The success of every website now depends on search engine optimization and digital marketing strategy. If you are on the first page of all major search engines, then you are ahead of your competitors in terms of online sales, "Dr Christopher Dayagdag".

You might not know what PPC Marketing means but must have come across several ppc management in the digital space. On Google, after searching for anything, they come as the first 2-3 results with a short 'Ads' description before them.

Despite the challenges of increasing their reach and revenue, lots of businesses take advantage of PPC Marketing. They use PPC to supplement their ongoing organic efforts to reach more audiences and drive more conversions. Most digital marketers remark a designated part of their ad budget to search engine advertisement, showing PPC's importance to marketing.

ppc marketing can be very effective if done correctly and can help businesses increase their reach and conversions. However, companies can lose a lot of money if their PPC strategy is not well-planned and executed. PPC advertising is susceptible to click fraud and other issues that can negatively impact results, so it is essential to have a solid plan in place.

PPC campaigns require consistent optimization to ensure you are getting your driving results and making the most of your investment. To be successful in PPC involves a lot of hard work. The workload can be reduced by using intelligent data-driven analytics, but you must remember that competition is fierce, and mistakes are not forgiven.

What is PPC Marketing?

ppc marketing is a digital advertising model whereby the advertiser pays the publisher each time a user or visitor clicks on the advert. The advertiser does not reimburse the publisher upfront before the ad is displayed; they pay after each visitor clicks the ad. This type of advertisement is run primarily by search engines and social networks. The most popular are Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, etc.

Advertisement fees are paid by the advertiser when a user clicks on an ad that appears on a search engine result page (SERP) in response to a query related to the advertiser's target keywords. The ads typically appear at the top or bottom of the SERP, with an indication that they are ads (""Ad"" tag).

PPC Marketing is used by businesses to increase traffic to a landing page, grow brand awareness, and make sales to people in the market for their products or services. It helps companies put their products and services in the faces of people searching precisely for them. With PPC marketing, businesses enjoy a form of targeted advertising that traditional advertisement does not make provision for.

Types of PPC Marketing

Let us briefly touch on the types of PPC ads, as the requisite knowledge will help you understand the challenges and fixes of pay-per-click advertising:

Text Ads

These are exactly as they sound. They are texts written by the copywriter to sell a product without using visual aids. Text ads are triggered when a user's search aligns with a particular keyword in your ad campaign. They are varied and can be Responsive Search Ads, Expanded Text Ads, and Dynamic Search Ads.

Display Ads

Text ads are generated when a customer's search includes a specific keyword from your advertising campaign. They can be responsive search ads, expanded text ads, or dynamic search ads.

Shopping Ads

shopping ads are shown when the user searches for a specific product or product category a business sells online. The shopping ad includes the product's picture, the price, location, specification, shipping information, and a link to an online store where the user can place an order. When a user clicks the link, they are directed to a landing page, and the store owner pays the platform irrespective of whether the user completes the purchase.

Six Common PPC Marketing Challenges and Ways to Fix Them

Here is a way to know your PPC marketing challenges along with their solution:

Challenge 1: Low Impression

The Impression Share (IS) measures the number of impressions an ad receives in PPC. Impression Share is the percentage of total impressions your ads receive compared to the total number of impressions it is eligible to receive. Lost Impression Share is the remaining percentage.

When running a ppc campaigns, your range of keywords and how high enough your bid is will determine the total number of times your ad shows in any number of searches. For each search, your IS tells you how many times it has been seen compared to how many times it could have been seen.

Some of the reasons your ads can have a low impression share are:

• Low budget
• Your ad rank is not high enough
• Your bid is too low

Fix 1:

• Increase your budget if your ad budget is running low, it won't be easy to bid high enough to get a high ad rank. Once you run out of money, you leave the market for your competitors to dominate searches. Also, if your budget is too large, you stand the risk of draining your resources soon. Therefore, you should find a balance by testing different bids and budgets.

• Adjust your bids as when you increase or decrease your bids depending on the time of the day and how well your ads are doing. If your ads are behind, you should increase your bid while maintaining or reducing your current bid in places where you are ahead. For better bidding use NinjaSEM bid management.

• Assess your keywords as using the exact match type keywords will attract more qualified use but only a few. However, utilizing Broad Match can open up your ads to show for more similar searches.

Challenge 2: Too Many keywords

This is a common mistake with several PPC advertisements, and some businesses use as many keywords as possible, thinking that this will translate theoretically to more traffic and more conversion. This is a mistake. When building your ads, you must meet your customers at different stages of their buying journey.

Stuffing keywords into an ad destroys this segmentation as it drives all kinds of search intent to your ads without filtering the stage each customer is in. Hence, you lose money for each click, and the conversion rate is low. The relevance you seek would make your ads irrelevant as the search engine would rank you down insignificance.

The best number of keywords to use in any of your PPC ads should be 20 or fewer. This will reduce unnecessary traffic and filter the visitors who will see your ads. Furthermore, it makes you a better marketer as you have to select your choice of keywords and phrases more carefully.

Fix 2:

• Use negative keywords to filter out irrelevant searches. keyword research with high rates but low conversion rates and use them as negative keywords.

• Understand the types of keyword matches; Exact Match, Broad Match, Phrase Match. Exact Match tells the search engine to give searches for that same keyword; Broad Match shows relevant ads to your keywords, while Phrase Match means the search engine displays your ads for searches where your keyword appears precisely as it is in a more extensive search.

Challenge 3: Poorly Structured Account

Search engines rarely rank your ad if your account lacks a clear structure. All stages of your campaigns, down to the ads, impact your Quality Score and segment effectively. Give your PPC ads a well-defined structure by having a system of organization that reminds you of what each item does. This gives every individual on the account a clear understanding of what you are doing and makes it easy for you to locate the offending element if your ads are not doing well.

Fix 3:

• Set an objective for your ad campaign before you delve deeper into PPC advertising.
• Divide your ad groups based on the value they offer the target audience and what stage of the sales funnel they are targeting.
• Match your ad groups to the search intents of customers at various stages of the buying phase.
• Test the structure of your ad before investing your budget. This is important to filter out expensive queries, refine your messaging and help you learn more about what works best for your brand.

Challenge 4: Competitors Using Your Brand Keywords

When your ads are doing very well, it is tough to hide them from competitors. In business, monitoring competitors and stealing working ideas are not uncommon, and the same can also be a challenge in PPC advertising. Competitors hover around your keywords when you are ranking top in your brand keywords and your brand awareness is being established.

Specifically, upcoming brands will use your keywords to hijack organic traffic to get your level of exposure in a short space of time. They siphon lots of clicks your ads should be receiving, thereby dealing your conversions a considerable blow.

Fix 4:

• Boost your bids. Most competitors that steal these keywords are upcoming, so they cannot match your spending strength. Hence, you can easily outrank them.

• Ask them to stop politely. Unfortunately, if they are generating a lot of leads, your competitors would refuse. Since all is fair in love and advertisement, they are not breaking any rules.

• Have optimal control over the keywords, you can trademark your keyword. This won't stop your competitors entirely, but if they persist, you can sue them and reap gazillions in damages.

Challenge 5: Wrong Search Intent

This happens when there is a mismatch between what people are searching for and what your ads show. This is quite dangerous as several layers of preparations go to waste as your ads do not connect with your audience. It highlights the differences between what is going through the users' minds and the intent of your advertisement. Your ad can be selling jogging shoes while your user is thinking of "buy running shoes online."

Fix 5:

Search engines serve ads to audiences based on several factors, including past search behavior, current trends, and signals of intent. So, to get your ads to match what is going through your user's mind, here are some things you can do:

• Run small tests to see which queries will trigger your ads'
• Take cognizance of homonyms
• Take cognizance of intent
• Use keywords that factor in the state of the mind of the user.

Challenge 6: Focusing on the Wrong KPIs

PPC advertisement is a great way to convert users and grow your online presence if you have an excellent online brand presence. Unlike SEO, PPC produces an immediate difference that takes months of build-up before you can notice a difference. Another mistake digital marketers make is declaring a campaign successful untimely or based on a few solid numbers for the wrong metrics.

So, unless you know your ads' objective, it is possible to focus on the wrong metric and assume it is successful.

Fix 6:

It is best to measure the performance of PPC campaigns by looking at the result of your ads campaign in the context of your company's business goals rather than judging individual metrics. Here are a few ways to align the two:

• High number of clicks and a substantial CTR are great for business exposure but poor if the goal is to make sales
• High numbers of conversions and clicks are good, but you are missing out on much more if the CTR is low.
• High Return on Ad Spend might look great, but you are not making gains if the profit margin is low compared to your ad spend.

Conclusion

"As an expert UK PPC consultant, Scott uses a range of techniques to produce successful outcomes for your business, including in-depth keyword planner, bid management, competitor analysis, and split-testing. You'll gain a deeper insight into what persuades potential customers to purchase on your site."― PPC AgencyUK

There are always new things to learn in PPC advertisements, irrespective of how extensive your knowledge might seem. But when you are new to online advertising, it is challenging to know where the limits are, what keywords to target, the frequency of the keywords, and how to study the results.

Use NinjaSEM to manage all your digital advertisements.