5 Common Google AdWords Mistakes You Need to Avoid

Google AdWords can be a daunting experience when you are just starting out, but the reality is, even big businesses still make some simple mistakes. Make sure you avoid the following and you’ll be on your way to a successful ROI.

Broad Keywords

Regardless of whether you have a large or small marketing budget, keywords with a high search volume shouldn’t be considered when just starting out with AdWords. Use more targeted keywords that aren’t too specific but are still relevant to the landing page you want to take the user to. Broad keywords will eat up your budget fast and until you know how AdWords works for your business, you shouldn’t even consider taking on the larger companies in a keyword bidding war.

Not Checking In On Your Campaigns

A lot of businesses make the mistake of setting up an AdWords account then just leaving them to run, but if you want AdWords to run successfully for your business, you have to work at it. It requires constant optimisation and adjustments to your campaigns accordingly, making sure you keep checking on their progress to see what works and what doesn’t. There are plenty of opportunities to grow with AdWords, but you need to regularly analyse the results so you get more for your money.

Unrelated Keywords

A common mistake made by a lot of businesses just starting out with Google AdWords is to create one campaign and one ad set, and lots of unrelated keywords that loosely reflect what you are linking to. This can cause you to be penalised by AdWords, resulting in a low-quality score and thus paying more per click. In order to avoid this, you should be creating separate campaigns with their own goals and keywords that will all link back to their relevant landing pages. You can then adjust your budget per campaign.

Not Setting Goals

There’s no point setting up a campaign without knowing what you want it to achieve. Too many businesses get caught up in the excitement of first setting up AdWords and end up creating pointless campaigns with no real goal. Set up a spreadsheet with all of your campaign details and keep track of how they are doing, looking for where you can make improvements to reach your goals.

Not Using Negative Keywords

Many businesses neglect the use of negative keywords, but they are actually a vital component to ensuring you are targeting the right audience and help improve your quality score and reduce your costs. Negative keywords are a great way to cut out all of the people you don’t want seeing your advert. For example, if you offer legal advice for a fee, you may want to add ‘free’ to your negative keywords so that people who search for ‘free legal advice’ won’t see your ad, reducing any waste advertising spend. Don’t use too many however, as this may narrow your audience too much – only use negative keywords when you know for certain an audience you don’t want to see your ad.

Avoid the above mistakes and you will be well on your way to seeing increased conversions and a great ROI. For more advice and digital marketing support, get in touch here.