SEO Belfast

Here’s a list of Adwords mistakes I’ve made, no doubt these are common Adwords mistakes that many people make at the beginning. They can eat away at your budget, bring poor PPC results and end with you giving up Adwords all together.

My biggest mistake was not researching Google Adwords. For some reason the first campaign I ran years ago I thought that getting a targeted visitor to a site was almost like a conversion, get the visitor to a specific page and it’s a done done sale.

I read the literature with headlines such as ‘100 million visitors online looking for your products’ and it all sounded too easy.

Overbidding – I was paying $1 a click for a $39 product to be number 1 even when there was strong competition both in the organic results and PPC.

Campaign neglect – Set and forget call it what you want. I set up campaigns and left them to bring in sales, when they didn’t I simply left them to rot and continue eating up the budget.

Poor campaign organisation and management – Rather than organising my campaigns into logical divisions based on products, product features, services and geographic targeting the campaigns were poorly organised. Campaigns and ad groups where poorly named without any theme. Ad groups didn’t have parent keywords, unrelated keywords where bunched together and ads didn’t match keywords.

Broad matches – expanded matches. Irrelevant keywords were triggering ads, web design was pulling up services such as graphic design that I didn’t offer.

Going after number 1 placement – How many times do you buy the number 1 product? People do research checking product features and product prices amongst other things so paying for number 1 slot isn’t always the best way to go. You can test it out yourself.

Generic Landing Pages – I should have sent visitors to the page that dealt with the product or service that they were looking for rather than a generic page that deals with all the services I offered.

Poor Landing Pages – My landing pages where poor with, little content, no testimonials, no enhancing images and no calls to action.

Poor keyword Research – A small selection of general keywords on broad match that everyone and his dog is bidding on won’t give you the best results. There are more long details keywords that cost less but convert better.

Negative Words – running a web design campaign, I had one or two students looking for summer placements, not the best way to get a job, click my ad then call me and ask for a placement.

Poor Ads – My ads were poor, sometimes due to time constraints, poor wording, lack of keywords, blending in with the other ads or being just plain boring. Split test your ads continually, tweak and run again.

Running the best optimised ad – There’s an option to run your ads evenly rather than the best performing one, set your campaign to this setting and split test your ads.

Content Network – Leaving the content network enabled and part of the same campaign, didn’t help me measure the success and resulted poor click thru rates and poor campaign management. I also entered the content network without modifying my bids.

Poor conversion tracking – I sent all the traffic, both organic and PPC to the same page as well as not installing conversion tracking.

CTR – CTR was what mattered and was even more important than Conversion Rate and Cost Per Conversion.

SEO and PPC – I didn’t use all the data, keywords etc in my SEO campaigns to bolster my PPC campaigns.

Test, Monitor and tweak performance – Campaigns need constant attention.

These are all Adwords mistakes that I’ve made on my own campaigns and paid handsomely for the experience. Lucky enough they weren’t mistakes any clients paid for.