How to Stay Away from Costly Google Adwords Mistakes

Whatever your level of expertise is, whether you are a first-timer or an expert in online marketing — building a Google Adwords campaign definitely comes with it several challenges particularly if you are to work on a relatively new niche. While you can spend hours monitoring the market and seeing what your competitors are doing, the real lessons are learned when you create an ad and then focus on optimizing it for performance. However, this technique is not free from any lapses or mistakes and can entail loss on your part.

Conducting keyword research and optimizing ad campaigns can create confusion to some but you can get results by following these simple steps and suggestions by Perry Marshall in his book The Definitive Guide to Google Adwords.  

When you want to build an effective Google Adwords campaign one that generates a large amount of quality traffic and actually reaches your target market make sure you’re not making any of these five common mistakes:

1. Creating an ad copy that has no keywords. Never make the mistake of putting the keyword in your headline only, most Adwords campaign managers do this, and they forget to place it within the ad. You want to make sure your ad copy is as relevant and keyword-rich as possible, so feel free to use at least 1-2 keywords or keyphrases within the ad for extra benefits.

2. Leading the visitors to go to your page. You’ll generate much more attention and even higher conversion rates if the URL you use in your ad proceeds directly to a landing page with the incentive or promo, and not just your homepage.

3. Using only the ‘broad match’ feature of the Keyword Selector Tool. There are other options apart from the ‘broad match’ feature that allows you to have a basic idea on the keywords you can use in your niche or market. In the same way, you can use the tool’s ‘phrase match’ and ‘exact match’ functions for your ads and website copy to get quality and intended list of keywords.

4. Using a set of keywords that do not actually give results. Understanding exactly what your target market is searching for will take some time, and you cannot always assume that people will be searching for your products or services using the same keywords that you may use online. Utilizing the ’synonyms’ feature on the Google Adwords Keyword Selector Tool helps you get desired outcome in your campaign and this can be done by getting a list of similar keywords with the use of the ’synonyms’ feature.

5. Presenting your offer only in the body copy. Don’t forget to accentuate in your copy’s headline the ‘ultimate benefit’. Imagine that your reader/viewer is only reading the headlines; will they be compelled to click on the ad or read the remainder of the copy? Viewers scan even the smallest of details even though Google Adwords ads have only 3 to 4 lines, but what is good to note is that they only react when something presented grabs their attention, your opportunity to do this lies right in your headline.