There are many common Adwords mistakes, you may be a guilty of a few yourself without even knowing. Today I will be shedding some light on some of the more easily fixed blunders so you can start gaining conversions for your business.
Adwords is an extremely effective tool, but it can also be a huge drain on resources if you set out your budget improperly. There has been countless small businesses over the years who have had nasty shocks when they look at their bank account after not setting out a carefully planned budget. It can be very easy to overspend significantly, especially when you get into multiple campaigns and ad groups. Do the maths and work out what you are realistically able to spend on your campaign.
This is a very common mistake. By default, every keyword you add into an ad group is a broad match keyword. Familiarise yourself with the keyword matching options that are available to you. They allow you to be far more specific in your targeting efforts, which raises conversion rates and qualified leads by staggering percentages.
Negative keywords allow you to filter out searchers from seeing your ads when they add certain words to their search queries. This is incredibly useful as it means people who clearly aren’t looking for a service you provide, won’t be eating into your budget by clicking on your ads. Pretend for a minute you own a car dealership and you only sell cars and don’t want to hire them out. Some examples of useful negative keywords would be rent, rental, hire, lease and so on. Personally I sometimes use upwards of 20 negative keywords per campaign. Doing this means the leads that come through are highly qualified and you can gain better control over your budget.
Another common mistake is in the writing of the ads themselves. When writing ads think from a customer’s perspective. Searchers want a brief concise description of what they can expect to get by clicking on your ad. If you have free next day delivery, let them know. Highlight your USP and split test several different ads per group until you find the sweet spot.
Often split testing (A/B testing) is neglected due to a lack of time or commitment. You create your ad and give yourself a pat on the back and leave it there. Without creating multiple variants of headlines, descriptions, landing pages and call to actions, you will never be able to get the most out of your campaigns. After enough traffic has passed through your ads, you will be able to tell which of each variant is the converting the best and begin reaping the benefits of all that testing.
If you don’t use ad extensions, your are missing out on a great opportunity to take up some serious real estate on SERPs (search engine results pages). Extensions allow you to feature far more prominently, without actually costing you any more money. Review your targeted ads and decide what your priorities are. After your review, decide what extensions would be of benefit to the user and help you get out in front of the competition. Communicate your USP to the searcher and test different extensions to see what works best for you.
Even if you follow all the previous steps, if you haven’t set up tracking, it will be impossible to truly measure your results. It’s impossible to carry out all the testing I have proposed without any tracking, so it’s a must. AdWords allows for limited tracking, so setting up proper Google Analytics allows you to see how effective ads truly are, taking a huge amount of important information into consideration such as bounce rates. To fix this, go into the settings in your Google AdWords account, then go into linked accounts and then pick the corresponding Analytics and Search Console profiles. Just choose which profiles you want to link and you will begin to have Analytics data in AdWords and the other way round.
To have an effective AdWords campaign you have to eliminate all of the small mistakes wherever you can. Remember to set up your budget properly, use different types of keyword match types especially, include a strong list of negative keywords, keep your ads simple and inform users of what they can expect to get by clicking them, test everything you do to make sure you’re achieving your maximum conversion rates, use relevant ad extensions to take up more space and increase your CTR and finally make sure you set up proper Analytics to track your ads, without analytics you can’t test properly to maximise your results.
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