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While a well-managed Google Ads account has the power to drive a great deal of valuable traffic to your online business, just one mistake can eat up your budget.
Without proper care, a Google Ads account can quickly become an expensive marketing initiative. That’s why we’ve put together a guide to help you avoid mistakes that result in poorly-performing pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.
Not targeting the proper audience when setting up campaigns is the number one Google Ad mistake you can make. To avoid killing your PPC budget, make sure you consider your audience’s purchasing habits, interests, and pain points.
Unfocused audience targeting includes:
Not displaying your ads in some geographic regions will divert your campaign goal. For instance, if you’re selling courses in your town, however you target the larger city, irrelevant clicks from people not interested in your course will drain your budget.
Wrongly use radius targeting as well, whenever you decide to use radius make sure you are correctly selecting the areas. Moreover you can further change the bids for your more demanding areas as well.
Targeting audiences in the wrong age group will drain your campaign budget. For instance, if you’re selling makeup and beauty products for teens, but you only target women over 40, your budget will go to waste.
Gender-specific targeting for the wrong gender drains your budget. For instance, targeting women for men’s clothes creates a loss of budget.
If you get more conversions through mobile, targeting desktop users will waste your money. Keep your eye on device-type and understand what type of customers to target. Device targeting analysis help you better in underrating your budget, profit and waste on each device separately.
Creating customer intent audiences can drive conversions; however, only if you’re choosing the right keywords. Irrelevant keywords won’t attract the right leads and will result in a drained budget.
Avoid mixing display and search network settings as it will impact your ability to optimize and measure network performance. Separate the campaigns manually as both are selected by default.
While duplicating campaigns isn’t an issue, you may create a duplicate of your campaign and make it a smart campaign but you forget smart campaigns require historical data in order to perform better. So, don’t expect it would behave in same way as it was performing before. If you don’t have any previous data, your results may be different than expected.
To avoid budget mishaps, follow these guidelines:
If you’re new to PPC, it’s recommended you start with a single campaign. If you have multiple campaigns in one account, you’ll be splitting your budget across the campaigns. However, if your campaign has a lot of ad groups and ads within it, your budget will be stretched too thin.
For instance, let’s say you set aside $100 per day for Google Ads for five campaigns, with an equal split among them for $20 per campaign. However, the issue with this is that all your campaigns will likely spend the same amount of budget. So, if one campaign contains more popular keywords, set the bid lower to allow it to run throughout the day,
You can also set a Shared Budget that treats all your campaigns like one campaign budget, which will help avoid surpassing your daily limit.
When you don’t add negative keywords, you’re likely spending money on irrelevant keywords. Negative keywords help block your ad from showing up for irrelevant searches. Make sure to include a long list of negative keywords for your account before posting your ad.
Measuring your campaign performance is a vital aspect of PPC. If you’re running a campaign for women’s jeans and another for men’s, it’s difficult to tell how each campaign is performing unless you set up your campaign to deliver on your conversion goals.
For instance, if your focus is to increase app installs, you should tailor your ad copy, landing pages, and calls-to-action in a way that optimizes for that specific conversion goal.
In Google Ads, you can use conversion tracking to track user actions related to a wide number of conversion goals, including sales, leads, app installs, and phone calls. With your goal in mind, you can optimize your campaign to maximize conversions.
Adding too many keywords (particularly a broad range) to a single ad group and not using separate groups is a big mistake, it will decrease your quality score, along with any chance of delivering relevant ads. In your keyword research and then putting them in a group, check if it makes sense to categorize by:
If you sell both shoes and belts, you can might have one ad group that holds both. Always go for separate ad group for each product.
If you have different products for both male and female, you might have one ad group for both. So keep them separate.
Each ad groups should include a list of keywords that are relevant to all ads within the group. This increases ad relevancy and overall quality score.
Make sure you create an ad group that includes your brand keywords. If you don’t, your competitors may jump on the opportunity, helping their ad pop up for searchers before yours.
For instance, when searching for the e-commerce brand, “Shopify,” you’ll notice two competitors target the same campaign brand name. To rise above this, create an ad group for your brand when developing your campaign.
Imagine you have a store that is open from 9 am to 6 pm, but your audience is only active between 11 am and 2pm. Every day, you run ads to promote business in the local area, which is a smart move. However, one of the biggest Google Ads mistakes is to ignore ad scheduling. When you do this, your ads run all day, without any consideration of when your audience is active.
More often than not, this results in wasted spend, as your ads display to unqualified users. Instead, you should study reports to identify optimum times to display your ads. In this case, if you only schedule your ads to display between 11 am and 2 pm, your budget will last longer, and it will generate better results.
PPC advertising is competitive, regardless of your market space. You can boost your chances of success by creating multiple variations of each ad. At least have 3 ad copies.
This allows for split-testing, so you can weed out low-performing variations, and gradually nurture high-performing aspects to create the best possible version of each ad. In time, you will have solid blueprints for future success.
Your ad is just one step in the customer journey, inviting users to click through to your landing page. For better user experience, you must ensure that you provide a seamless, cohesive experience from your ad to your landing page.
If your ad mentions a discount on black women’s pants, but the landing page discusses men’s suits, you won’t win any fans. People will bounce off the landing page quickly, most likely never to return.
Take time to make sure your landing page content relates to your ads, keywords, and audience interests.
Match types have the power to drive a lot of traffic to your site, especially if you focus on broad match type — the default choice in Google Ads. The problem with this option is that you can attract a lot of clicks from irrelevant users, who are probably not going to be interested in what you have to offer.
You can sidestep one of the most common Google Ads mistakes simply by using a combination of match types, including exact match and phrase match keywords. Doing this will help you find an effective balance between audience reach and keyword relevance.
With the Search Terms report, PPC advertisers can get valuable insights into audience search behaviors. This research can make all the difference, as you may find terms you can add to your campaign to attract new traffic. Similarly, you may identify relevant search terms that you can add to your negative keyword lists, which will help you filter out unqualified leads.
In the age of artificial intelligence (AI), it’s tempting to let Google do the work for you. However, smart bidding hasn’t totally mastered PPC advertising just yet. When you first start, you should experiment with manual bidding to get a feel for things. Automated bidding is a great time-saver, but you must still keep an eye on things to ensure it is generating positive results.
In either case, consider your data and results carefully while making changes. With data insights, you can make smarter decisions.
Ad Extensions are wonderful. They tend customer to take actions quickly and navigate to the site. If your business services needs to be contacted by customer then its best to use call extension and make sure your ad should be showing to customer only when you or your representative is available respond on call. Mostly advertiser let the ad running without proper scheduling which eventually end up without lead or conversion.
You can use the Combined Audience option to narrow your audience targeting. While your ads will reach a smaller audience, it will be a more focused subject that will have higher buying intent.
For example, a pizza shop owner could use combined audiences to target people who like Italian food and in-market audiences for people actively searching for fast food.
This technique can save your budget and generate a much better return on investment (ROI) by narrow down the results.
Another one of the Google Ads mistakes that can drain your budget is to accept Google Ads recommendations blindly.
If your store sells clothes, and Google suggests that you increase your bids on a keyword, you should consider its potential impact on your goals. Ultimately, not every suggestion from Google is guaranteed to be good for your conversion rates, so don’t accept every recommendation without thinking it through.
If you don’t know the lifetime value of your customers, then you’re wasting both time and money.
Customer Lifetime Value — or CLTV — is how much future revenue you expect to gain from each customer. This figure includes additional purchases, upsells, and referrals. You can calculate CLTV with this formula:
CLTV = Annual Profit of Customer X Number of Years Customer Remains
So, if you calculate that your average customer has a CLTV of $10,000, you won’t mind paying $1 per click on your PPC ads. Conversely, if the average CLTV is just $100, then you might consider $1 cost-per-click (CPC) to be excessive.
Ultimately, if you don’t know the lifetime value of your customers, then you’ll waste a lot of your time and money on PPC advertising.
In PPC, your CTA is a vital component. It may only be a few words, but a well-written CTA can drive action in a big way, swaying hundreds or thousands of prospects to take the action you want them to after they read your ad.
Essentially, your ad presents a solution to your prospects, and your CTA is the hook that gets them to engage with that solution.
Make sure that all of your ads have a clear, strong CTA that lets people know exactly what to do next. Make it easy by including a link on some action-oriented text, like Shop Now, Sign-Up, or Learn More.
After 20 Google Ads mistakes, you may think you know it all now. But the thing is that it’s almost impossible to know it all in Google Ads! One of the biggest pitfalls is to sit back and think you have it all under control.
You will make plenty of mistakes in PPC — that’s all part of the learning curve. The biggest mistake of all is if you don’t learn from these little errors. With a consistent approach to testing, monitoring, and analysis, you can quickly build up your experience and knowledge, which will help you perfect your audience targeting and campaign optimization.
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