If you want to mine every ounce of performance from your pay-per-click ads, review your work to be sure you’re not making any of these frequent mistakes. If you are, you’re not alone, many internet entrepreneurs make them. Avoid them and your business will take off for sure:

• Bidding on keywords/phrases which are too general. You have to be specific to get meaningful results, otherwise you’ll just get lots of unrelated traffic. Don’t bid on “dogs”. Bid on “border collie nutrition” or “border collie senior nutrition” instead.
• Not bidding on enough keywords/phrases. Some people only bid on 5 or 10 keywords. Others bid on 50 or 60. The folks with the most successful websites bid on 1000, 2000, even 4000 keywords at once. You have to use WordTracker to find all of the relevant phrases that real people use to search for your niche every day!
• Bidding on keywords/phrases which are too expensive. Don’t bid on the ones which cost a dollar a click or more (don’t even think of bidding on “mortgage” or “insurance” for example)! Instead, bid on lots of more-specific keywords/phrases which only cost 5 or 10 cents a click. You’ll get more relevant traffic for a much lower cost.
• Not using WordTracker to see which keywords/phrases people really use when they search. You can guess what people might use all day long, and you’ll get lucky here and there. But you’ll never come up with all of the phrases which people use all over the world to search for your niche. You just won’t. Why leave money on the table? Use WordTracker to be sure you capture what people are really using when they search.
• Not bidding on all possible combinations. With Google in particular, you need to bid on the phrase itself, and also the phrase surrounded by double quotes, and also the phrase surrounded by brackets. They all indicate subtle variations on how the words in the phrase can appear in search queries (with other words in between the ones you specify, with other word endings, etc.). Using these three variations on each key phrase triples your phrase count, in case you were wondering how you could ever get as high as 4000 phrases for a campaign.
• Not using negative keywords. Again, with Google campaigns in particular, you should specify words like “free” and “cheap” and “discount” as negative keywords if you’re selling a product which is not free, cheap or discounted. If you’re bidding on “reptile care book” and you specify “free” as a negative keyword, anyone who searches for “free reptile care book” won’t see your ad, which is what you want if you’re trying to sell them a reptile care book, especially an expensive one.
• Not bidding on mis-spelled keywords/phrases. You’d be amazed at how many people spell search terms incorrectly, especially if it’s one of those words that no one’s quite sure how to spell in the first place. It’s worth it to bid on mis-spellings, even more so if the correctly-spelled phrase is popular and expensive (the mis-spelling may be cheap and give you significant traffic).
• Not using WordTracker to determine buyer behavior. Not sure which words people will use when they want to buy your product right now? Use WordTracker to see how often people use “buy clawfoot tub” versus “purchase clawfoot tub” versus “clawfoot tub shop” versus “clawfoot tub comparison” and so on. If you’re not sure what to sell, explore WordTracker’s vast database by looking to see what it comes up with when you simply give it “buy” or “comparison” or “deals” or “prices” or “advice” and so on.
• Not using WordTracker because it’s too expensive. You don’t have to sign up for WordTracker by the month. Organize yourself and sign up for a day at a time, or a week at a time. Most people try to go the route of guessing and using free tools like Overture’s and Google’s suggestion tools, but they end up bidding on only a fraction of the keywords/phrases which will really bring them relevant traffic. Overture’s tool is half-way decent but won’t give you the same volume of phrases which WordTracker does, and Google’s tool is almost useless (many of their “suggestions” are wildly irrelevant to the rest of your keywords).
• Not “split-testing” slightly different ads for the same product with the same keywords/phrases. Once you’ve settled on a set of keywords/phrases, you have to constantly test slightly different ads to see which ones get the best click-through rate. We’re talking about only changing a word or two in the ad and leaving everything else the same. One tiny change can make an exponential difference in your response rate!

Avoid those common mistakes and you’ll get top performance and more revenue from your pay-per-click ads.

Discover why successful people use WordTracker every day.

Learn more about WordTracker by taking their free trial now.

Have a happy Fourth of July!

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