Google Adwords has dominated the Search Engine Marketing arena by having millions of businesses engaging it as their primary online marketing tool. With so many riding on this wave, it is essential to avoid the 3 overly committed sins to get an edge over your competitors.
Sin 1: Unrelated Ads in One Campaign
Being organized is key in all Adwords campaigns and definitely not difficult. Many people tend to place advertisements of no relation into one campaign. A deadly sin to commit! I will tell you why:
John is the owner of a shop selling digital electronic products. With little knowledge of Search Engine Marketing, he decided to assign ALL his product ads under one campaign, ignorant to the fact that he would later have problems tracking their performances.
To make John’s Adwords experience a better one, as illustrated by the chart, he should organize his ads in an orderly manner. Under his account, he can have multiple campaigns, with each campaign having different ad groups and under each ad group, different forms and styles of ads.
In another words, he could set up different campaigns for different electronic products, such as Laptops, Mobile Phones, MP3 and DVD players. After which, under his Laptop campaign for example, he could organize his ad groups into different brands of laptops such as Acer, Dell and HP laptops.
You might ask, “What if I only sell one type of product?” Well, lucky you. Your campaign structure is pretty flexible. Build it in a way that serves you best. For instance, if John is solely selling laptops, the brands Acer, Dell and HP could now be John’s campaigns (rather than ad groups). Consequently, he could have different ad groups under each campaign (Dell, Acer and HP), which could namely be different laptop models or laptop promotions to attract buyers.
The purpose of having a well-organized Adwords account is to ensure that you measure apples to apples, thus helping you identify which campaigns; ads and keywords are performing well. With some proper organization, Adwords performance tracking would becomes a whole lot easier!
Sin 2: No Keyword Research
Not conducting a keyword research prior to an Adwords campaign is as good as going for a camping trip without bringing enough underwear.
To start the research, John logs on to Google’s keyword research tool. He then types in the word ‘laptop’, which returns a whole load of data, from cost-per-click (CPC) to search volume of the keyword, depending on what sort of data he chooses to display. He can then use all the information to decide what sort of keywords to use that would benefit his campaign most.
Relying on data is so much more accurate and reliable than using intuition or guesswork in choosing your keywords. Even with Google heavily promoting keyword research, there are not many clients utilizing this tool. When you have tried it, you really won’t see why not!
Sin 3: No Match Types Used
Match types, if used appropriately, could save you thousands of dollars, help you gain a more targeted group of audiences and prevent your ads from showing in a wrong search.
Adwords only has 4 match types for you to master. It does not need to get any easier!
Upon implementing various match types on your keywords, it is vital to try Googling them to check if your ads appear according to plan.
To give you a clearer picture of the benefits of using match types, try Googling ‘lousy laptops’ and you will see a list of ads showing up as seen below:
You definitely do not want to pay for your ads to appear in this type of searches! Why let your ads appear at the wrong places when you can do something about it?
Don’t wait any longer. Avoid these three sins to make your money well spent, and multiplied back to you in many folds.
