Google Ad Mistakes & How To Avoid Them

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Podcast Transcript:

This week on the digital marketing scoop, we’re discussing Google ads and some of the most common mistakes and how you can avoid them.

Hey everyone and welcome to this week’s episode of the Digital Marketing Scoop. This week we’re going to be talking about Google ads and some of the really kind of major mistakes that people make that can really affect your Google ad campaigns. Yeah, so the first one we’re looking at is broad match keywords. I suppose that’s something we see in an awful lot of when campaigns come into us are when clients come into us and they have an existing campaign already. A big mistake that is made is that within there I groups they just have broad match keywords and basically broad match keywords are when you put your keyword into Google ads without any pluses or inverted commas or brackets around it. So it’s basically telling Google, here’s my keywords, okay, I want to show up for that. But when you don’t, when you’re using broad match, you’re going to show for keywords related to those keywords as well. And as the name states that is extremely broad and you can end up with an awful lot of traffic that is, is wasteful basically, and not related to what you’re selling at all.

Yeah. I mean, if you’re using broad match keywords, you’re basically selling Google, Google, do what you want. Go for it. Yeah. You’re going to really just eat up your budgets. It’s near to pointless. I think Google recommends it at the start when you pull in their keywords, yeah. They just pull in as opposed to broad automatic. Yes. So that’s a major mistake. Like if you put it in a broad match for example of  let’s say a sound engineer, you could end up showing far keywords where someone is searching for a microphone. Potentially. It can almost be that broad. Yeah so yeah, the first thing you do is stay far, far away from, from pure broad match keyword.

Yeah. And if you’re not sure what the other ones there, I mean there’s phrase match, exact match and stuff. Just have a look up on how to just put those in and just change the broad words that you have in there and just put the little brackets around them and just, just start from there at least or yeah,

That will save you a lot of wasted money. Yeah. So the second thing we’re looking at then is minimal use of extensions. So extensions are when you’re, when you see your ad on Google, you might see a phone number on the ad, you might see links underneath the ad, you might see the businesses location on the dead. These are all extensions that you can add to the, your, your regular texts that on Google and because that screen real estate, especially on the phone is still valuable. Having those extensions means that potentially if you have all those extensions in our mobile, your ad might be the only one showing on above the fold on the, I’m on a mobile device. So those are the extensions are extremely important because they’re going to, they’re going to increase your click through rate. As I say, you’re going to get a lot more screen and we the state and overall will just improve your, your Google ads campaign dramatically.

Yeah. Alongside that, I mean especially if you’re bidding on your own brand and stuff, people are probably looking for your location or number. Do you know the second popular page? Some businesses just had that one page that they know everyone’s going to or something. But it’s, it’s great to be able to incorporate those into your ads as well. Cause there’s like, uh, as well as the real estate space, you’re probably giving your customers exactly what they’re looking for straight away. Yeah.

So the next one is only having one and variation in each ad group. So this comes down to basically if you are keywords, we go sound engineer Karch again and you have only one ad. You don’t know if that one ad is is working well or not. Cause you could do a second ad and the turret add in a fourth time, the fifth that and have test them all against each other and see which is converting best, which is getting you the best picture race and that can make again an absolutely massive, massive difference in your campaign.

I’m always amazed by how small the variations need to be to make a change. Like even just say if you were sound engineer cork sometimes even just the core cause you don’t know it’s so even just the smallest copy changes make it make a huge difference and it’s, I don’t know how it works just like Oh I’ll get this, this, this and this to go. And I’m always surprised, always surprised,

which is why it’s so important to be constantly testing different ads. Yeah. Yeah. And the next one you mentioned this earlier as well is not bidding on your brand.

Yeah. It’s so important. I mean your competitor probably is Yup. Beating on your brand. So why wouldn’t, why wouldn’t you bet on yourself, you know? and the only thing is, is that it’s like if you’re not bidding on your brand and someone else’s, sure you might be ranking first for it organically, but your competitor is going to still come up ahead of you in the ads if you’re, if you’re, if you’re not bidding on your own brand. I think it’s really important and it’s usually really low cost traffic as well because the message matches trout.

Yeah. You’re going to have a high quality score. Yeah. It’s going to generally you’re going to be able to bid in your own brand much, much cheaper than what your competitors are going to be able to build that brand name for. So it certainly, certainly worth doing, especially if you want to protect your brand as well. Yeah. Very, that’s very, very important to do that. Um, so the next one, not taking advantage of the search terms report.

Yeah. That’s a huge one. Massive. Yeah. I mean, we talked before about keeping on top of the negative keyword list and things like that. Search term report. We give you so much, so much of it. And if you, look, going back to what we were talking about, the [inaudible], the broad match keywords, if you’ve been using them all along the, you could jump into your search term report now and see WASC yeah. It’s bringing out for your actual search terms that were, yeah. Or I’m taking the liberty of showing your ads to yeah, but I mean the, the search terms report is great because you straight away just start adding things to your negative keyword. Let’s just start weeding out, weeding out, weeding out. Because it’s so important because it really reduces your costs on, it increases the relevancy of your ad slot up. Cause you’re only gonna, you only want to show for certain search times. I think one of the biggest mistakes that people can make with Google ads is trying to be everything to everyone or all over the place it’s just not, it’s not viable and you, you’re not going to get your return on investment.

Plus when you go into that search terms report, if you vote your conversion tracking all set up correctly, you’re going to be able to find those gems, the keywords, long tail ones, and then you can pull those out and create separate ad groups and separate campaigns for those keywords. Yeah. So basically, you know, this particular keyword comebacks well, okay, let’s focus on that. Keep testing on that. I’m trying out different extensions, testing different landing pages because you know that keyword works. So let’s start building and building and building on that and increasing that day

Conversion rates and even one of your favourites, the single keyword ad groups just play your best performing one and even just wonder that it’s amazing how low you can get the costumes yeah. On those. Yeah,

Absolutely. and that goes into our next term as well, not using negative keywords.

Yeah. It’s, it’s so important. Yeah. It’s just like, I use the example in one of our previous podcasts of the barbecue. If you wanted to either go for a, if you had an edge up and that you were selling barbecues in say a hardware store of some source and you just were using the word barbecue, would I, would I blocking it off thing, food, place a restaurant or blocking and using that as your negative point, then you could show for completely irrelevant to completely separate business to what you’re doing or does. There’s so many examples of that. Yeah.

What am I, one of my favorites is, jobs and careers for people putting negatives in for that. Cause you could have your, your phrase even uh, let’s say, I dunno, uh, accountant, cork, but if someone types in accountants jobs cork. Yeah. Our jobs accountant, Karch, our accountant, car, career, all those ones instead of, you know, advertising for new customers. Your know recruiting. Yeah. Yeah. So, so you’re, you’re, you’re spending your ad spend on exactly what you probably don’t want to be spending it on. So negative keywords are just, again, they’re going, they’re really important because there’s going to be so many search terms that are going to eat away at your budget if you’re not using negative keywords. So next one, not usually utilizing the experiments feature.

Yeah. So I mean when it comes to anything you want to try little error is, is the way forward for any of your eyes. I mean I’m always amazed at people doing split testing and then at the end of it just going, oh, okay, that’s, that’s my winter. I’m done. Like just keep us to just keep out at it, whether it be different ad copy, different and landing pages even, you know, test your landing page a, I mean experimented opposite of everything. And there is built-in experiment features on Google ads. Neither a little bit finicky to find, but I mean if you just do a little bit of research around those, they work well, the worthwhile. Yeah.

I’m experimenting what your cost per click as well. So you might, you might be, let’s say your ad, you’re averaging position two for a particular keyword. It’s work increasing our cost per click testing at position one, seeing how much more traffic you’re getting, how much more conversions you’re getting and likewise, lowering your cost per click. Seeing is that going from position to position tree having an impact on your, on your results. But again that all comes from experimenting and Testing. Yeah.

And the tool we use and how up to, I mean that is so good for recommending whether to increase or decrease your base around certain keywords and it gives you all of the reasons why it thinks that as well. Why, why their algorithm thinks that. And you can sometimes you do need to make a judgment call on it and go, actually Genoa thought that would be better off now not touching us about this between Tasha and common sense to finance. But, yeah I know you it optio was really good, especially if you just want to get familiar with us. If you just want to get familiar with, and even just looking through their reasons, we’ll give you a good kind of layer of kind of, okay, this is, this is when I should be thinking about butchering, butchering, budget and stuff. Because when it comes to budget, it’s, it, you could increase, your cost will kick and suddenly start draining your budget very quickly. I mean, there’s so many little find mistakes that you can make that, that you could easily, we load by using a tool for the meantime at least. Yeah.

Yeah, so one of my favourites not split testing advertising creatives. So this kind of comes back a bit to the, the one where we’re only having one ad variation. Yeah. I would say if you’re doing display advertising, are you doing youtube advertising a Gml ads, all the other types of ads you can do. True Google ads. Again, you need to be designing different creatives and testing them against each other. So a hundred people might see one ad, a hundred people see another ad, but that second ad could convert much higher. It could engage people much better. So it’s it like it that is just key to really successful digital marketing overall. But when Google ads, you need to be testing those creatives, banner ads, youtube videos yeah, there’s just, it just has to,

we don’t really, I no matter what strategy you have, like, oh, like if you’ve gone right here is my target audience is what they like. This is what they don’t like. You can never put down on paper what a creative, how creative is going to perform. You can never like just like I was saying earlier with the ad copy, just the slightest variations makes such a difference. I mean like a low quality image versus a high quality image. Alo alone will make a huge difference not to mind to having different images, but I think right across the board that creatives, if you’re thinking that you need to make one video or two images to split test, I’m talking six, seven, eight, like it’s a, especially with images, I mean if you have the availability to create that many creatives, there’s no reason not to test them. Yeah. Yep.

And the last one again, which is a really common one we see from, from new claims coming into us is sending people to the wrong landing page. And the wrong landing page is generally the homepage. Send them where they can find everything. Yeah, yeah. So again, I, if you’re, if your website, you have five or six services on it and you’re bidding on one of the keywords Fardo services, you should not be sending your traffic to the homepage. You should be sending them to the page of that service. Yeah. And then ideally sprint testing that page as well. But that, that, that’s so common. Basically people will go into Google ads and put it in all their keywords and then send all the traffic to that, to that page.

Yeah. I mean, it’s all as that, you’re going to impacts your policy store score, sending people to the wrong landing page. If you’re sending people to your homepage, you’re asking them to start their journey of looking for what they’re trying to find. Again, they’re just to go back out and goes and maybe the next side or the person who’s ranking organically, the, and as well as that, I mean, if you don’t have the vial availability to change your landing pages, if they’re bad to begin with, if you are sending them to those is the, the tool we use is unbuttoned months. Yep. Yeah. And it’s, it’s really good. I mean you can just design up, design up new ones very quickly. Yeah. Very quickly yet.

And like basically sending to the wrong landing page means you’re going to be spending more, you’re going to be getting less traffic and you’re going to be converting less people from browsers into way less. Yeah. Yeah, so that, that is, you know, number one really well between that and the broad keywords. Yeah. I think they are probably the two biggest, biggest mistake.

Yeah. I think if you’ve been running a campaign yourself and you just haven’t been 100% sure and just following Google guidelines, I mean they, they’re very easily, can lead you astray very easily. The Google. Yeah. Google Ganja. Cause, I mean between it’s recommended keywords, which are usually not crazy at the moment. And then you’re just putting them in and it’s automatically selecting broad match for you. It’s not doing you any favours to begin with. So I mean, the first thing definitely is look at your broad match, look at your search term and the long, your negative keyword list. That would be for me anyway. Yeah,

yeah, I’d, I’d probably throw in as well, just make sure you have content that is perfectly matched to your, to your, to your keywords as well. Yep. Yeah. Thank you very much. That has been this week’s episode of the digital marketing scope.