Following from our previous post last Thursday, here are the additional five mistakes that we see people make in their Google AdWord Campaigns:
6. Not targetting the right group of searchers: Is your product or services aimed towards a particular demographic or geographical location? Did you know that you can set your AdWord campaigns to target those demographics or locations? If you want to target women in their 30′s you can do that. You can also set very specific geographic locations to target – saving you money and increasing your success rates.
7. Only having one advert per AdGroup: It’s important to test, test, test in Google AdWords. Test everything! One of the key things to test is your ad copy. Ideally create one advert which you think will be effective – then create another 2 or so versions with slight tweaks. You’ll then be able to see which ones have the higher click through rate and most on site conversions. Take the winner of these ads, then create another 2 or so versions based on this one and test those… and continue the testing process. This is the only way to continually improve your adverts. If you’ve got two very different ads (remember to make sure they’re still relevant for that AdGroup though), test them together – see which one is more effective and then use that as a basis to start further tweaks and tests.
8. Letting Google show more popular ads most often: Google sets this as the default. You might think this sounds like a good idea – you’ve got 3 adverts in your AdGroup, one gets a lot more clicks than the others, so it makes sense for Google to show it most often right?? Wrong. Google wants to make money from you, so of course it’ll want to show the highest performing ads most often – you’ll get more clicks and they’ll get more ££. However, want you need to know is not what the highest performing ad is in terms of clicks – but in terms of conversions. If you have two ads with two different call to actions – one might get the most clicks, but only converts 1% of the time. The other gets fewer clicks but converts 5% of the time. You need to work out what generates a higher ROI – more clicks but less conversions, or less clicks but more conversions. You can only work this out by a) measuring it using your analytics (like Google Analytics) programme, and b) setting your ads to rotate evenly so you get an equal amount of results from which to measure.
9. Not having compelling adverts: You need to give people a reason to click on your ad. You’re competing against a number of other paid results and ten natural results. Why should people click on your link over another one? So use call to actions in your adverts. Tell people why they should click and what they can expect when they click.
10. Failing to track results: As I said earlier, it’s important to test everything in Google AdWords, and this means tracking and understanding the results. You can set up conversion tracking which means that Google understands that page you’re trying to get people to get to (which is commonly a ‘Thank you’ type page). Once you’ve told Google this, they can then tell you which Campaigns, AdGroups, Keywords and Ads resulted in conversions. If you know this you can put more focus (and budget) on the better performing areas and either eliminate or work on improving the poor performing areas. Make sure that you also link up your Google Analytics to your Google AdWords – this will give you a host of additional information. Data such as the bounce rates of landing pages, time on site and visitor paths can all help to improve you results.
So these are just some of the common mistakes. Google AdWords can have an enormous impact on your online success, but they must be managed and monitored in the right way.
Have you made any huge mistakes with Google AdWords? Share your story in the comments and help others from making those same blunders!