Today I was reading about the ad performance tips on Yahoo Search marketing blog. These tips were crisp and clear and if you are involved in PPC with yahoo search marketing, you can ensure you do not make these mistakes.

Below are the top five mistakes advertisers make in their PPC campaigns:

1. Duplicate keywords across ad groups or campaigns

Kastle waserman on the blog says “duplicate keywords won’t help your performance—in fact, they can hurt you quite a bit, because our systems de-dupe on multiple levels”. You can definitely agree to these that the duplicate keywords won’t help. Systems will only use one of the keywords to display your ads. But I was not sure as to how the duplicate keywords can hurt the campaigns. It may actually lower your quality score and result in a higher CPC.

2. Geo-modified keywords in geo-targeted campaigns

Well the Geo targetted keywords can & will decrease the traffic but for some campaigns these keywords can actually increase in good conversion rates as these would be highly targetted keywords. The Blog says, “This can result in a lot less traffic, since there is a strong chance the ads will not display due to a geo-targeting mismatch. The solution for this is to use geo-modified keywords only in campaigns not using geo-targeting.”

3. Putting your phone number in your ad

Kastle mentions “a phone number in your ad can decrease your click-through rate and quality index score, which in turn drives up your cost-per-click and pushes the ad further down in results.” Surely, if you have a phone number on the ad, then you may not get the clickthrough but then you may get some direct customers. This may sound profitable but will hurt in long term as your ad may get impressions & lower CTR as the visitors do not need to click on your ad. They can contact you directly on the phone number.

4. Bidding on competitor’s keywords

Kastle mentions on the blog that “it’s not OK to see what your competitor is using and then simply copy them. Doing this will result in your irrelevant keywords being removed by our guidelines review”.
This was surprising for me as there are many advertisers who pay a lot of money to get programs which can spy on the PPC advertisers to copy their campiagns. This strategy is definitely profitable.
Secondly, even if you do not copy anyone, you will still use the same keyword research tools & there are possibilities that you will end up lot of keywords similar to your competitors. Ok, advertisers who just copy for the sake of copying will definitely end up with lower quality score and will have their irrelevant keywords removed. So, if you want to copy just make sure you are copying adgroup relevant keywords only.

5. Quitting too soon.

This is one point which does not need to be explained. Many a times, newbies run a campaign for short time & when they do not find any returns they just dump the campaigns. Sometimes they bid so low that the ads do not get any impressions and these are soon dumped. Its extremely important to test the keywords, ads for atleast 100 clicks before you quit on the campaign. (well 100 clicks is something that works for me.)

Read the Yahoo blog