Pay-per-click marketing is THE norm for online marketing now. While inbound marketing envelopes all the techniques for online marketing, it is PPC that does the magic for business that need to make sales and increase their revenues in a short span of time. Talking of that, even e-commerce entities have relied on the marketing of this kind. So, it only makes sense to invest in the service of a Pay per click marketing firm.

But hey! Not everyone is making magic; not everyone is closing millions of deals everyday; not everyone is on the top. Clearly, not everyone can be a pro. Clearly, most people are making mistakes. Astonishingly, you don’t have to be a dum-dum to make those mistakes. You could be very well acquainted with PPC marketing and could still be committing these silly errors that may prove to be cataclysmic blunders for your ad campaign, and ultimately for your business.

So, right here, are 5 silliest of the silliest PPC marketing mistakes that you could be committing with your PPC campaign.

1. Letting Others Bid for Your Company Name

Seriously pal, that happens a lot. Your competitors bid for a keyword that is your brand name. If you are not bidding on your brand name as a keyword, odds are that your competitor will. And, they do. You shouldn’t be surprised if you Google your name and the result that pops up isn’t your ad. Well, there are situations in which you can take legal action against the one that is making use of a keyword that is your brand name. So, don’t hesitate in checking with your intellectual property rights expert.

Also, it should be an important part of your strategy to bid on your brand name keywords. It brings you a hoard of traffic if your brand is already known to your audience. It also means that you have better chances of your ad to figure on the top. And, if it’s the budget you are looking at, it’s just a teeny tiny bit extra when you are already bidding on keywords.

2. Going Only for Broad Match

Attempting to capture a broad audience with broad match keywords can actually be self-sabotaging. It is what the lazy people do. It is good to have certain general keywords that are likely to attract a lot of traffic initially, but just that cannot suffice. All general keywords offer variations that can get you specific set of audience. Long tail keywords work a lot better than broad match keywords. In short term and long, you are going to pay less if you focus on them. The closer the query matches your keyword, the higher your rank will be. Bid on broad match keywords, but also take these keywords and turn them into variations in order to bid on keywords that are closer to your audience’s queries.

3. Paying for Fraudulent Networks

Take it for granted that each paid search engine will give you the excess baggage of fraudulent networks, or the ones that fail to fetch you any traffic. Yahoo, Bing, Google, MSN – all will distribute your ads to these networks along with the worthy ones. Why should you be paying for these, when it is unlikely that the leads from such networks buy from you? Going for such an arrangement will only get your traffic a very high bounce rate.

The good news is that Google offers you the facility to get rid of these. The category called “negative excluded site” lets you collect all these domains in a folder so that your ad isn’t published there. As for the other search engines, you can always give them a call to sort the issue.

4. Using Contact Details in Text Instead of Ad Extensions

Are you writing your phone number, contact address or URL in the ad copy? If you are, you are simply flushing your money down the drain. There is no chance that any user is going to copy your number from the ad and then make a call. Not happening in this life, at least. Even if you put your address there, your audience cannot navigate from there. So, you are only wasting the precious ad space.

Ad extensions are a rather genius way of putting some of the most vital information in your ad copy which otherwise would have eaten up the most precious character space. Plus, don’t forget a large chunk, larger than desktop users, is that of mobile device users. They appreciate when they have a call button, or if they can see your address on Google Maps. But, they simply won’t like it if your URL is not clickable. Your URL must direct them to the landing page. Extensions like Call Extension, Location Extension, Sitelink Extension, etc., are what you need.

5. Paying for Negative Keywords

You sell quality HD wallpapers, but people want free HD wallpapers, and when they search for “free hd wallpapers”, your ad pops up. They click, they find that your product isn’t free and they go. But, you still end up paying for that click. That, my friend, is nothing but a loss you can simply avoid by making a negative keyword list.

Making a negative keyword folder means that even when the broad match is applicable, your search engine will make sure that your ad isn’t displayed for queries with those keywords like “free” or “stock”, or any keyword that you are unlikely to offer any scope of conversion . This is how you decrease the bounce rate and don’t pay for the clicks that cannot be converted.

Trust me, if you will. These are some of the silliest mistakes that you could ever commit with PPC marketing. But, the good news is that you can avoid them.