7 Common Mistakes People Make With Google AdWords

So you want to send paid traffic to your website? That’s great! Given the amount of digital noise online today, expanding your digital marketing campaigns by putting your message directly in front of your target audience with paid ads is a powerful technique, and you’ll find that Google AdWords makes it easy to get up and running with this approach.

Unfortunately, though, just because it’s easy to open up an Adwords account doesn’t mean that it’s easy to generate a positive return on investment using this service.

Many pay-per-click (PPC) advertisers start out with good intentions, but limited experience. As a result, they run into common mistakes that can hurt a campaign’s profitability. If your initial campaigns have produced lackluster results, read through the following mistakes and their solutions to improve your PPC ROI:

1. Targeting keywords that are too broad

Here’s a newsflash: if you’re a new advertiser, you’re probably never going to be able to bid your way to the top spot for broad keywords such as “women’s shoes.” Even if you do, you’re going to be paying so much for the privilege that, unless you’re Zappos, it’s unlikely your revenue generated will justify your costs.

Instead, start your AdWords campaigns with groups of five to 10 long-tail keywords -- preferably those you’ve identified as good candidates from the data found in your Google Analytics or Google Webmaster Tools accounts. Expand your campaigns to broader keywords only as you’re able to prove a positive ROI with these entry-level queries.

2. Putting too many keywords in an ad group

In an ideal world, you’d create a unique landing page and PPC ad for every keyword you target, so that your user’s experience is as laser-targeted as possible. But since nobody has this much time, stick to ad groups of just five to 10 keywords to start, as mentioned above. Doing so will prevent you from forcing too many unrelated words and phrases to use the same ads and landing pages.

3. Running ads on the “search network with display select” campaign type

Google tries to push this combination campaign type, but the reality is that AdWord’s search and display formats require different advertising approaches. Stick to search, display or both, but be sure the ads you create follow industry-accepted best practices for each individual campaign style.

4. Sending traffic directly to your homepage

Every visitor you secure via PPC ads should wind up on a landing page that’s designed to be as appealing and engaging as possible to his or her interests. If, instead, you simply drop visitors onto your homepage, you’re making them work to find the information they want, leading to higher bounce rates, missed conversion opportunities and unnecessary ad expenses.

Yes, it’s a little more work to craft custom landing pages for your PPC campaigns, but the results are worth the effort. Tools such as Unbounceand LeadPages make the process a snap.

Related: It's Easy to Spy on Your Competitors Conveniently and for Free

5. Not including negative keywords

Suppose you run a website selling designer women’s shoes. Depending on the match type you use, your AdWords campaign for “women’s shoes” could appear for phrases ranging from “designer women’s shoes” to “cheap women’s shoes.”

Since every click costs you money -- and since visitors searching for the query “cheap women’s shoes” aren’t likely to turn into buyers for you -- adding the negative keyword “-cheap” to your campaign will keep these tire kickers away.

6. Not rotating ad variation displays evenly

If you create more than one ad variation (which you should, for split testing purposes), Google’s default is to serve up the ad it believes will perform better more frequently. While this might help your overall campaign ROI, it won’t give you a fair split test since the frequency of your ad variation displays isn’t even.

To prevent this from occurring, head to the “Settings” section of your AdWords account, then click on “Advanced Settings.” There, you’ll find four ad rotation options: “Optimize for clicks,” “Optimize for Conversions,” “Rotate Evenly” and “Rotate Indefinitely.” Select the “Rotate Indefinitely” option to keep your data clean.

7. Not measuring ROI

If you’re running AdWords campaigns without any mechanism to determine which of your paid clicks are converting into customers, you’re almost certainly wasting money on poor quality traffic. Tracking the conversions that enter your sales funnel from an AdWords click and go on to become paying customers will show you how to focus your ad spend in the future, which campaigns should be ramped up and which ad groups or keywords should be dropped entirely.

Tracking conversions on your site requires you to first define your sales funnel and then either install an AdWords tracking pixel or set up Google Analytics goals on your site. It’s a little more complicated than simply running a campaign without conversion tracking, but taking these steps is the only real way to know if your campaigns are paying off with a positive ROI.

What other AdWords mistakes has your company made? Share your experiences by leaving a comment below!

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2 Mistakes That Cause Advertisers to Quit AdWords Just When They’re on the Verge of a Breakthrough

When people find out I’m the author of Google AdWords for Dummies, the second most common reaction, after "What’s AdWords?", is "Oh, I tried AdWords. It didn’t work for me."

I’m biased, certainly, and I understand that AdWords isn’t an appropriate advertising medium for every business, but the truth is that many advertisers give up on AdWords way too soon.

In this article, I’ll share the two most common mistakes we see in the AdWords accounts of our new clients who are almost on the verge of throwing in the towel, and how we deal with them.

But first, some context.

There are two fundamental reasons that your AdWords campaigns are failing: AdWords problems and business problems.

In other words, maybe you’re not using AdWords as effectively as your competitors, so they get the best traffic at the best prices, and you’re hustling for paltry scraps at a premium. Or perhaps you’re doing everything right inside your account, but your product or message or business model is not as robust as those of your competitors.

Most cases are a combination of the two. So fixing your AdWords account won’t necessarily open the floodgates of hungry prospects eager to buy what you’re selling (although we’ve seen that often enough).

But solving your AdWords problems will allow you to perform an accurate stress test on your business, so you can identify and overcome your weaknesses relative to your competition.

Visitor Value: The Key Metric

The business that wins AdWords is the one that can afford to spend the most for a click. The higher you can bid, the more traffic you get. The more traffic you get, the faster you can test and learn and improve.

And the business that can spend the most for a click, in the long term, is the one that monetizes that click most efficiently. Or, to drop the jargon for a moment, the one that makes the most money from that prospect.

If your business converts prospects better and gets them to spend more than your competitors do, you get to win AdWords. So AdWords traffic can represent the perfect "stress test" for your business fundamentals – but only if you get the AdWords part right to begin with.

Here are the two most common AdWords mistakes that lead business owners to give up on the medium before it’s delivered the lead flow – or strategic insight – of which its capable.

1. Wasting Money on the Wrong Traffic

The AdWords default settings are all about getting you the most impressions and clicks possible. I’ve never seen a case where opening up all the traffic sluices from the get-go was a good idea.

Rather, indiscriminate use of vague, high-traffic keywords and overly permissive campaign settings waste money by sending you lots of visitors who are not your prospects.

Watch out for three principal money-wasters:

A. Overly generic terms: If you’re a wedding photographer, don’t bid on "photographer" unless you want to branch into photographing kids, pets, pregnant women, mansions, and sporting events.

B. Broad Match keywords: Instead, choose exact and modified broad match to keep Google from throwing too much junk into your AdWords trunk.

C. "Stairway to Heaven" keywords: As in, "words that have two meanings." Examples include words like "windows," which can refer to the glass-filled holes in your house, or the operating system, and "speaker," which can refer to an orator or the thumpingly loud box your neighbor can’t seem to turn down.

Two maintenance activities to eliminate bad traffic:

A. Scour your search queries for keywords that you don’t want to attract and turn them into negatives.

B. Set up conversion tracking and pause or delete keywords that cost you more than they make in profits.

2. Blending in on the Search Results Page

Google cares a lot about your click-through rate (CTR). The better it is, everything else being equal, the less you’ll pay for each click. Think of it as a thank-you discount for buying in bulk.

If your ads look the same as your competitors’ ads, then there’s no particular reason for a prospect to click yours. Sure, you can pay more for a more prominent placement, but you can often achieve the same goal for free by writing an ad that cuts through the clutter on the page.

Here’s a sad example of a "me-too" search results page:

What kind of ad would cut through the clutter? The specific wording would be based, ideally, on the unique and valuable difference of the dental clinic in question. But even without thinking hard, an advertiser might focus on any of the following:

• Free cleaning with first visit
• See testimonials from satisfied clients
• Extremely comfortable chairs
• Industrial-strength giant vats of anesthesia
• And so on…

The steps here are simple, although successful execution generally takes time and thought.

1. Look at all your competitors’ ads.
2. Put yourself in your prospects’ shoes and think about what matters to them.
3. Define or invent a meaningful difference from the competition.
4. Write and test ads that embody that difference.

In a future article, I’ll share the next three most common mistakes. But getting these two fixed will go a long way toward bringing the right people to your website.

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