9 AdWord Mistakes & How to Fix Them

Google AdWords is the greatest direct response advertising medium ever created.This fact has been recognized by more than one national business magazine, newspaper, and marketing guru. Some business owners have Google AdWords to thank for their entire existence and growth, while others have replaced their traditional advertising budget at a fraction of the cost to advertise on search engines with better results. Since 2001 these classifieds-style, "Sponsored Links" seen above and alongside organic search listings have created millionaries, they have also lost advertisers millions. With a low barrier-to-entry, many business owners and marketing managers have tried their hand at Google's pay-per-click system. Some have soared, while others have hopelessly wasted big bucks without knowing why. Having looked at dozens of accounts over the years and managed over a million dollars in clicks, I've seen the costly mistakes often made. Below are eight of the most common with solutions.

1. Always Bidding to Be Number One - Ego bidding can cause expensive click wars. Always trying to be #1 over your competitors on one specific keyword just to be #1 wastes time and money unless you know your keywords' true value or cost-per-conversion. For high volume, competitive, high cost clicks, make sure you know your keywords' cost-per-conversion.

Solution: Generally, positions 3 - 10 have higher conversion rates because they receive less impulsive and irrelevant clicks. In recent years relevancy has been playing a larger role (Quality Score), and being #1 is not solely dependent on maximum bid. Calculate how much a customer or lead is worth to you and don't spend more than that per lead (excluding the first month of testing or so). Swallow your pride, mind your ROI, and let your competitors waste their time and money on bidding wars. The one exception being when the keyword is the name of your company.

2. Unrelated Keyword Clumping - Organizing similar phrases and keywords into similar and specific adgroups and campaigns is a huge key to scaling your AdWord's account success. You're not organizing just for the sake of organization; your account should be structured in a way that you are able to give you a quick "bird's eye view" of any one of your particular adgroups or campaigns' relative success.

Solution: Don't put a long list of unrelated terms and phrases in the same adgroup. Organize and stratify your adgroups using what I call the "Two Word Relevancy Litmus Test" where all phrases in one particular adgroup have at least a two word base commonality. This will create adgroup naming conventions which are close to WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) as possible.

3. Neglecting Conversion Tracking Codes - Google AdWords provides up to four codes which should be correlated with an action a user takes on your website: form submission, shopping cart sale, whitepaper download, contact page view, etc. These codes allow you to calculate a much more important number than traffic -- your cost-per-conversion or even cost-per-acquisition.

One click may cost you .25, but it may take 100 clicks before someone fills out a contact form, resulting in a cost-per- conversion of $25. This is a crucial number in which you should base your bid amount. Based on your closing ratio you can then calculate your cost-per-acquisition or advertising cost-per-customer.

Solution: Add the provided conversion tracking codes to your website before you spend a dime on AdWords. Label each action. Put one on the "Thank you" page after a contact form submission. If you have an ecommerce shopping cart, place a code on the receipt page after an online sale is made. You will then know which campaigns, adgroups, keywords, even ads attract the most, and most highly qualified, leads.

4. Using One Catch-All Ad - Non-specific ads which attempt to sell on generalities and features, using superlatives and hyperbole combined with a cliché call to action do not work. These ads under-utilize the direct response nature of the Internet combined with flexibility of matching keyword relevance to ad copy. Search Engine users are typically later in the buying cycle because he/she is looking verses mass marketing which advertises to a much less targeted audience.

Solution: Write tight, keyword relevant ads in small adgroups for every area of your service or product categories. Get the user to take the next step closer, which might not always be a sale. Signing up for newsletter, Ezine, to receive a free whitepaper or ebook, all have huge long term value if a relationship is cultivated.

5. Pointing All Ads to the Homepage - Only linking ads to your homepage is not wise. If a user has to hunt too long for the service or product he/she saw mentioned in your ad's headline, your potential customer is gone and will never return.

Solution: Create specific ads to link to interior landing pages having content that specifically relates to the keyword phrase/ad. Giving the user what he/she was looking for quickly makes it less likely they will leave because you made them think too much. Categorizing your services into separate pages and having a specific ad land exactly on what the user is looking for combined with a convincing argument and a way for him/her to receive more information will dramatically increase your conversion rate. Don't make your prospect hunt, that's what a search engine is for, not your website.

6. Neglecting Negative Keywords - Adding negative keywords to your adgroup or campaign means your ads won't display for search queries containing phase combinations which use irelevant terms. By filtering out unwanted impressions, negative keywords can help you reach the most appropriate prospects, reduce your cost-per-click (CPC), and increase your ROI.

Solution: Find negative keywords by using common sense, keyword research tools, and the Search Query Performance report over time.

7. Mingling Search & Contextual Campaigns - Did you know more than half of Google ads are not served on Google or any of their Search Partners (ASK, Dogpile, AOL)? They are served on relevant sites surrounding articles, blog posts, news, and other content (aka "Ads by Google"). You have the choice to opt out of this non-search network of sites. Since these two arenas are very different and require different strategies you should address each network one at a time.

Solution: When first starting out with your AdWords uncheck the Content Network by choosing to "Edit Settings" on the campaign level. Once you have achieved an acceptable cost/conversion for the Google + Search Network, then duplicate your campaigns using the AdWords Editor and have "Content Only" campaigns, in which you will most like want to test new ads on as well.

8. Trusting IP Geo-targeting - 20% of the time or more of the time a geo-graphically tagged IP address is either wrong or not set, this can lead to irrelevant or out of area traffic less likely to do business with your local services.

Solution: Create two similar campaigns, one with generic keywords without the city name, the other with generic keywords plus the city name. Target the first campaign using Google AdWords' geo-targeting. Manually target the other to a larger region (state or country), but only buy keywords which have the phrase + the city name. This will cover all your bases and bring you more highly targeted traffic.

9. Accepting the Status Quo - Once a conversion rate has been measured, some site owners do not understand they should keep trying to improve this number by experimenting and testing several variables.

Solution: Always be trying to improve it by A/B split testing ad copy as well as landing page graphics and headlines in order to constantly improve conversion rates.


I hope you found this article useful. Feel free to leave me a comment.

To Your Success,

Chad Timothy
http://www.chadtimothy.com/
http://www.softwarebillionsclub.com/
Chad Timothy's 500K Instant Cash Flow System