, your main focus is choosing the keywords you want your ads to display for. And in most cases, you want those ads to reach as many people as possible.

However, not all the people searching for a given keyword are necessarily qualified leads. That’s where negative keywords become important, and not using them means you could end up overpaying on Google Ads and other platforms.

Ranking for as many searches as possible may seem like a good thing at first. However, if customers click on your ads and then leave without buying anything, you’re still spending money on those clicks—even though they’re not generating any revenue for you.

If you identify keywords that are similar to your target keywords, but indicate that a user isn’t a potential customer, you can add them to your campaigns as negative keywords. Your ads won’t show for these searches, meaning that even though you’ll likely see a reduction in clicks, you’re only eliminating users who are unlikely to become customers—and eliminating the possibility of wasting your budget.

For example, let’s say you sell sneakers and cater to athletes. You could add negative keywords like “orthopedic” and “dress” to your campaigns, so that people looking for orthopedic shoes or dress shoes won’t see your ads—even though their searches include the word “shoes.”

Identifying the right negative keywords for your campaign will require time and research, but the money it can save you is certainly worth it. The less you spend on unqualified leads, the more room you’ll have in your budget to spend on potential customers.

2. Neglecting analytics

At its simplest, analytics refers to data that can help you make decisions. In marketing, analytics usually refers to data that shows how well your campaigns are performing.

For example, the analytics for your company’s website include the number of unique visitors you get per month, the location of those visitors, how long they spend on your site, and how they found your site in the first place.

Strong analytics are essential to making sure you’re making the right moves with your marketing campaigns. If you’re spending a lot of money on PPC or social media ads, for example, but find that most of your website visitors are actually coming from your email newsletter, that’s a sign that you may want to refocus your efforts.

Essentially, it shows you the most effective channels for your business.

Analytics also gives you a better understanding of your customers, so you can do a better job of providing the content they want on the channels they prefer. Look at which pages on your site are the most popular, what topics they address, and what formats they use.

Knowing this allows you to create more of the content customers want, driving even more traffic to your website.

Knowing where your customers come from is also invaluable. If you notice many of your online visitors are being referred from a certain social network, you may consider investing more of your budget in that network—and less in the others.

Without using analytics, you’re essentially guessing what customers want and how they’re responding to your current strategy. With analytics, you have the data to back it up.