Top Common Google Ads Mistakes and How to avoid them

Before getting into how to make better use of your PPC budget, it’s important to understand a very simple concept behind adwords.  Adwords is a sales channel. This implies that the primary reason you use adwords is to sell your products and services and make profit.

If you cannot make your adwords campaigns profitable then you should concentrate on other digital marketing tools and leave behind PPC.

There can be several reasons why your campaign is not performing. Most help sites, articles and marketing companies would say that this is because the quality score is reduced.

You write an ad for your business, choose keywords that determine what sort of searches your ad will appear for on Google, and say how much you are willing to pay each time someone is directed to your website as a result of clicking on your ad.

The Quality Score of your ads determines its frequency, position, and cost per click on Google’s search network. Quality Scores depend on the following:

•  Click-Through Rate
•  Relevance of keywords to the ad group
•  Relevance and quality of landing page
•  Relevance of ad text
•  Historical AdWords account performance

 Are You Making Any of These 10 AdWords Mistakes?

1. Make landing page More Relevant

Many digital marketers focus on creating perfect ad copies but forget that the user experience beyond the ads is just as valuable. Landing page experience is an essential component of your Quality Score so that a poor landing page experience can affect the visibility of your ads.

Solution:

While optimizing your landing page for better results, remember a formula: ROTN

Relevancy: Provide relevant content to the user who came to the website after seeing an ad. So match your content with the ad which in turn should match user’s intent and expectation.

Originality: The content provided on the landing page must be original and unique to your organization or business. Plagiarism for beautification and enhancement of content is seen as untrustworthy. Do not copy-paste what is written elsewhere. Provide something new to make it actually readworthy.

Transparent: With the increasing concerns about privacy and security, users think twice before filling in their information. To gain trust, clearly mention why you are collecting the information and how you intend to use it. Include a link to your Privacy Policy at the footer of the site or anywhere else that’s convenient. Mention T&C distinctly. If you’re claiming to be the best, please support it with an award or review. If you’re offering a product or service, be crystal clear.

Navigability: Users on your website are much like potential tenants in a new apartment. Don’t bombard them with too much information altogether. Link content to one another and help them stay on your site for a longer period of time without distracting them from the end conversion. Give internal links and scroll-to-top buttons. Remember how you can jump to the top updates in a Facebook news feed. They shouldn’t be confused on what to click and where to go. Remember it’s an apartment, not a maze.

2. Landing page irrelevance

After ensuring your landing page experience is optimized, there is still one more crucial check for your landing page: its relevance. Imagine clicking on an ad for ‘chocolate cakes’ hoping to order a delicious chocolate cake, but end up on a landing page for ‘vanilla cakes.’ Though it may not seem like its a big deal, it would be detrimental to your ad’s quality score, as the landing page is perceived as irrelevant to the ad.

Solution
For maximum relevance, start by grouping relevant keywords in an ad group. Next, craft landing pages specific to the ad group. Instapage is an excellent platform for creating landing pages to increase conversions. Lastly, link the landing pages with the ads from the same ad group and, voila! Crisis averted. See how we used this is a simple yet highly effective method to generate leads at a low cost.

3. Directing to the home page

Another mistake regarding landing page relevance is directing users to your website’s homepage, instead of the specific web page. This is quite common amongst e-commerce businesses. Even though the relevant web page can be navigated to from the home page, directing users to the home page will still damage your quality score.

Solution

If you were running an e-commerce business selling clothes, and your ad is for ‘children’s apparel,’ your ads should be directed to the page on children’s clothes rather than your website’s homepage of your website. Always link your ads to a page that is directly relevant.

4. Poor Keyword Research

When you’re doing keyword research for SEO, you’re looking for the keywords that are worth investing time and resources in. You’re looking for the keywords that are valuable to rank for and then try to narrow down which are within your current potential. keyword research for Adwords is different because I will only research a subset of all possible keywords, the ones that have the highest potential ROI.

Irrelevant keywords and keywords with low search volume are bad news for your quality score. If you have not been getting relevant results, then grab a coffee and a comfortable chair because it is time to start revising those keywords.

Solution

You should not have more than 20 keywords per ad group, as this could mean that your keywords and ad copies are not related. Pause keywords that are irrelevant and/or not converting to avoid excessive spending. Then use keyword planner to add fresh new keywords with high search volumes. Lastly, make use of keyword matches to get the most bang for your buck. To generate impressions, broad match is the way to go. To drive conversions, use phrase and exact matches.

5. How to use negative keywords

Negative keywords help you save money and can improve your PPC performance by easily increasing your click-through rates. Even if you picked out the best set of keywords, your ads might still appear in searches that are irrelevant. For instance, if you had ‘marketing’ as a keyword, your ad might appear next to searches for eggs, vegetables, groceries, etc. This is where negative keywords are useful in helping you avoid paying for irrelevant searches.

Solution

Start adding broad, phrase or exact match negative keywords to your ad group or campaign. For example, if you were advertising your marketing company, you could add ‘eggs,’ ‘vegetables,’ ‘groceries’ as negative keywords. If your campaign has been running for a while, look through your search terms report and add irrelevant searches as negative keywords.

6. Targeting your ads

Targeting ads is an essential part of a successful advertising campaign. You may have designed the perfect ad, but you'll need to show it to the right people at the right time to better reach your goal. Google Ads offers different ways of targeting your ads.Targeting is extremely useful in directing your ads to the audience you want and drive conversions. This also ensures that you do not pay unnecessarily for clicks that won’t convert.

Solution

Location, audience and device targeting are some ways you can narrow down your audience. Choose targeting strategies based on your business goals. If you are looking for customers to purchase your products in your home country, use location targeting, so you do not pay for clicks from overseas customers that you cannot reach. Furthermore, it may be easier to reach customers via mobile rather than desktop targeting if your customers are always on the move.

7. How to Use Extensions

Ad extensions are great. Undoubtedly. They help your customers navigate your site and take action quickly without even going to your landing page. But there is a more practical benefit of using ad extensions – they make your ad bigger! The bigger your ad, the more real estate your ad takes on the search page, the higher the chances of your ad getting noticed and clicked are!

Solution

Get familiar with the different types of ad extensions and add them whenever it is suitable for your business. When in doubt, callout extensions are almost always applicable! 

8. Create the Most Effective Ad Groups

There are a lot of factors that go into how effective your Google AdWords campaigns are. Most people focus on optimizing their bidding strategy, keywords and quality score, but those aren’t the only parts of your campaigns that matter. Ad groups are just as important as any of those other components and if your ad groups aren’t set up right, you’ll never get anywhere with your campaigns—at least not anywhere you want to go.

Solution

You should create ad groups where the keyword groups, ad text and landing pages all match each other closely. It’s almost never a good idea to try to appeal to your entire audience in a single ad group.

9. Which Ad Position Is Best for Search Campaigns?

The ad positions will be different for two different ads as the components of their quality score (expected click through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience) will be different (which influences ad rank and position).

May be you can use Adwords automated rules to increase your ad positions when it is low but you need to change your bid to do that. So again you are influencing/changing one component in ad rank (position).

A better approach can be finding the most suitable ad to achieve your marketing goals. Find the ad which bring more visits (CTR) or more sales/leads (conversions). Once you find the most profitable ad, you can test different positions by adjusting the bid.

Quality score and average positions are few indicators that can give you some direction in campaign optimization.

Solution

To adjust your ad’s positions, start playing with your Cost Per Click (CPC) bids until you are between the 3rd to 5th positions.

10. Ad copy testing in an ad group

Many marketers skip this step. Testing ad copy is usually dismissed as unnecessary, but the truth is, you never really know how your ads will perform. Even if you had the perfect ad copy that may be doing quite well, testing your copies is always a good idea.

Solution

Start crafting multiple variations of that perfect ad copy. This can mean having several ads with the same titles but different descriptions, or vice vera. 

Also, try adopting different angles to the copies. For example, an ad for a preschool can urge parents to sign up and secure a good future for their child or lure parents to sign up because of its excellent reviews. After running your ads, wait until they receive around 20-40 clicks before pausing the advertisements that are not performing as well.

By following these tips and avoiding these common mistakes, you can easily ensure that your AdWords experience is more efficient and far-reaching. If this is all too daunting, consider getting a Google AdWords agency to do all the hard work! Google Adwords is in the end a tool and those who use it well are the ones that stand at the top. It’s time for you to join them.