Discover 7 common Google AdWords mistakes to avoid with your Google AdWords campaigns. There are plenty of mistakes that people make with Google AdWords so it is important to avoid them and to keep your campaigns optimized. Since AdWords can be difficult to learn for beginners, new advertisers many times make mistakes and don't ever test Google AdWords again. That's why we put together this video, so you can look at some common errors that advertisers make.
Helpful URLs:
Negative Keyword List from TechWyse:
Ubersuggest Keyword Tool: neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/
Google AdWords Tutorial:
Google AdWords and Bing Ads Keyword Match Types:
Google AdWords Keyword Bidding Strategy:
Google AdWords Quality Score and Ad Rank Explained:
7 Google AdWords Mistakes:
Mistake 1 – Opting into the Search Network and Display Network at the same time.
The Google Search Network and Search Partners are much different than the Google Display Network (GDN). When you target keywords, you want to target them on the search network since they perform much different for display ads.
Mistake 2 – Not Using Negative Keywords.
Negative keywords are vital to a successful campaign. Regardless of the industry you work in, there are always going to be unrelated keywords in your search terms report. In addition, you can remove certain words that will not drive you conversions.
Mistake 3 – Not Optimizing for Conversions.
People spend a lot of money on advertising where they simply drive traffic to their website. They have no goal in terms of leads, sales, phone calls, app installs, or any other key performance indicator. In order to successfully manage your advertising budget, you need to track conversions and optimize your conversion rate while keep costs similar.
Mistake 4 – Poor Keyword Research and Bidding on Broad Match Keywords.
Keyword Research is absolutely vital to successful campaigns in addition to avoiding broad match keywords. Modified broad match, phrase match, and exact match keywords will help your campaigns perform much better. In addition, finding the right keywords and bidding on them properly will be the best long-term strategy for you.
Mistake 5 – Not Testing Bidding Strategies as you Optimize Google AdWords Campaigns.
There are a wide variety of Google AdWords bidding strategies including Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Clicks, Maximize Conversions, Target Outranking Share, Target Top of Page, and Manual CPC. We love starting with Manual CPC and then getting to Target CPA after we test everything.
Mistake 6 – Only Creating 1 Ad Variation and Not Using Ad Extensions.
Google AdWords will automatically optimize your campaigns to show your top-performing ads. In addition, ad extensions make your ads larger in search results and you can add more relevant information.
Mistake 7 – Not Understand the Goals of Google AdWords
Ultimately, you want to keep testing and optimizing your Google AdWords campaigns until you can effectively use Target CPA or Target ROAS bidding strategies. If you can find the right keywords for your business that drive results, you can keep bidding on them and optimizing your campaigns. Target CPA and Target ROAS bidding strategies will allow Google AdWords to optimize your campaigns for you, you just have to give them the data they need while constantly improving your campaigns.
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This is the only channel literally telling about what is really important. Beyond all if these – how to create ad. Awesome!
This is really informative! Thank you so much for giving it for free!
Glad it was helpful!
Fantastic info thanks for doing the video. I’m just starting out but have watched a lot of getting started with Google ads and yours is great. Thanks for your help.
Hi, one more question, would appreciate if you can answer. I chose a few keywords in google keyword planner, those were all exact match, and I got a forecast for them, then I created a campaign with these chosen keywords and run that campaign but got no result although I set my max cpc as per that plan and daily budget also as per that plan. Can you tell why this could happen?
hey! great information. one question. how to set conversion in our ad, because the ad leads to landing page and from there to the target website where we expect customer to purchase. So, how to set conversion metrics and then CPA to enhance our ad quality? thanks
thanks for your great tutorial video, which is clear and easy to understand. May I know when you select manual CPC and select keywords by keyword planner, at 11:21 you suggested to start with $4-$5 for the bidding cost, may I know the methodology behind, does it mean leverage the lowest cost (low range) and can apply it to all keywords? thanks for your expertise
Surfside PPC 👍🏻👍🏻 thank you for your expertise tips, keep on the excellent sharing and wish you all the best 😊
Thank you! Yes, usually I start by bids as low as possible and then only increase them if I am having trouble spending my budget.
Great content. Super easy to understand and follow. Thanks.
Really useful and informative video. Thank you for putting your time and effort into helping us increase Google Adwords’ effectiveness.
Really helpful. Thanks for the tips on bidding strategies. Very well explained.
Another common mistake can be not setting up the location correctly. traffic from unwanted regions can sometimes cost you your entire budget.
Thanks. This is one of the best videos I have watched based on campaign metrics! Brief, clear, concise and spoke slowly for newbies like myself to follow and understand! I cannot understand when some experts speak so fast and expect you to follow them when you are still learning…I have also subscribed which I don’t do often.
Thank you! I really appreciate your kind words. I’ve tried to slow down a bit and make sure things are as easy to understand as possible. I’m also working on a free Google Ads course that will cover everything from start to finish, because it’s a difficult channel to use.
For target CPA, if your optimizing and you get your target CPA to a good spot, how does that bypass the CPC amount that’s determined by the level of competition? are you able to get a target CPA that’s lower evenly regardless of the CPC and level of competition?
You’re only going to be able to get your CPA to a certain point depending on the level of competition. I worked with a client recently that the CPA started at $70/conversion, which was profitable for them, but I couldn’t get it below about $50/conversion over the course of each month because CPCs were rising across the board for their product. That’s when it could be worthwhile to focus on overall website conversion rates (Landing page optimization, User Experience) and focus on Search Engine Optimization for additional conversions. That can be difficult though depending on resources available.
Thanks so much… You explained it really well!
Excellent refresher. Thank you so much for putting the time into doing these videos!
Thanks a lot for this great video! I have been actively using Google Ads for promoting my business and I intentionally keep ignoring Target CPA / ROAS. The reason for this is because my customers, that actually come and consume my product, don’t actually complete a form or something like that. What I’ve noticed is that the ones that complete a form almost never come to consultations.
Is there a way I could define a conversion, via Tag Manager, to count the time spent on the website?
In that matter I would define a conversion as someone who spent over a minute on the website.
Thanks in advance for your response!
Not sure if you ever found and answer to this, but it’s definitely possible. What I’d do is firstly ensure that you are tracking goals in Google Analytics and then passing them back to Google Ads (so you need to have Google Ads and Google Analytics linking configured). From there, create a goal in Google Analytics using the standard ‘duration’ type of whatever your target duration is, e.g. 1 minute. Next, import this goal into Google Ads using Tools/Conversions in your Google Ads interface.
If you complete this correctly, you will then be able to optimize for conversions in Google Ads using that duration-based goal.
I hope that helps!
I looked at your courses and I am sure you’ll have some great tips but what if I am selling a kindle book where my profit is only $3.50/book. Still practical to take your Adwords course given such a slim profit margin?
Have you considered instead using Google Adwords to build up an email list (rather than directly promoting your Kindle eBook) so that you can keep promoting over and over again … rather than having someone click once and then if they don’t buy your eBook you’ve lost them? Your initial customer acquisition cost might be higher, but then you can profit in the mid/long-term!
Great video. Getting a little frustrated here that when I do make a sale on my shopify store ive actually spent £20 on ads to sell a £15 product :/
Same I’ve just spent £65 for 70 clicks, 800 impression and sold an item for £17.99…that item made me £4.40.
So I’m literally £60.60p down.
Had the add running for like hour and half and had to shut it down.
Great video. Very helpful. Learned a lot of things that I was missing out on. Thanks so much!
Hey SurfSideppc, I have a question if you can answer it, ok so we have our google analytic goals in Ad-Words as conversions, we have correctly linked GA & imported these goals quite a while ago (like months ago). Recently we’ve been getting goals on our Google Analytics account but nothing on our adwords account where it is connected with? What is causing this to happen? Any Ideas?
Hi. What is the difference between adding the negative keyword as a broad match or as a phrase match?
Good question, I’m honestly not positive if there is a difference but I always use Phrase Match negative keywords. Google AdWords might treat broad match negative keywords like Phrase Match. Here’s an article I found that’s probably better than my answer: https://www.ppchero.com/defining-negative-keyword-match-types/