By Christopher Pappas
This post is sponsored by eLearning Industry, the best collection of eLearning articles, software, and resources.
While search engines like Google are growing strong, so will pay-per-click advertising. Optimizing on PPC requires careful planning and management of ad campaigns. If you’re not getting the return on investment that you expected out of your PPC investment, then you may be making some of the most common mistakes that lead to failure of PPC campaigns. The good news is that these mistakes are easily avoidable and preventable.
Let’s look at some of the common PPC campaign mistakes that eLearning businesses tend to make, leading to PPC campaign failure.
1. Targeting Only Broad Keywords
A lot of businesses target one- or two-word keywords that are very broad and general in their scope. It’s very important that you be specific in your keyword usage to reach the right audience.
While general and broad keywords could also get you the audience, the probability of reaching the right target audience with broad and general keywords is less. Broad and general keywords can also attract an audience just doing research on a topic. To get the attention of specific audience interested in eLearning, you need to be specific in your intent with the keywords that you use.
2. Text Ads
Ensure that your text ads are being used for the right keyword. A lot of businesses have irrelevant text ads for keywords which will not cause any rise in their reach to the target audience. So make sure that your text ads are being used for relevant and correct keywords.
3. Landing Pages
It doesn’t take more than 10 seconds for a user to determine whether a website is going to be helpful or should he/ she move on to the next one. It is these 10 seconds that are going to make or break the deal of conversion for you. So, your landing page should load in less than 10 seconds, should be clear and organized. This means not having too many distractions on the landing page.
Most businesses think that a landing page with a lot of content is good for the user because it’s giving him/ her a lot of information, but that’s not true. The approach of having too much content on the landing page fails to keep the user on the website for long because it’s too cluttered and distracting. Your aim should be to give a user maximum experience in minimum effort.
4. Tracking Conversions
Many businesses have concerns regarding sharing their data with Google, so they don’t track their conversions. But, what they don’t realize is that if you don’t track conversions then there is no way to know which ad campaign or keyword is resulting in conversions. Tracking conversions will help the LMS PPC campaign managers to focus more on those specific keywords and find more keywords around that.
5. Search Terms
A lot of eLearning businesses fail to include the actual search terms, that brought them conversions as keywords. It is very important that you analyze the search terms that your visitors typed in search engines before clicking on your ads. These search terms should be added as keywords utilized in PPC campaigns. While remembering to add these search terms as keywords, it is also important to remove the keywords or search terms that are not getting you any clicks on your ads.
Conclusion
These are some of the common and small aspects of PPC campaigns that eLearning businesses forget or ignore. Each small step into the right direction can lead to great ROI on your LMS PPC campaigns. If these points are remembered in your next PPC campaign, you will definitely be able to see the change in your conversions. PPC campaigns need to be worked on and monitored constantly to see what’s working because the internet is a dynamic and constantly changing space.
