Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If you use Google Adwords you know that even the smallest mistakes can end up costing you money. Simple things like not optimising your campaigns properly especially on competitive keywords can reduce or impede your return on investment (ROI).

If used properly Adwords can help you easily achieve maximum return on investment (ROI) for the keywords or phrases that are most relevant to your internet business and can also improve your website stats by providing targeted traffic.

Because internet marketing is becoming more competitive, with more people than ever competing for keywords, it has unfortunately meant that search engine PPC campaigns and keyword prices are more expensive and so it becomes essential for you to avoid mistakes that will undoubtedly result in poor performing PPC campaigns. Below are 6 mistakes to avoid if you want to have successful Adwords campaign.

1. Creating long lists of poorly targeted keywords

When you first set out to create your AdWords campaign, it is import to choose your keywords carefully and resist the temptation to create a long unless list of irrelevant or generic keywords. For example, if you ran a mobile phone shop then, it wouldn’t be sensible to target the keywords “mobile phone” as the cost per click (CPC) for this generic keyword/ phrase would be amazingly high when compared to a more descriptive and relevant keyword/phrase, such as “Sony Ericsson Xperia X10.”

Do not choose keywords that are disassociative with what you offer i.e. if you only sell products do not choose keywords for repairs or spares, these phrases may well bring visitors to your site but produce no conversions as you do not offer these services.

It’s important to identify and understand your specific internet business niche, so that you can market directly to people who want the products or services that your internet business offers. Do not fool yourself into a postion of using broader terms as this will end up negatively impacting you as well as costing you money.

2. Lack of keywords in your ad text

Ad text is probably the most poorly done part of Adwords as most people forget that when they are creating descriptive ad copy, it’s imperative to inject their keywords in to the title and description while maintaining the balance between clarity and relevance. Your internet marketing ad copy should be written in such a way that anyone reading it will understand easily, exactly what to expect when they click on your ad.

3. Utilising single campaigns

Once you sorted out your ads into into easily identified ad groups, you can move on and create your campaigns. At this stage you should have created ads relating to each product specifically, you now need to group these into one container that describes them.

let us use the example of a florist. They have created ad groups for ‘Red Roses’, Red Tulips and Red Chrysanthemums’. The florist now needs to create a container called ‘Red Flower Bunches’ or ‘Flower Bunches Red’ – (remember red flowers maybe to generic) to hold all of the ad groups in the campaign.
This process is then repeated for blue flowers, gifts or anything else the florist may sell.

Having highly organised campaigns is the key to determining which ads are creating the optimal conversions. Don’t simply put all your ads into the one campaign — split them into separate campaigns to make tracking and amending the ad groups easy.

4. Using broad match only

Adwords Funnel

When you start serving your ads, you should make sure you take advantage of the Adwords Ad serving service. You should also take advantage of the phrase matching options that AdWords makes available for your campaigns, if you are not doing this it is likely that you are missing out on potential customers and creating higher CPC for your campaign.

Broad matches are generally less targeted than exact and phrase matches. Broad matching is the default option under which your ads appear for expanded matches such as plurals or relevant keyword variations.

When you use phrase matching, your ad will appear for your chosen search terms in the specified order you put them in, occassionally they will appear for other terms, too. The most targeted option that you can use is Exact matching, this works by only showing your ad for the exact keyword you specified. The negative keyword option is also a great tool as it allows you to specify the keywords you do not want the ads to appear for. Here’s a quick example of how these targeting options work:

· Broad match: Default option: Plumbing Technician London
· Phrase match: Surround the keyword in quotes: “Plumbing Technician London”
· Exact match: Surround the keyword in square brackets: [Plumbing Technician London]
· Negative match: Place a negative character before the keyword: -Plumbing Technician London

Make sure you take time to research and test all of these different matching techniques as not all will be right for your specific campaign.

5. Failing to optimise ad serving for your ads

When you start serving your ads, you should make sure you take advantage of the AdWords ad serving service, this service help to ensure that your most popular ads are displayed more often for any specific keyword or phrase based on its click through rate (CTR). This works by making more use of your popular ads and less use of those ads that people are not clicking on thus giving you more ‘bang for your buck’ as the expression says.

Basically the AdWords platform gives far more weight to ads with higher click through rates, displaying them more often than ads with lower CTRs in the same ad group, but you must use the serving service for this to work best for you.

6. Failing to track results

Performance of your AdWords campaign’s is important and in order to tweak and refine your process or remove poorly performing ads you need to regularly track results, this will help you identify which keywords work and which do not. By using any of Google’s tracking tools or any other provider tools (most are free) you will be able to do this form of monitoring.

Google has built into the AdWords interface Google Analytics web analytics tools which can provide you with in-depth reporting on all aspects of your campaign’s performance. Setting goals for a campaign will allow you to see whether the campaign is over or underperforming.

As you can see these 6 mistakes can cost you dearly not only in time but in monetary terms as well. Try to remember what your goal is for using AdWords and stick to it. Ensure you do not make these mistakes and hopefully you will have a far more successful adword campaign with a high return on investment (ROI) for your internet business.