Adwords Training – Tips & Tricks Day 5

The Ten Most Common AdWord Mistakes

1. Setting a daily budget. The thing is this: most people new to Google AdWords are a little cautious and want to play it safe by making use of the facility Google offers to set a daily budget for their ad campaigns. This is how it works: you decide how much you want to spend per day on pay per clicks. Then once the number of clicks your ads are getting nears your daily budget, Google starts scaling back on the number of times your ad is presented to searchers. This means that you could be loosing out on hot prospects and it certainly means that you won’t be benefiting from the ‘real’ picture regarding your ad campaign as you’ll be missing out on all the available (or possible) data from which to evaluate your campaign effectively. By setting your daily budget to meet all the available traffic, your ad will be presented to as many searchers who specify your keywords.

2. Sticking to one ad group. When you establish an AdWords account, you are allowed to run up to 25 campaigns, each of which can consist of 2,000 ad groups. Most AdWord newbies tend to cram as many keywords into a group as possible, thereby diluting their eventual results. It is far better to create different ad groups for ads with similar keywords. If you use as many keywords as possible within a single ad group, you will have difficulty targeting those keywords to specific ads within that group, resulting in your keyword quality score and click through rate suffering and you having to bid more to have your ads shown.

3. Badly chosen keywords. Most people just jump in and select a bunch of keywords they assume are relevant for the product or service they are advertising. Most of those tend to be generic terms. You can usually tell they are generic because they are short words that the vast majority of advertisers would also use. Trouble with this is that generic words require higher bids and attract people who are still doing their research and aren’t ready yet to make a purchasing decision. What you should be doing instead is selecting more unique words that searchers look for when they are ready to buy. These words also tend to cost less than the more generic, or obvious, ones.

4. Using too many keywords. The problem here is that you won’t be able to optimise the keywords that attract the most attention. Too much clutter means you will have much to manage, which will be counter-productive to say the least. Choose well and you will be far better off.
5. Not using negative keywords. By ignoring keywords that don’t apply to you, you actually increase the chances of having clicks which result in bounces. And bounces are something you should be aiming to minimise because you’ll be paying for them and they won’t result in anything. So what exactly is a negative keyword? Think of it this way: if you sell new cars only, you won’t want people looking for second hand cars clicking on your ad. So you’d have second hand cars and used cars as a negative keywords.

6. Ignoring the competition. Too many business owners don’t take the time to review what their competitors are doing as far as their SEO campaigns are concerned. What keywords do they use? Where do their ads rank? What mistakes are they making?

7. Forgetting to use keywords in the text of ads. While many people are good at including keywords in the titles of their ads, you’d be surprised at how many then clean forget about them when it comes to writing the body of the ad. The thing is this: although Google will pick up the keywords in the heading, the text will draw a blank. That means only the actual keywords in the heading will show up highlighted in your ad in their search results whereas those of your competitors will have highlights all over the copy too. Theirs will, at first glance, appear more appropriate or relevant and will thus attract their attention.

8. Driving traffic to a web site instead of a landing page. You see, so many ads direct people to a generic web site, from where they are expected to navigate their way through a myriad of irrelevant pages to the one where the product or service being advertised is available for sale. The more difficult it is for a prospect to buy, the more likely it is they will loose interest and visit another web site. What you need is for your ad to direct traffic straight to a custom-made landing page where they can fill in their details and make a purchase. Quick, simple and relevant.

9. Not measuring conversion rates. The vast majority of business owners do all the hard work attracting a prospect, then keeping that person’s attention through a carefully-crafted advertisement, and taking the order. But the part they omit is to actually measure the entire process over time. This results in them having no idea what part of their ad or website worked and what didn’t, if the ad was more effective compared to others, or what its return on investment was. With conversion tracking software like Google Conversion Optimiser (which is free, too), this is easy to accomplish.

10. Flying by the seat of their pants. This is something more business people do than you would believe. What they should be doing is testing everything, even if they are achieving a good conversion rate. They need to know which keywords work and which don’t, which are getting higher click through rates, which produce bounces and which get no clicks.

I hope you enjoyed this program, I wish you every success in the future.

P.S If you are truly looking to take your online marketing to the next level and understand how to make your online business sky rocket visit eBusinessMagic.com.au, this is my no B.S approach to online marketing success.

Get more information today