We’ve put together a blog with tips and tricks that will help those new to Pay Per Click and Google Ads, and also help as a refresher for those more experienced with search engine marketing.
Read our blog 28 Top Google Ads Tricks & Tips To Help You Create An Effective Campaign In 2021.
Yell used to be one of the best options to advertise your business with back in the 80s and 90s with their Yellow Pages. The big yellow book was the first stop when people where looking for businesses.
The internet exploded out of the traps in the early 2000s and the Yellow Pages began to lose out to cheaper, measurable online marketing. They ‘adapted’ by realising they needed to move online with their own business directory Yell.com. They also started offering PPC (pay-per-click) advertising as a ‘service’ using Google AdWords.
This may seem like a natural progression for a company like Yell to offer online advertising listings – though it doesn’t mean they’re any good at it!
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I’ve trained a lot of local companies in Google AdWords in recent months. Some of them come to me as total AdWords newbies that are doing it themselves. Others have paid an agency or freelancer to develop and manage their campaign.
No matter what level of experience, there are some common costly mistakes being made both by newbies and surprisingly by experienced agencies/freelancers – even, dare I say it, Google Specialists!
One of the biggest mistakes I see is blowing parts of the budget on totally irrelevant terms. This is easier to do than you think!
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Some quick thoughts for summer 2016.
Last month Belfast welcomed the 4th DigitalDNA conference. Great to see digital buzzing in Belfast, with some excellent companies and knowledgeable speakers. Great also to meetup with people within the industry.
Although the event was a great success and I’m sure it’ll continue to go from strength to strength, there was some lessons to be learnt. Two of the talks that I attended, the Google talk and the Loudmouth Media talk you could bearly hear. The speakers were drown out, so well done the speakers as they carried on despite this.
Surprisingly the main hall with some of the big speakers didn’t appear to be as well attended as I would have thought. Maybe there’s a disconnect between some bigger companies and the small businesses that I’m guessing would have made up the majority of the attendees.
The title of this article is a recurring theme. When I run courses on AdWords or talk to new clients about getting new traffic sources I’m surprised at how many people still have a mistrust of Google Ads, or believe that because they skip the untrustworthy Ads everyone else is also ignoring them and as a result, the ads aren’t worth running.
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Last week saw Google remove the text ads from the right hand side of it’s desktop search results. The 8 ads that seemed glued to many search results and appeared on desktop search are no longer appearing.
An additional 4th ad may appear in the search results for ‘highly commercial queries’, something that Google’s been testing for a while. The 4th Ad can benefit from showing all the ad extensions, including site links, call outs and location extensions.
The screenshot below shows 4 ads at the top.
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What seems like a very long time ago I wrote an article on my own AdWords mistakes. Most of them still apply. 7 or 8 years later here’s a follow up with a few more.
If you are running on a fairly small budget or your cost per click is high relative to your budget then the ‘Limited By Budget’ warning can be fairly common. Sometimes this is very difficult to work with, particularly if it’s a small client dipping their toes into Adwords and they aren’t prepared to up their budget. They usually have a low budget and a high cost per click.
If the daily budget is £10 per day and your clicks cost you £1, then when you get 10 clicks your ads will stop showing. If your budget runs out at 5pm then your ad no longer shows.
I’ll add more to the list but here’s a couple of kick off with.
1. The ability to add annotations/comments. This is long overdue. Having to write notes in a Google Doc and refer back to these is time consuming.
2. I’d like to have the date picker that’s in Google Analytics, it makes it very easy to compare this year with last year’s performance. You can run comparisons in Google Adwords, though arguably they aren’t as easy to read/digest.
3. Ad scheduling at Ad level, so that I could create different ad text for different times of the day.
4. Being able to group select Broad Match Modifier keywords.
5. Being able to set different ads to display 10%, 20%, 50% of the time.
6. More flexibility & common sense with mobile ads, seems a nonsense to have to run a separate mobile ad campaign with the same keywords and decrease mobile settings by 100% in the original desktop/tablet campaign.
7. I’d like to be able to simply click a button and restore an account to a previous date, rollback functionality. I rarely use the undo changes feature, and backing up an account and restoring would be too time consuming everytime you made significant changes.
8. Being able to review and assess Quality Score for keywords over time.
9. I’d like to be able to get an email notification sent straightaway when the daily budget runs out, and not have to go through the current process of setting up rules to run at certain times to check if the cost has exceeded a certain amount.
10. I’d like to be able to see all the IP addresses in Adwords and what they get up to on the site.
Update August 2016
11. It’d be great to have coloured rows rather than all grey rows, which can sometimes be hard to distinguish, and can lead to mistakes if you’re writing the figures down.
Have you got any?
Below is a quick comparison table I’ve drawn up between Google Adwords Express & Google Adwords.
| Google Adwords Express | Google Adwords |
|---|---|
| Easy to setup and admin | Much harder learner curve, much more complex, and ever changing |
| Automated Management, enter your service and service area and Google will get things up and running for you | You choose your own keywords, set bid prices and structure your account, you adjust bids, deal with quality score issues, poor performing keywords and ads. |
| Google Analytics stats and figures aren’t impressive | Google Adwords has better integration with Google Analytics and can give you a clearer picture of what Adwords visitors do on the website |
| Reporting is simple | Detailed reporting, you can drill down into everything |
| Adwords Express doesn’t support the advanced features that Google Adwords does. | Google Adwords allows to you use many of the more advanced features.
For instance you can run callouts & site links that many of your competitors are running. Remarketing and advanced advertising formats are available (read what remarketing is). Google Adwords support Youtube ads. |
Google Adwords Express may work for small businesses without the time and knowledge who want to run ads, but if you’re running campaigns spending hundreds of pounds a month, and your competitors are running Google Adwords campaigns with all the features then it is certainly worth considering running the full package even if that involves hiring a Google Adwords professional. You’ll need to look at your costs to see if it’s justified.
I’m happy to be tutoring the ‘Introduction to Google Adwords and Google Analytics’ training course on the following 2015 dates.
1st April (Completed)
13th May
8th July
9th Sept
4th Nov
The training sessions will have a maximum of 6 and will take place at the BigRockDesigns training suite at the Wellington Park Business Centre on the Malone Road.
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Michael Wall is an experienced SEO based in Belfast N.Ireland currently running his own SEO Agency.
Michael Wall is available for Internet Marketing, Google Adwords PPC and SEO work. Please call Belfast 02890 923383 or use the contact form.
