You allotted a decent budget to promote your business through Google ads and not getting desired sales. Are you not happy with the Google adwords performance? Does your paid marketing campaigns are not giving desired sales? Are you planning to stop using Adwords?

Wait! Before you stop using Google ads, checkout this article. It may happen that your team committing few common mistakes in managing Google adwords account. Here it is very important for you to learn about possible reason behind this poor performance? Therefore to avoid the common Adwords mistakes, it is necessary to take care of the following blunders and to avoid them in the future:

#1 Not doing proper research:

Doing a proper research is the key before you start any paid marketing campaign. The most important and the basic first step for Adwords advertiser is to understand the market. Research can be done by reading tips on industry blogs like Search Engine Land, Google Ads official blog or by talking to others who have advertised on Google Ads. If possible read Google AdWords blog daily and keep your self updated with latest AdWords update & features. It will give you better idea to experiment new things in various client accounts.

Here fundamental understanding of your market and the Google adwords features is highly recommended. It will give you better understanding of your target audiences and the type of ads you should run. So, start doing your research and understand the tool before you start promoting your business via Google adwords.

Pro Tip:

If you are an eCommerce business and looking to generate sales, you need to study Google shopping ads. They not only giving best conversion rate but also can reduce your ads spend as compare to search ads. Here is an example of how Google shopping ads display your advertisement on Google search result.

#2 Not using the right Keywords and Keywords Match Type:

Keywords research is the heart and soul of a Google Ads campaign, especially for the search ads. Thus it is beneficial to correctly judge your keywords before putting them into the campaign. The keywords should be such that they bring conversions and not just clicks. It is important to ensure that you understand your campaign type whether product or content to manage the set of keywords.

Break your keywords into small sets and use the right keyword match types combination (broad match, phrase match, or exact match) to optimize your campaign. But of course, this strategy would depend on what you want, traffic, impressions or conversion.

Don’t forget to add negative keywords list which includes terms you “do not” want to respond to, so as to save a lot of costs. In Google AdWords Negative keywords are most important factor as it saves lots of cost and will not show your ad on particular keywords. Here is one such example of the importance of negative keywords.

In every AdWords campaign there is common set of negative keywords which needs to include while creating any new campaign. You also need to identify that which negative keywords will come at AdGroup and Campaign level.

#3 Ad Copy – Not using multiple ad copies:

If you are creating one or two search or display ad copies, it is wrong practice. Testing advertisement copy is very crucial part while running a paid ads. It is the most compelling reason people click your advertisement and and hence, better ad copy can improve CTR. An ideal ad copy consists of a headline, your keywords and a persuasive call to action. It is wise to test your copy by trying two or three variants to find out what works best. You need to find out what actually will get you conversions thus it is wise idea to test different variations of everything.

You should finally choose a copy that gets you the highest click-through and conversion rate, or the lowest cost per acquisition. It is thus extremely sensible to trust numbers before making a final choice of copy. Here, you also need to understand the importance of AdWords Ad Extensions. Sitelink, Call out, Structured snippet, ratings and location extensions are the most common extensions that every AdWords users use in their campaigns. This extensions often increases CTR, Conversions, Clicks and Converion Rate so use them wisely.

In above ad copy you will find the maximum use of Ad Extensions which drives some useful information for the users hence the chances of clicks and conversions are high.

If the holiday sales are near by than you should set up your campaigns before one month with various ad copies. After setting up the campaigns within 1 or 2 weeks you will come to know that which kind of ad copies are working well for holiday campaigns and on the bases of that you can make necessary changes in it.

#4 Not knowing your customers Life Time Value:

Calculating the LTV for your customers is an integral part of your research to understand how much you can spend on Adwords per acquisition. By calculating this value you can decide how much to spend on your campaign. The Life time value should not be lower than the cost per customer for your campaign especially for an ecommerce business. If your customer stays with you longer that eventually the initial cost may be sensible. Kissmetrics blog provided detailed calculation of Life Time Value represented in Infographic on their blog.

#5 Not understanding the Adwords advance features:

Although the basic campaign set-up is easy yet they require various small setting to make it run better. It is up to you to educate yourself about the use of those features so as to get more results for the same money. Some of the helpful options are AdGroups, Ad targeting, Match types, Keyword insertion and Ad Extensions.

I strongly recommend keep reviewing new and advance features announced by Google Adwords team. They are really working hard to offer best Adwords features that can maximize your business using their tool.

#6 Not using Google Analytics with Adwords:

One of the most powerful marketing tools, Google Analytics is there for you at no extra cost. Connecting your AdWords conversion tracking to your Google Analytics can help you see all kinds of data that your campaign is generating. Google Analytics provides you the product performance report specially for ecommerce business which helps them to make AdWords strategies for particular products or product category.

Google AdWords blog also explained earlier that combining Google AdWords & Analytics can open huge opportunity for advertisers to achieve their goals.

Please note that, this is not a mandatory to use but if implemented properly, you can have a better data to understand customer’s behavior. This can directly impact your marketing strategy and can improve overall performance for sure.

#7 Not directing the Traffic to the category or highly relevant page:

The unique landing pages help the searcher connect easily with the information they seek, and this is much convenient for them rather than landing on your homepage where they have to struggle with finding what they came to your site for.

For an ecommerce site, it is a good idea to send people directly to the product page, bypassing the homepage and the category pages.

There is one added advantage of landing them on highly targeted page is to have a better Quality Score! Google adrank is defined based on your Quality score + bidding and having better QS can result in lower CPC.

#8 Not Testing the Optimal Ad Position for branding:

Positioning is important if your goal is to improve branding. It is obvious that the first few search results get more clicks and if getting clicks is your goal then do ensure you are on the top of the page but if your goal is conversion then your ad content will work for you.

One more important factor of branding in AdWords is that you shouldn’t ignore your own brand while running the campaigns. Yes, you need to run Ads on your own brand keywords. If your business is slowly achieving the goals and people come to know about your business after some time than they will directly search on Google by your business name. But, if you are not running ads on your brand keywords and some competitor grabs this opportunity than you will loose huge business.

So, don’t make this mistakes while running AdWords account and make sure your first campaign will be your brand campaign.

#9 Not knowing your competitors:

When you know who are you competing against and what ads are they using you are well equipped to build a strategy for yourself.  It is important to know your competitors keywords and their landing pages to modify yours.

If you want to sustain in the market and keep improving your business than you must focus on competitors. Above report is fetched from ispionage which gives detailed report of your competitor like how much they are spending, which ppc keywords they are using and many more. Even in Google AdWords you can check Auction Insights report where you will find how other advertisers participating in the same shopping auctions. It gives you valuable insights for your Google ads account.

#10 For eCommerce – Avoiding Shopping Ads is a biggest mistake:

If you are an eCommerce brand and not running a Shopping ads, you are loosing great business opportunity. Shopping ads has a great importance for an eCommerce and this case study is a great example of it.

As explained in first section, you will have a great benefits of using shopping ads:

• Only eCommerce portal can run shopping ads (less competition)
• Your ad will appear with product image / ratings / price and other additional information. This can give you added advantage over search ads.
• You can use various promotions (through Google merchant center, you can run promotion that will be displayed under your product ads). Better way to increase CTR.

Apart from this, there are various benefits of using Google shopping ads which is already explained in given article.

Over to you:

Just check the given mistakes and review your Google ads account to see whether your team is making these mistakes? These are very basic points but can really save your money and can improve the performance of your adwords account.

If you still need any help, feel free to contact us here by comment or through our contact us page. I will get back to you within 24 hours.