PPC marketing has the power to drive massive traffic and conversions – but one wrong move can drain your budget fast.
Many marketers unknowingly make costly mistakes due to hidden platform settings, human error, or poor strategic decisions.
Whether it’s setting an unrealistic budget, neglecting creative, misusing AI, or avoiding experimentation, these missteps can lead to wasted ad spend and underwhelming results.
The good news?
Every PPC mistake has a fix.
This article breaks down the four most common PPC mistakes, why they happen, and how to correct them – so you can optimize your campaigns and maximize ROI.
Mistake 1: Setting an unrealistic budget
Setting a budget that simply can’t deliver results is a huge mistake.
Whether it’s due to misjudging the number of targets, misunderstanding auction prices, or failing to align spend with market conditions, an inadequate budget dooms campaigns before they start.
Your budget needs to support at least 10 clicks per day to succeed.
A 10% conversion rate is considered excellent for non-branded campaigns. The math isn’t in your favor if you’re not budgeting for at least one lead per day.
Here’s what you need to consider when setting your budget:
Know the auction prices of your targets
Whether they are keywords, audiences, placements, or topics, they’re all going to have different CPCs or CPMs.
Mixing too many auction prices in the same campaign will cause the campaign to struggle to support them all.
Factor in market conditions
Location, device type, time of day, and other competitive elements impact conversion rates and cost.
Set realistic shifts for ad delivery
If your budget is tight, consider running ads only during the highest-performing hours. You can identify these by segmenting your schedule into six-hour windows.
This helps you identify when impressions and clicks happen most often and lets you optimize spend based on historical performance.
Make sure your bids align with your budget
If your daily budget is $50 but your average cost per click (CPC) is $75 to $100, you won’t get results.
Many platforms prevent you from setting bids that exceed 50% of your daily budget to avoid this mistake.
It’s important to factor in how much you will trust your conversions and the anticipated volume of your conversions.
The biggest reason ad platforms can misallocate your budget is getting false positives/negatives on what’s driving success in your account.
Dig deeper: PPC diagnostics: How to find and fix the root cause of low conversions
Mistake 2: Not investing enough time in creative
Even the best budget strategy won’t save a campaign if your ads fail to capture attention. That’s where creative comes in.
PPC platforms are packed with technical features. But creative is what makes or breaks your campaigns.