SEO Belfast

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.

1. Limited by Budget

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.

Lowering your bids might mean that you get your clicks for 80p, and get 12 odd clicks and last all day. You’ll need to experiment with your bids.

Obviously lowering your bids will see your position drop, though having a lower position won’t necessarily have a negative effect on your conversion rate.

It can be tiresome continuing to lower your bids until you get the most out of your budget.

To get an idea of when your clicks are maxing out you can look at the dimensions tab in Google Adwords. If you can see a pattern that your impressions are drastically slowing down and the number of clicks drops then your budget is running out and you are not showing as much as you could in the auction.

You can also set up rules to notify you if your spend per day has gone past a certain budget.

These rules have to be set up to run at particular times, it would be great if Google had a feature to email you straight away when the budget is done.

2. Not Using the Ad Extensions

These features weren’t available in the 1st article I wrote years ago.

Make sure to use as many as you can. The extensions include Location Extensions, Site Links, and more recently Call Outs. These are great ways to improve your ads, their Click Thru Rates (CTRs) and what you pay per click.

According to Google since late 2013 the extensions can ‘now influence the position of your ad on the search results page’. Despite this, they are still underused.

3. Avoid Bidding Wars & Markets you Can’t Compete In

Sometimes it just isn’t profitable to bid in your market, there are people that make bigger margins on their products, maybe not just on the sale but on the life time value of their product and service and can simply outbid.

For instance bigger agency web design companies might be able to charge thousands and thousands and for the freelancer it’s hard to bid on keywords that cost £5 per click.

Sometimes you just can’t compete and sometimes you just can’t compete particularly at the top positions. Avoid overbidding and look for other ways to get traffic at good value.

4. Sometimes It’s not the Adwords Campaign

You can have the best Google Adwords campaign and continually try to improve, but if the product or service isn’t great, if the selection is poor, and the prices are poor and the site is poor and lacking credibility then no matter what you do you’ll struggle to improve it. Related products, good selection, good prices, good reviews, decent landing pages all will help.

On one or two occasions I’ve restructured campaigns or made them even more granular to try and improve them. Yes there’s been slight improvement, but for the time and effort it’s arguable whether it’s been worth it. However a change in price, or a better offer can be the biggest determining factor in a campaigns success.

I’ve also seen campaigns that do well simply based on good products and prices that don’t have all the attention, perhaps over attention that other campaigns have.

5. Google Adwords Express

Running Google Adwords Express is a poor relation to the full Google Adwords program. If you are spending decent money then it’s not recommended. If you don’t know what you’re doing then hire someone that does. A number of the accounts that I have looked at were throwing money away, with poor keyword targeting, no conversion tracking and few real insights to help you improve the campaign.

6. Not Using Negative Lists

In your Shared Library, setting up negative lists can make the management of your account a whole lost easier. Having a big account, and adding negatives on an ad hoc basis to this and that campaign or ad group makes for a management nightmare. Have a clear strategy for your negative lists and how you add negatives. If you have worked on alot of campaigns then you might even have a number of negative lists that you’ve built up and use on new campaigns.

Anyone got any thoughts on these?