3 Most Critical Google AdWords Mistakes You’re Probably Committing
“PPC is not easy,” says digital marketing wizard Neil Patel. And we couldn’t agree more.
Every other day we meet clients who’ve been running pay-per-click (PPC) search or display campaigns on their own, presuming AdWords to be a self-service platform as touted by Google. However, complicated as AdWords is even for professionals, most of these DIY marketers commit terrible mistakes that cost them thousands of dollars. And the worst thing is they don’t even know they are losing money.
AdWords is probably the best and most certain solution to drive traffic to your sales pages. With a strategically priced offer, you can hope to make $2 (the average AdWords ROI) for each dollar that you spend provided you’re not committing one or more of the following critical AdWords mistakes.
AdWords Mistake #1: Not Selecting the Keyword Match Correctly
This is the most common mistakes and it’s an endemic problem with small businesses running their own AdWords campaigns. You have three ways to input your keywords into AdWords broad match, phrase match, and exact match.
Broad match: Your Ad shows up regardless of the order or number of the words in a query. For instance, if you enter “fashion jewelry” as a broad match keyword, your Ad will be displayed when someone searches for “fashion jewelry” or ” jewelry fashion” or “jewelry fashion for fall.”
Phrase match: Your Ad will show up only when the exact order of the keyword is used, which may be preceded or followed by more words. In the above example, your Ad will be displayed when someone looks for “fashion jewelry” or “discounted fashion jewelry.” It won’t show up for “jewelry fashion for fall”.
Exact match: Just as the name depicts, an exact match means that the query should exactly match the phrase you’ve specified in order for your Ad to be shown.
As you may see, specifying the wrong keyword match will divert a lot of unwanted traffic to your sales pages. This will result in lost advertising dollars, higher PPC bid rates, and may leave a bad impression on your misdirected visitors, who won’t be able to find what they came looking for. Ultimately, it will also affect your SEO and business growth. Hence, avoid this mistake at all costs.
AdWords Mistake #2: Not Using Ad Groups Correctly
In this most common AdWords mistake, people simply pool all of their keywords together and show all of their customers the same Ad. Though it may seem a fairly decent thing to do, it can cause thousands of your AdWords dollars to flow down the drain.
Even if you are selling a single product, you still have multiple sub-segments in your target market. For example, fashion jewelry may be bought by brides-to-be, college students, or by their friends as a gift. AdWords allows you to target these sub-segments using Adgroups. Hence, you can customize your Ad and select different keywords to for different segment. This approach will make your Ads more relatable to your audience. Naturally, your traffic and conversions are going to increase.
The rule of thumb is to have no more than 20 keywords per ad group. You need to go deeper into the market that you’re selling to and think of ways to create different offers and Ads for different segments. If used correctly, Adgroups can multiply your AdWords ROI. You’ll be wasting money if you don’t use them or use them incorrectly.
AdWords Mistake #3: Trusting Your Instincts More than Your Numbers
Finally, most of the businesses that run PPC campaigns either don’t bother to look at the analytics, or they simply love their own ideas more than what the numbers are trying to tell them. You may like an Ad copy, but it may have no effect on your customers. Your CTR (click-through-rate) will tell you the truth, but many people refuse to listen.
Similarly, most of the clients we meet either don’t bother to test their Ads or test them for the wrong elements. The correct way is to trust your numbers and choose the version of the Ad that’s giving you the most number of clicks.
Conclusion
These are just three top mistakes in a long list of blunders we’ve seen our clients committing, before they started working with eMarket Experts, an AdWords Certified Partner agency. Many people tend to DIY PPS because they think hiring PPC professionals will be expensive. Nothing could be further from fact.
Working with the right digital media agency will actually save the money that you’re wasting on driving unwanted traffic and paying higher CPA costs. You’ll also see your conversions and revenues improving significantly.
