10 Worst AdWords Campaign Mistakes
Do you want to attain maximum return on investment (ROI) for the keywords or phrases that are most pertinent to your business, and are most likely to endow your sites with targeted traffic? Well, it seems like all of us want to. On the vastly competitive Google AdWords pay per click (PPC) search engine, it is now more essential than ever to guarantee that your PPC campaigns are optimized to their paramount potential. With the cost-per-click (CPC) prices available through various PPC search engines always increasing, it is fundamental that you avoid certain mistakes that will undoubtedly result in poorly performing PPC campaigns, including:
1. Creating a Long List of Poorly Targeted Keywords
With AdWords, thinking that broader is better is just not true. When you first get started to create your AdWords campaign, it is important not to go "keyword crazy" -- defy the lure to create long lists of extraneous, nonspecific keywords. Some phrases may bring visitors to your site, but if they do not find what they are looking for when they get there, they will leave just as quickly as they arrived. Hence, it is important to identify your definite niche, and to market in a straight line to users who want the products and services that you offer.
2. Failing to Identify Unique Aspects of Your Product or Service
To be able to come up with a strategy that will oust your competitors, you must comprehend exactly what it is that makes your organization be conspicuous from the competition before execute your AdWords campaign. You can conduct a competition analysis by having a look and see what they are doing and which phrases they are using, to identify what makes your products, services or offerings unique. Thus, you will be see clearly how you can rise above your competitors and zone in on the keywords or phrases that are unique to your business.
3. A Lack of Keywords in Your Ad Text
When you are creating descriptive ad copy, it is very important that you manage to inject your keywords in to your title and description while maintaining a delicate balance between clarity and relevance. Your ad copy should be tailored in such a way, that as visitors read it, they understand exactly what they can expect when they click on your ad.
4. Directing Users Solely to Your Home Page
Instead of pointing all ads in a campaign to the site’s homepage in the hopes that users will navigate through the site to find what they are looking for, you shall send them straight to the page that contains exactly what was described to them in the ad copy, of course for them to get decent conversions. Few site owners even take the time to decide which destination URL should be applied to each ad.
5. Creating Single Ad Groups
If you categorize ads that target related keywords into a common AdWords ad group, you will set up a high level of control over your whole campaign. Organizing your ad group structure in this manner gives you the ability to construct in-depth reports on each ad-group and to make real changes that have a significant impact on those ads' performance over time.
6. Utilizing Single Ad Campaigns
Once you have your AdWords ads sorted into easily identified ad groups, you can create campaigns. Having highly organized campaigns is the key to determine which ads are creating the optimal conversions. Do not simply put all your ads into the one campaign -- split them into separate campaigns to make tracking and amending the ad groups easy.
7. Using Broad Match Only
Broad matching is the default option under which your ads will appear for expanded matches such as plurals or relevant keyword variations, that usually less targeted than exact and phrase matches. When you utilize phrase matching, your ad will appear for your chosen search terms in the order that you specify, and sometimes for other terms, too. Exact matching is by far the most targeted option to use, so do not neglect it! Your ad will appear for the exact keyword you specified. The negative keyword option is also a great tool that allows you to specify the keywords for which you do not want the ads to appear. Here is a quick example of how these targeting options work:
• Broad match: Default option: blue widget
• Phrase match: Surround the keyword in quotes: "blue widget"
• Exact match: Surround the keyword in square brackets: [blue widget]
• Negative match: Place a negative character before the keyword: -blue widget
Broad matching is not necessarily the best -- or only -- option! Unless you take advantage of the phrase matching options that AdWords makes available, chances are that you are missing out on potential customers and creating a higher CPC for yourself.
8. Failing to Optimize Ad Serving for Your Ads
The AdWords ad serving service ensures that your most popular ads are displayed more often, that it will give more weight to the ads with the highest click through rates (CTRs), and will display them more often than ads with lower (CTRs) in the same ad group.
9. Failing to Track Results
In order to gauge your AdWords campaign's performance, you must be able to identify which keywords work and which do not. Google AdWords supplies a vast array of very useful tracking tools. Google has also built into the AdWords interface Google Analytics -- a marvellous web analytics tool that provides in-depth reporting on all aspects of your campaign's performance.
10. Entering the Content Network without Modifying Bids
The AdWords platform has recently given advertisers the ability to set different bids for the content network than for the search network, meant for them not paying more than they should be for each click. Lower the prices on certain keywords and you will notice that the number of clickthroughs you will receive will remain the same as at the higher bid.
Conclusion
The purpose of this article was to create awareness among AdWords advertisers about the common mistakes they can make with this network, the problems these mistakes caused, how to avoid the pitfalls and to eliminate frustrations that may emerge as managing Google AdWords campaigns. I hope that this advice helps you to create a marketing campaign that will generate remarkable increases to your business profits.
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