The Eight Common Mistakes you can Make With Your Google Adwords Campaign

With the rise of digital marketing, googleadwords have now become an essential aspect for entrepreneurs all around the world. If you are an entrepreneur, I am sure that you spend a lot of time on Google Adwords as well. If you are a user, you must already be finding out all the wonders about Google Adwords; however, you must be aware. There are a lot of common mistakes with Google Adwords that entrepreneurs make if they are using Google Adwords. So without further ado, let’s walk you through the ten common mistakes with Google Adwords that you can make.

* Not using the Right Format for your Ad:

This is probably one of the most common mistakes with Google Adwords that beginner’s make- not placing the right format for the ad on Google ads. Often times, we see restaurant owners placing text ads on Google and service businesses placing image based ads on Google. While there is nothing wrong with that and you will still probably receive clicks on it, you are essentially lowering your ROI by doing this. So depending on the type of product or the service your business offers, it’s important to make sure that you are using the right form of advertisement to reach out to your audience.

As you can see, there are a lot of types of ads. If your business promotes a product, it’s ideal to go for image or rich media ads. If your business of a service, you may think about giving out call-only ads or text ads or ads with extensions. If you are an e-commerce, it’s probably a good idea to go for shopping ads along with image or rich media ads. If you are a startup or a tech firm offering wonderful services, you may think about placing video ads that explain what you do and the services that you offer. In terms of formats, there are plenty of options to choose from, but one of the most common mistakes with Google Adwords is to go about placing ads in all types of formats, don’t make that mistake. You can stick to one or more types of formats, but make sure that whichever format you are using is something that you would click on as a visitor if you saw it pop up- being able to think from the consumer’s view-point is one of the most important attributes of being a marketer.

*  Not using Proper Keyword Matches

Not using the right keyword match can also lower your Google Adwords ROI, in fact, it can decrease your ROI significantly- yet, it is one of the most common mistakes with Google Adwords that most entrepreneurs make. There are three forms of keyword matches in Google- Broad Match, Phrase Match, and Exact Match. The following list will tell you how to separate them and how each can be useful to you:

Broad Match: A broad match means that your ad will show if the keywords are used in the match: regardless of the order, the larger phrase or other words that are used with it. So for example, if your business sells deodorants and your keywords are “Deodorants for sale”, your ad will show up in searches such as “Men’s Deodorants for Sale”, “Women’s Deodorants for Sale”, “Cheap Deodorants for Sale”, etc. To use a keyword as a broad match, simply type in the keywords in the keyword entry list. So, in this case, you would type in: Deodorants for Sale. It also allows for misspellings, so it would show up to people searching for “Women’s Deodaronts for sale” or “Man’s Dewderants for sail”.

Phrase Match: A phrase match means that your ad will show only to people who search with the keywords intact. Your ads won’t be shown to people who search with the keywords in different order. So your ads will show to people who search for “Men’s Deodorants for Sale”, “Women’s Deodorants for Sale”, but won’t show to people who search “Sale for Deodorants” or “Deodorants for Men Sale”. To type in a phrase match, you need to type in the keyword enclosed within double quotation marks. So in this case, you would need to type in- “Deodorants for Sale”

Exact Match: An exact match, as the name suggests is one where only searches that match exactly to the keywords are the ones that trigger your ads. So going back to our example, the ad would show to anyone who searches for “Deodorants for Sale” but not to people searching for “Men’s Deodorants for Sale”. To type in for exact matches, you need to type the keyword and enclose it between to third brackets. So, in this case, you would type in: [Deodorants for Sale]

Negative Keyword: A negative keyword refers to a word that, if present in the ad will not trigger the ad. So, if your business is selling men’s deodorants exclusively, it may be a good idea to restrict the ad from people who are looking for women’s deodorants. In that case, you can add the word “Women”/”Female” as negative keywords. So to type in a negative keyword in the keyword entry list, you need to write the keyword with a negative sign in front of the keyword, so in this case, you would type in: -Women, -Female.

* Targeting Keywords that are too Broad:

There are some keywords that are just too highly competitive and there’s a high chance that if you are using those keywords, your ads won’t even show to your target audience base. For example, if you are a new hotel offering cheap accommodation in New York, you will never go anywhere with keywords like “Cheap hotels in New York” because there’s just too much competition around keywords such as these. You simply won’t be able to bid high enough to outmatch your competitors.

Instead, it’s always a better idea to start your Adwords campaign with keyword groups of five to ten long tail keywords- these may have been keywords that you have seen to perform well from your Google Webmaster/Analytics tools. You may think about to expanding to broader keywords once you have achieved good results with these keywords.

* Placing your Ads and Forgetting All About It:

This is one of the most common mistakes with Google Adwords that I, as a professional digital marketer, experience whenever client’s come to me and tell that they had horrible experiences while using Google Adwords. An Adwords Campaign is like a living thing, it’s like that flower in your backyard which will die away if you don’t water it every day. Do not forget about your adwords campaign once you have placed them, instead, measure them every day, pit them against one another and see how they are performing, analyze your state of sales after the marketing event initiated, how much clicks/actions are costing you, how much reach you are getting each day. Every three or four days, you can take an attempt in tweaking your campaigns to make sure that you are getting better ROI, you can add or remove keywords, reduce the amount you are spending on certain campaigns and increase that on others to ensure better ROI. 

It is one of the most common mistakes with Google Adwords and it puts a real dent into your Return on Investment, but if you are only a bit careful about it, you can make sure to avoid it.

* Mistakes with the Landing Page

This is one of the cardinal sins of PPC advertising, but this is one of the most common mistakes with Google Adwords as well, more often than not, entrepreneurs end up placing their landing page as the home page of their website. Well, that is never a good idea unless your homepage contains all the information about the product or service that you are advertising about. Your landing page needs to be as attractive as possible and as useful as your visitor as possible as well- anything short of that and you will experience massive bounce rates or very low conversion rates.

The landing page of your PPC advertisement should be about what you are advertising about. Even better if it’s designed like the advertisement itself or exactly pertains to the advertisement. Make sure that you don’t make your visitors work to find what is being advertised because they won’t!

* Not Performing A/B Split Testing:

Analyzing the psychology of the target audience is one of the prime perils of advertisers around the world and to be honest, there are no ways via which you can analyze the mindset of your target audience and thus it’s better to perform an A/B Split testing and not performing it is one of the worst common mistakes with Google Adwords possible. Often times, there may just be more than one idea in your mind to produce a great ad. You may want to test your ad in two different formats, landing pages, designs or copies to understand how your audience responses to each type of ad. Under those circumstances, it is necessary to perform A/B split testing.

To perform an A/B Split test on landing pages, just write two similar ad copies in the same ad group, use two different landing pages, then go to the campaigns setting and change the ad rotation setting to “Rotate evenly: Show ads evenly for 90 days, then optimize”. To test any of the other criteria such as design, copy, etc, do the above, just make sure that you are only changing the aspect that you are testing and putting the ads on rotation while keeping all other settings uniform.

* Check who you are Competing Against:

Not checking who you are up against in the PPC advertising game is another common mistake with Google Adwords that most entrepreneurs regret doing further down the line. Always keep in mind that a PPC campaign is a sizeable investment for any business and that you need to make sure that your dollars are being well spent and to do that, you need to take out the competition. But to take out the competition, you need to take cues from it and think about how to take it out, you need to come up with the perfect strategy. So, put yourself in your customer’s shoes and search for keywords that are relevant to your business and note your competitors.

Check out their landing pages and check out the standard of their work, their copies, and their designs; take cues from that because that’s what you have to match to take a share of their visitors.

* Not Segmenting your Keywords Properly into Multiple Ad Groups:

Most people miss out on the basic understanding of campaigns and ad groups. Campaigns are there for different groups of products or business segments. So if your business offers two to three different types of products, such as clothing and handicraft items, or clothing and food items. You may set up different campaigns for Food, Clothing and Handicraft items. Ad groups unify your keywords and organize the ads that show for those keywords. One of the common mistakes with Google Adwords is to add too many keywords to a single ad group- this reduces your quality score and disparages your chances of delivering high-quality ads. You can set up different ad groups for different groups of products, for example, you can have one ad group for ‘Belts’ and another for ‘Shirts’ if you are selling clothing items.

By making sure that you avoid this eight mistakes, you can get much better ROIs starting from your next campaign- you can ensure that you start getting great results from the get go of your next major PPC campaign.