8 Common PPC Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Did you know that PPC costs have risen by 22% year on year? With search advertising becoming increasingly expensive, avoiding costly mistakes is more crucial than ever for maximizing ROI.

Not Bidding On Your Own Brand

A common oversight that many PPC advertisers make is neglecting to bid on their own brand. SEO purists will argue that top organic rankings should suffice, but Tom Goodwin, the Head of PPC at Exposure Ninja, insists otherwise. In today’s competitive landscape, brand terms not only capture high-converting traffic but also supply Google’s machine-learning algorithms with critical first-party signals.

"If you’re not bidding on your brand, just forget about anything else on search advertising." – Tom Goodwin, Head of PPC, Exposure Ninja

By owning your brand terms you prevent competitors, affiliates, or resellers from intercepting your most valuable audience. Even global leaders like Amazon and eBay invest heavily in brand PPC throughout the year, recognizing the dual benefit of protecting market share and informing Google’s smart bidding. Without brand bidding, you risk diluted control over your customer journey and higher acquisition costs on non-brand campaigns. This strategy also helps refine remarketing lists and customer match segments, fueling lookalike campaigns. Consider running split tests to compare brand versus non-brand CPA to quantify the true lift.

Ignoring Quality Score

Quality Score is an often-overlooked metric in PPC advertising that directly impacts your cost per click and ad position. Google’s Quality Score algorithm evaluates landing page relevancy, ad copy quality, and expected click-through rate (CTR) to determine both your ad rank and the subsidy you receive on each click. A strong Quality Score can cut CPC by up to 50%, effectively subsidizing your ad spend and boosting ROI.

While Google has started to hide aggregate Quality Score, individual diagnostics like “landing page experience” and “ad relevance” remain visible in your search keyword report. Make these metrics part of your weekly audit checklist. Unusually low ad relevance or landing page scores are red flags demanding immediate action.

To boost your Quality Score:

1. Landing Page Relevancy: Align landing page content with user search intent. If someone searches for “ergonomic office chairs,” send them directly to a page featuring that exact phrase above the fold.
2. Ad Relevancy: Tailor headlines and descriptions to match users’ queries, not just your keyword list. Dynamic keyword insertion can help, but always review search term reports to refine creative.
3. Expected CTR: Test multiple ad variations with distinct value propositions. Rotate ads for at least two weeks before optimization.

Spelling Errors

Even in the digital age, simple spelling mistakes and typos can derail your PPC efforts and damage brand credibility. Ads with errors tend to underperform, as users perceive them as unprofessional or untrustworthy. Unlike a print brochure that can be pulped at great cost, a live search campaign may run for days or weeks before anyone notices the typo.

Pro tip: incorporate a formal QA step into your workflow. Export ads to Excel or Google Sheets and run spell-check or use tools like Grammarly. Schedule these audits monthly and include checks for grammar, capitalization, and punctuation consistency. For large accounts with hundreds of ads, consider automated scripts or third-party tools such as SEMrush’s Ad Builder or AdEspresso to flag language errors.

A tiny misplacement of a hyphen (“co-operative” versus “cooperative”) or a missing apostrophe can cost thousands in wasted spend and lost conversions. Maintain a style guide and train your team to spot and correct errors before they go live. Attention to detail not only preserves Quality Score but also reinforces a professional brand image.

Sending People to 404 Errors

Imagine clicking on a highly relevant ad only to hit a 404 “Page Not Found” error. This PPC mistake is surprisingly common, especially on large e-commerce sites with frequent inventory or URL changes. Every click to a dead page equates to wasted ad spend, lost leads, and a poor user experience that can harm brand reputation.

Tom Goodwin recommends automated checks using Google Ads scripts or third-party auditing tools like Screaming Frog, DeepCrawl, or SEMrush Site Audit. You can set up a basic Google Ads script that crawls each final URL in your active ad group and alerts you via email when it encounters a non-200 HTTP status code. For enterprise-scale campaigns, integrate a continuous monitoring solution that runs daily checks and publishes error reports to your dashboard.

Key steps:

• Compile a list of all final URLs and schedule daily crawl jobs.
• Use URL tracking templates to verify landing pages remain accessible after site migrations.
• Segment your 404 alerts by campaign to quickly identify which ad groups or promotions have broken links.

By proactively policing link integrity, you preserve your advertising budget and ensure every click drives real engagement.

Offers That Expire

Nothing frustrates a potential customer more than clicking on an ad promoting a time-sensitive deal only to discover the offer has expired. Whether it’s a seasonal Black Friday sale or a limited-time discount code, outdated promotions can erode trust, suppress conversion rates, and leave you paying for clicks that will never convert.

To avoid this mistake:

• Leverage Google Ads’ ad scheduling feature to automatically pause or update ads when a promotion ends.
• Use dynamic countdown customizers in your ad copy to display the exact time remaining, boosting urgency and CTR.
• Maintain a centralized calendar for all offers, and tie it into a project management tool like Asana or Trello so marketing and PPC teams stay aligned.

Set reminders one to two days before each offer’s end date to launch follow-up campaigns or evergreen messaging. Keeping promotions current not only improves user experience but also signals to Google that your ads remain relevant—a factor that can positively influence your Quality Score.

Not Using Audiences

Many PPC marketers focus solely on keywords, overlooking Google Ads’ powerful audience capabilities. Audience signals—such as in-market, affinity, and custom intent segments—allow you to layer demographic, behavioral, and first-party data on top of keyword targeting. This can drastically improve campaign efficiency and ROI.

Examples include:

• Combining a keyword like “corporate training course” with an in-market audience for “Business Services” to reach users actively researching that category.
• Uploading a list of your top 1,000 customers via customer match to target lookalike audiences resembling your best buyers.
• Using remarketing audiences to re-engage site visitors who didn’t convert initially.

Advanced tactics:

• Apply demographic bid adjustments by age, gender, or household income based on performance data.
• Create layered audience segments (affinity + in-market) for hyper-targeted ads.
• Exclude irrelevant audiences to reduce wasted spend and improve Quality Score.

Harnessing audience insights moves you beyond ‘spray and pray’ keyword targeting to a sophisticated, data-driven strategy that boosts both efficiency and conversions.

Not Using Broad Match Keywords

Broad match keywords have long been viewed with suspicion due to their potential to trigger irrelevant queries and waste budget. However, in Google’s machine-learning environment, broad match paired with smart bidding can be remarkably effective. Google now uses contextual signals, historical conversion data, and user behavior to map broad keywords to highly relevant searches.

Best practices include:

• Pair broad match with a target CPA or ROAS smart bidding strategy to let Google optimize bids in real time.
• Maintain a robust negative keyword list to block phrases that don’t align with your offering.
• Regularly review the search terms report to identify new opportunities and refine your negative lists.

For instance, if your seed keyword is “running shoes,” broad match can capture queries like “best lightweight trail running shoes” or “women’s waterproof running shoes.” This broader net, combined with smart bidding, often delivers higher conversion volume at scale. Embrace broad match strategically to complement your exact and phrase match tactics rather than replacing them entirely.

No Performance Max or Only Performance Max

Performance Max campaigns have stirred debate among PPC professionals. On one hand, Performance Max can unlock new customer segments by automatically optimizing across Search, Display, YouTube, Discover, and Gmail. On the other, over-reliance on this automated format can cloud transparency, making it hard to dissect which channels or creative assets are driving results.

Tom Goodwin advises a balanced approach:

• Exclude brand terms from Performance Max campaigns to isolate incremental performance and avoid bidding against your own brand campaigns.
• Ensure your asset feed is well-structured with high-quality images, clear titles, and accurate descriptions. This foundation feeds Google’s asset group optimization and yields better outcomes.
• Test Performance Max alongside your existing search and shopping campaigns. Compare CPA and conversion volume over at least a four-week period to draw meaningful conclusions.
• Use Google’s Insights page to review asset performance, and regularly refresh creative with new headlines, images, and video clips to prevent ad fatigue.
• Document your Performance Max tests in a shared spreadsheet to inform future strategies across teams and channels.

Remember that no single campaign type is a silver bullet. The best PPC strategies combine automated and manual tactics to maintain control over budget allocation, creative testing, and performance analysis.

Bold Actionable Takeaway: Audit your Performance Max settings, exclude branded terms, and run parallel search campaigns to measure incremental lift accurately.

Have you caught any of these mistakes in your own PPC campaigns? What strategies will you adopt to avoid them going forward?