This is the first in our paid search marketing series. Pay per click can be a really effective online marketing channel...if you know what to do. Dave, Chad and Eric talk about the five rookie mistakes of paid search marketing and how you can avoid them! Watch the video!
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Hi, this is Dave. We're with the Semify team over here. Today we're going to be discussing the five rookie mistakes of paid search marketing. I have Chad and Eric here as well from our paid search analyst team. And we're just going to dive into it.
Number one. The first mistake we usually see is going to be match type. Thanks, Dave. I'm Chad. I'm going to go over the first rookie mistake of paid search marketing. And that normally, when we get a campaign over, the biggest thing I normally notice is every single keyword in all campaigns and ad groups are broad matched. That's something that people that don't normally manage a PPC campaign wouldn't know any different to do.
The biggest thing you want to do to have control over your keywords. And setting everything to broad match is one, going to waste your money. And two, you're really not getting very specific traffic for what you're looking for. In a nutshell, you want to have a little bit more control. You should have good match types between broad, phrase, and exact matching. And you need some enhanced broad match keywords. So that is the first paid search marketing mistake that rookies make. I'm going to give it to Eric now for number two, which is location targeting.
Many people don't realize it, but we use AdWords Editor a lot. And if you really dive into paid search, and you're really serious about paid search marketing, then you're going to really have that need to use Editor. It makes bulk edits a lot simplified for you. It makes a lot of changes simple. But what many people really gloss over and don't realize-- the location targeting. By default, Editor is set to the entire US. Now, it doesn't make sense for someone who has a small business in Philadelphia-- if you want to write just the city of Philadelphia, it doesn't make sense to target the entire US. So you really got to be aware of where your location targeting is set. And make sure you're really optimizing that simple feature. And that's one mistake I see a lot of people make.
Awesome. Couldn't agree more. That actually segues perfectly into our third rookie mistake of paid search marketing that people make. And that is running campaigns on search and display networks combined. Like Eric said, the location targeting is default to the US. Same thing, you're in Editor building your initial campaigns.
Most people don't realize that the default setting for Google is search and display. And you could say they're trying to trick you, because it gets more money. It probably works. And for the most part, when I see a campaign come over that we're going to start managing for customers, the first thing I check is the settings, and see what opportunities are in there.
The biggest reason you guys don't want to run a paid search campaign and a display campaign together is one, they're going to compete with each other. Two, you're going to really spend a lot of money on display. Most people that are running their own PPC campaigns before they actually bring it over to a professional agency usually have smaller budgets. But a smaller budget, you really have to watch every little dollar spending, and display is really not something you do when you got a $500, $1,000, $1,500 budget. So that's a big, big mistake. And that is our third rookie mistake of paid search marketing. Back to Eric for our fourth mistake. And that's going to be device targeting error.
Yeah. Like you said, you've got to watch the budget when you have a smaller media spend. And so many paid search marketers are going to have it set to all device targeting. So what that means is you're targeting desktops, tablets, and mobile devices. If your client's site doesn't have a mobile optimized site, then you're just going to lose potential visitors to bouncing off the site. It doesn't make sense.
It would be more efficient to set a call extension only campaign, or just not target mobile devices at all. And in paid search marketing, you want to really make sure you're optimizing that budget, optimizing the keywords. But at the end of the day, if the device targeting doesn't make sense, if your client's site's not optimized correctly, then limit it to just desktops and tablets. So as we can see, there's a lot of rookie mistakes that people make on paid search marketing. The last one really is-- and this is going to segue into our next video for next week-- but it's ad extensions. So I'm going to hop this one over to Dave right now and let Dave wrap it up for you.
So the last final rookie mistake we have here, number five, is going to be not taking advantage of ad extensions in your pay per click campaigns. So we're actually going to get into details on that next week in that segment. And we appreciate you guys actually sitting in, listening to our five rookie mistakes of paid search marketing. And tune in next week for the ad extensions video. Thank you for tuning in.