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It’s easy to spend thousands of dollars quickly (and accidentally) with Google AdWords campaigns. I’ve heard the horror stories.
Ideally, you should hire an AdWords expert to manage your campaign. If you can’t afford that, then you can at least take three steps to improve your campaign results.
These may not be easy steps for you. Whether you find them easy will depend on your comfort with technology, your AdWords experience, and your comfort level with risking a possibly expensive mistake.
The top three problems I commonly see in AdWords campaigns are:
1. Not Testing Ads Against One Another
The best way to improve your results and lower your costs is to test ads. In internet marketing, you must test and track and then test and track some more to improve your results.
When you create your first ad, you’ll be offered a way to create a second ad. Accept this option and use the same ad with one small change. In some of my past testing, the inclusion of something as small as an exclamation point has increased the click-through by a significant percentage.
The idea here is to keep testing your best ad against a new ad and try to beat your best ad. Over time, you’ll create an extraordinary and profitable ad for your business.
2. Not Using Exact Match
If you’re already working with a Google AdWords expert, please make sure they are not charging you a percentage of your spend. For Pete’s sake, if you pay a percentage of spend, then the incentive from the expert’s point of view is to spend more!
I never charge a percentage of spend and specialize in having my clients pay LESS while increasing their conversions.
When you enter your keywords, use the brackets around your keyword phrases. This is what I mean: []. The key phrase might look like this in the keywords area of your campaign:
[blue widget]
[red widget].
The format below is called broad match and is the kind of match most AdWords newbies use:
blue widget
red widget.
See? No brackets.
What often happens without brackets is that you get tons of traffic and terrible conversions. It can cost you thousands of dollars to make this mistake.
If you use the broad match, you’ll have people coming to your site when they searched for “purple widget” because the search engine “sees” widget in the search term and brings up your ad. Since you only carry only the blue and red widgets, you’ll waste money when people click on your pay-per-click ads only to find there are no purple widgets on your website. The people desiring purple widgets will quickly click away without buying.
3. Not Tracking Conversions
If you don’t track conversions, you don’t know if your ads are working. Even if you receive a lot of traffic to your site from ads, you need to set up a way to track the actual conversions to sales.
Let me explain.
You may receive loads of traffic from what I’ll call Ad A. You may receive very little traffic from what I’ll call Ad B.
Traffic
Ad A = 100 visits per day
Ad B = 200 visits per day
Which ad do you think is better?
If you track only the traffic you’ll say Ad B.
Let’s look at these additional figures.
Traffic
Ad A = 100 visits per day
Ad B = 200 visits per day
Conversions
Ad A = 50 sales per day = 50% conversion rate
Ad B = 25 sales per day = 12.5% conversion rate
Ad B receives more traffic but does not convert as well as Ad A.
The start to running a profitable Google AdWords campaign — and not losing your seat in the process — is to test your ads, use exact match in your keyword phrases and track your conversion to sales.
If you have questions, I’ve love to hear them. Please post them in the comments in below.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
While broad match is indeed bad (very bad), phrase match can be useful as well. You have to be careful with it, but if used correctly, you can get a good deal of traffic that converts.
If you do use phrase match, make sure to use negative keywords. If your phrase matched keyword is “baseball caps”, but you don’t sell red baseball caps, then add the negative keyword -red.