Internet marketers know that using Google AdWords is an excellent way to drive traffic to their sites. Since it can be expensive if not handled correctly, the trick is to manage campaigns to get the highest return on investment.
A poorly managed campaign can cost more than it brings in, but a well managed campaign can keep your store or company in business. It all comes down to how much you know about AdWords and how smartly you can manage your campaigns.
In this post, we’ll discuss the top 10 mistakes people make with Google AdWords. By avoiding these mistakes and following the alternative advice provided, you’ll be on your way to a highly successful AdWords campaign.
Mistake #1: Not Grouping Keywords Correctly
AdWords is set up so you can create campaign ad groups to manage different types of campaigns. (If you have a product campaign and a content campaign, each of them can be managed separately.) Within each campaign, you can break down your ads and keywords into ad groups.
Click on the green “New ad group” button within a campaign to create new groups for your ads and keywords.
Not using ad groups is one of the biggest mistakes people make. Instead of segmenting their ads into groups based around similar types of keywords, they lump all of their keywords into one ad group and show everyone the same ad.
The problem with this approach is that PPC Management 101 tells us that the ad being shown should match the keyword being searched. The closer the ad copy matches the keyword, the more likely people are to click on the ad (and eventually order). Let’s look at an example.
Apple sells several different products. They sell laptops, desktops, tablets, and mp3 players. If they didn’t break up their products into different groups, then they wouldn’t be able to show specific ads based on what people are searching for. They would have to resort to an ad with a headline such as “Buy Apple Products” instead of an ad that matches what people are searching for.
Instead, Apple uses ad groups for each of their products so they can use headlines like “MacBook Pro” or “iPad Mini” when people search for those respective products.
This is an example of an Apple ad from an ad group configured to show a MacBook Pro ad when people search for “macbook pro retina.”
If you don’t break up your keywords into different ad groups, then you’ll lump everything together underneath one ad copy. This doesn’t allow you to customize the ad to be a good fit for the term being searched for. The more you break up your ads and keywords into themes, the easier your campaigns will be to monitor and optimize.
Recommendation: The best rule of thumb is to use no more than 20 keywords per ad group. Sometimes you can get away with using a few more, but exceeding a 20 keyword limit is a sign that your ad copy isn’t matching the keyword being searched as closely as it could.
Mistake #2: Not Using the Right Keyword Matches
The next biggest mistake people make is not using the right broad match, phrase match, or exact match keywords.
Here’s how this works: AdWords allows you to add keywords to a campaign in one of the three ways mentioned above. You can add them as a broad match, phrase match, or exact match.
A broad match keyword means that your ads will show if the keywords are used in the search, regardless of the order. If you add “Nike running shoes, ” for example, your ad will show up for people who type “Nike running shoes, ” “Nike free running shoes, ” and “where can I buy Nike shoes for running.”
A broad match means that your ad will show in a search so long as the keywords you entered show up in the search in one form or another. To enter a broad match term into AdWords, simply enter the term without any kind of punctuation before or after the term. In this example, you would simply type nike running shoes to add it as a broad match keyword.
A phrase match keyword means the keyword phrase needs to show up in the search as a complete phrase in the order you enter it. Using the same example as above, when you enter “Nike running shoes” as a phrase match keyword, then your ad will show up for terms like “Nike running shoes” and “where can I buy Nike running shoes.”
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