Top 5 PPC Myths

The world is full of myths, starting from the human body and ending with a cable wire, so it is no surprise that myths regarding PPC also exist. Buy doing a little research because of pure curiosity, it was possible to find more than 50 myths. Some were just for fun and laughs, some were very serious, but below is a reduced list of the top 5 myths:

• Being in the 1st position will make your ads most profitable. This is not entirely true. There is no doubt that being in the 1st position gives the best visibility of your ad to a user and sometimes that can result in a conversion (after a user clicks on your ad, of course), but mostly it will end up spending more money that what the ad is generating. Being in the 1st position is great for branding purposes, however it also drives a lot of users who are not yet ready to make a purchase, subscribe to an email newsletter or register on the site, but are still researching. It is advised to experiment with ad positions, so that you can determine the position that works best and helps you achieve the right balance of costs vs. value.
• Add and use as many keywords into your PPC account as possible to get the most traffic. In theory you may get a ton of traffic, however it is important to keep in mind relevancy. By adding a lot of keywords, the traffic you get from it won’t be qualified traffic. This will most probably result in unwanted clicks or no action from users what so ever. Let’s admit, if you are selling chocolate, for example, there is no point to bid on clothing or shoe related keywords. It is important to target the most relevant keywords for your PPC account, otherwise it’s likely to use all your budget quickly without generating any of your desired conversions.
• After setting a PPC account you can forget about it. A lot of people think that they can create campaigns and ad groups, set budgets, bids, load in keywords, ads and walk away. Although it would be very nice and easy, unfortunately this isn’t true. PPC is not a “set it and forget it” if you want to make the most of the money you are willing to invest or spending at the moment. It takes monitoring, testing, adding, removing, bid increasing or lowering, turning off, turning on, etc., in order to get the highest results for the money you spend. Because of the workload involved in managing a PPC account many businesses choose to outsource their accounts to PPC agencies, which can dedicate time and expertise to complete the mentioned tasks.
• Opening up a new PPC account will re-start your Quality Scores. This actually is partially a myth, because technically if you open up a new PPC account your Quality Scores will reset, however, if you are keeping the same account structure, landing pages, ads, keywords, etc., you are going to end up with approximately the same Quality Score as you had previously. To improve your Quality Score, you need to monitor your account or maybe even re-structure to organize your campaigns, ad groups, keywords to reach the most targeted audience possible.
• Test ads every week regardless of the clicks they have. And again this isn’t true. It is important that when ads are tested (before deciding on when to pause or leave an ad on) to give them a longer date range to look at. Also be sure that each ad has at least 100 clicks – the more the better, before making any final decision. This will allow to get a true perspective on which ads are performing best over time. If an ad is paused too early, it could result in pausing a potentially great performing ad. Sometimes testing can take a longer time period, but it can achieve very positive results.