Top 10 Adwords mistakes
David Rosam on Oct 12 2006 at 12:19 pm | Filed under: Google, Pay Per Click
When I review prospective clients’ running Adwords campaigns, I find the same mistakes being made over and over again. Here are some of them:
1. Buying searches on the company name - many, if not most, companies or sites rank well on organic/natural searches for their own name. Why bother to buy clicks when you’re already on the first page for organic searches?
2. Not using Ad Groups - you’ll be paying more for your clicks as you’ll be sacrificing relevance
3. Always aiming for the top spot - positions 2-5 often perform just as well, and many PPC professionals report that they get fewer tyre-kickers from the lower positions
4. Bidding on too many keywords (phrases) - focus on the key phrases that are doing best for you and Google will reward you with higher positions and/or lower bid requirements
5. Not tracking conversions - make sure you’re using the tracking code on your site, because traffic levels are only part of the story. Make sure you know the ROI on your campaign
6. Using PPC for branding - no, no, no. It’s a direct response medium. If you must spend money on branding, do it in a more effective way
7. Not understanding where break-even lies - OK, it’s related to 5, but what happens when your cost per click doubles? Do you carry on? Or do you wait for the market to cool? Selling at a loss rarely makes sense, unless you have a structured sales back-end
8. Buying traffic for the sake of it (having no strategy) - all traffic isn’t good traffic. Make sure you’re buying relevant traffic, even if the clicks are a bit more expensive
9. Not understanding the principles of good advertising copy - you can either see writing PPC ads as being simple, totally dictated by the low character count, or you can work hard at applying the proven rules of good copywriting to that small space. Get it right, and you’ll give the competition a drubbing
10. Thinking that Google Adwords is a straight auction for positions - it’s amazing how many people think it is. Google mixes in other factors such as relevance and past performance to skew what you need to pay. Read all the information on the Google Adwords site and make sure you actively manage your campaign
Are you making these kind of mistakes with Adwords?
