Are You Making These 10 Common Google AdWords Mistakes?

The reality we face as marketers every day is that Google has the secret sauce and we don’t. So, no matter how hard you are trying to rank organically or do well with PPC, it’s going to be a constant experiment until you hit the sweet spot. 

Here are 10 things to avoid doing that could be hurting your campaigns more than you think:

#1: Starting small: Most people think they’ll invest a small amount in AdWords to ‘try’ it out. The budget limits the campaign potential and if the conversions don’t happen in the first few clicks, you may get a faulty perception that the ‘system’ doesn’t work. Go with a max test budget and run the ads at least for a week before you zero in on a conclusion

#2: Not reaching out to your Google account manager: While Google earlier supported only email communication, accounts with a decent spend now have managers assigned to them who can expertly guide you during the set up phase. They can optimize your account and prevent rookie mistakes.

#3: Not grouping your keywords correctly: Keyword research and grouping has a direct impact on your bottom-line. If your ad isn’t contextual to the keyword (for example if you show a generic women’s top ad for a ‘black t-shirt’ search term, those coveted clicks and conversions won’t be coming your way

#4: Not looking at the list of keywords your ad featured for: Google has some interesting ‘hidden’ tools that you need to befriend right away. Under keywords, look for the ‘Search terms’ tab to see the terms that your ad is actually showing for. There may be quite a few differences between this and your actual keyword list. Pick out the irrelevant ones and convert them into negative keywords at a campaign level.

#5: Not featuring for your own brand: So… why should you run an ad for your own brand if you are already showing in organic search? Think, what if your competitor chooses to advertise with your brand name. Better safe than sorry

#6: Not knowing your competitor well: Drink up on your competitor’s strategy in a way that you can narrate it in your sleep… their ad text, keywords, landing pages et all. There are more than enough ‘spying’ tools made just for this purpose.

#7: Directing traffic only to your homepage: This is a common one pulled by a lot of eCommerce sites. If you are bidding and showing on ‘wooden bangle box’, it doesn’t make sense to direct your customers to your generic wooden accessories section.

#8: Make your exhaustive list of negative keywords: Make sure you add words like “free” and “cheap” in the negative keyword list to avoid drop in your quality score

#9: Not using ad space: It does take a bit of creativity to utilize the full ad space available to sell for a click.

#10: Not optimizing: AdWords isn’t a set and run. If you don’t tweak your ad text, keywords and bids regularly, it may guzzle more marketing dollars than you think. 

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