Words: Ashley Rigg
Published: 24th January 2008
Top 5 paid search mistakes
Done well, paid search is a great source of cost-effective property leads. Run badly, and your costs can spiral with very little increase in lead volumes. Andreas Voniatis of
Lead Galaxy outlines how to maximise the return on your advertising budget by avoiding five of the most common mistakes.
Generic Keywords
One of the most common mistakes is to use only generic keywords such as Bulgarian Property instead of complementing generic keywords with more specific keywords. Although people do search using generic keywords, many potential property investors further along the buying cycle are more likely to have a better idea of which region they want,
Varna Property for example. Therefore, use region-specific keywords, as they are likely to be less expensive and give you a better return.
Unstructured Campaigns
Unstructured campaigns are where all the keywords are dumped into a single campaign or paid search ad group. This is not an effective use of budget if your company sells property in multiple regions or countries, as you are unlikely to have highly relevant ad copy due to your keywords being unfocused. Better to create tightly focused ad groups of region-specific keywords where you can have specifically written ads that pertain to its keywords.
Poor Landing Pages
Paid search advertising networks such as Google Adwords use a quality score to assess ranking of ads in the search engine sponsored listings. Unfortunately not every advertiser realises this and many end up using their home page as the landing page for all paid search ads. Better to create specific landing pages that will get a better quality score – they will not only rank better in the sponsored listings, but also get better conversions and generate more leads.
Poor Ad Copy
Poor ad copy often results in poor click-through, leading many paid search engines to downgrade the ad rankings in the sponsored listings. A common example would be where the advertiser writes ad copy with no reference to the keywords or any compelling message that convinces the potential investor that their property website will meet their needs.
Not knowing the CPA
Many advertisers start out in paid search with unrealistic expectations, yet don’t think about the affordability of their campaign. The key statistic here is the Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). The CPA tells you how effective your campaign is by measuring how much it cost in paid search clicks to generate a lead. Without knowing your CPA, you could be running campaigns at a loss.