Without a doubt one of the hardest parts of being a webmaster is finding a way to successfully drive traffic to your website.
Driving traffic to your website can be very frustrating to say the least. SEO is one proven method, but it can be hit or miss as algorithms change. So what else can you do to back up your SEO campaign?
One of the best options is to employ a pay-per-click campaign through a search engine such as Google or a social networking site like Facebook.
You must be cautious though, as once you set up this type of advertising with a search provider, it can get very expensive if it is not producing results. To avoid this from happening, we’ve come up with a list of reasons why your PPC advertising may not be working effectively. Keep reading to find out more.
1. Trying to Manage PPC on Your Own
By far the number one reason that companies fail with their pay-per-click advertising is they don’t know how to go about doing it right. This is a shame because a third party PPC manager can really help to boost a website’s traffic and sales with the guidance they have to offer. A good third party PPC manager can be the difference between making big profits with your campaign or just throwing away your advertising pounds.
2. Poor Results Tracking
Not everything that has to do with pay-per-click advertising works. Some keywords or phrases work better than others. It is essential to your business that you analyse and track the results of your advertising campaign because without these results you will be unable to determine which keyword buys are working and which are not.
Failure to do this means you may continue paying for keywords that are ineffective instead of putting your PPC funds into a more effective situation where they are generating more revenue.
3. Poor Web Design
This too is another reason why tracking is important. You have heard the expression “don’t shoot the messenger”. It may not be the pay-per-click campaign that is hurting you but your website design itself. This is often the case if web traffic to your site is steady but the visitors click-through quickly or only stay on your website for a short time. You may need to do some serious redesigning of your website if this is the case.
4. The Account Structure Itself
Many companies do such things as send all their traffic to their homepage instead of a specifically targeted webpage on their site, but this just causes the visitor to get lost or lose interest before your product or service even gets a chance to captivate them. There can also be instances where the keywords or phrases you are using are so close that they work against each other, or you could be using irrelevant keywords that have just resulted in a high bounce rate.
The best thing for most small companies to do is to consider hiring a pay-per-click professional. At the very least, they will help you to set up your PPC campaigns and explain which keywords you need to be targeting. And that could save you A LOT of work!
To Your Success!
About the Author:
The SEO-Alien is a project started in 2009 regarding all things online marketing. The site started out more of a diary of predictions, suggestions and references to things I frequently used for online marketing... before social media marketing was even an option.
I hope you find the information and tools presented here useful and something worth sharing with others.
If there is anything else about online marketing or any online advertising strategy you think would be helpful, please let me know.
