6 mistakes you don’t want to make with Google AdWords

Google is the King of internet and Google Adwords is the Princess. If you want to have your presence felt in the digital world, then you need to play by the rules set down by Google, and of course, have to make use of the Google AdWords to find potential leads for your business.

However, it is a complex tool and you need to have a proper understanding of its functioning before you even think of using it. There is a right & a wrong way to use it.  You really don’t think opening an AdWords account and pressing a few buttons here and there is going to do the trick for you, do you?

Here’s my list of the 6 most common mistakes businesses making while using Google AdWords

1. Not including negative keywords in your Google AdWords Campaign

Let’s suppose you sell luxury hand bags, so your keywords would be something like “high quality luxury hand bags” or “best luxury hand bags in Delhi”.

Now let’s say someone searches for “luxury hand bags scam”. Now since you haven’t put these keywords into your list of negative keywords, your SEO will kick in (because of the words “luxury hand bags”) and your website might be displayed when someone searches for those negative keywords. You might even get a lot of traffic and that might make your bosses happy. But it’s not the type of traffic you’re looking for, and there’s going to be zero conversions. So if you think all publicity is good publicity, you’re wrong.

Some keywords can be really harmful to your business, which is why you should identify negative keywords in your AdWords campaign to make sure that Google doesn’t show your ads for searches with those particular words.

2. Sending traffic directly to your homepage

Again, directing people to your homepage would give you a lot more traffic, but then by sending people to your homepage you’re forcing them to search for more information about you or your product. And that’s not why they clicked on your ad. This gives you a high bounce rate and ad expenses that could have easily been avoided.

So what’s the solution? Simple – a landing page. A landing page plays a great role in Digital Marketing. Sure it’s going to cost you extra money, but that’s peanuts compared to what you would have otherwise paid in the form of unnecessary ad expenditure. Landing pages play an important role in digital marketing & especially for Google Adwords, they are attractive & exciting, and they appeal to the interest of your target audience. If you are unsure how to go about it, check out tools like LeadPages & Unbounce. They make the process a whole lot easier.

3. Putting too many keywords in an ad group

Why? Just why would you want everything in one go? That’s not how Google AdWords works, so stop being a lazy ass. Use 10 keywords at the most in a single ad group, because this will help you to get rid of unnecessary and unrelated keywords to use on the same landing pages and ads as your other targeted keywords. And ideally, you should create PPC ads and landing pages for every 2-3 keywords to help get as precise a target audience as possible.

4. Not rotating ad variation displays evenly

If you have 2-3 variations of the same ad for split testing, you’d better manually check the one you want to run as your primary ad. Else, Google will make that decision for you. So the next time you login to your Google AdWords accounts, do the following:

Settings -> Advanced Settings -> Rotate Indefinitely.

This will give you a fair split test by letting all your ads go live, with all of them being given the same amount of visibility.

5. Not measuring your ROI

Seriously? Why would you skip this? I mean, if you’re not working on how many of your paid clicks are converting into customers, what’s the point of even investing in a campaign? Keeping a track of conversions via Google AdWords click who become paid consumers, because it helps you create a better and more focused ad budget for future campaigns. It also helps you understand which keywords work best for you and which ones are best left off your Google AdWords campaign.

6. Targeting a broad set of keywords

Do this only if you like flushing your money down the toilet. Why? Because PPC campaigns for a very broad set of keywords is expensive, the conversions are low and your expenditure will never be able to justify a poor conversion rate and revenue. If you want to bid your way to the top spot, do so by putting your money on as precise a set of keywords as you can.

Use data collected by Google Webmaster Tools or/and Google Analytics to come up with a small and targeted set of keywords (not more than 10). And stick to that figure till the point that you’re confident that investing in more keywords will result in a higher ROI.

Your limited experience can prove to be quite the disadvantage for you because that makes you more likely to commit mistakes that novices are guilty of committing all over the world. And if your previous Google AdWords campaigns were not quite as successful as you’d hoped, it was mostly probably because of the reasons that I have mentioned above. And now that you know what you did wrong (fingers crossed) you can create better Google AdWords campaigns.

Good luck!