Asi Dayan, Head of Growth at LawGeex, revealed that he wasted a gigantic $4M on Google Ads by making some big mistakes. He attributed the majority of his wasted ad spend to the following main contributors:
- Targeting too many keywords at once.
- Giving Google Display Network too much credit and time.
- Using Single Keyword Ad Groups right from the initial stages.
- Not using Landing Pages much.
- Not tapping into the power of ad extensions.
And while these aren’t all the Google Ads mistakes made by advertisers, we’ve observed many of our fellow advertisers repeat these mistakes again and again. At the same time, some other deadly mistakes other advertisers make are:
- Skipping branded keywords
- Not using keyword match types
- Being too shy with negative keywords
- And more!
As an advertiser, you’ll always make mistakes. But if you want your Google Ad campaigns to deliver mind-blowing results and help you conquer your business goals, you need to learn from these – learn what’s working and what’s not. And based on the data you’ve collected; you can further optimize your campaigns and drive more conversions.
And that’s what the try-and-test approach is all about.
To help you launch the most profitable Google Ad campaigns, we’ve prepared this blog post – our team wanted to shed light on the five most deadly Google Ads mistakes advertisers repeatedly make and don’t even realize it.
Let us help you catch them in your campaigns.
5 Deadly Google Ads Mistakes Advertisers Make All the Time
Out of all the mistakes advertisers make, we narrowed down our list, and here are the deadliest ones:
- Targeting Too Many Keywords at Once
- Not Using Keyword Match Types
- Skipping Branded Keywords
- Being Too Shy with Negative Keywords
- Poor Landing Page Experience
Targeting Too Many Keywords at Once
If you want your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns to be a brilliant success, you need to conduct thorough keywords research. Keywords can make or break your campaigns. In fact, efficient keywords research is the cornerstone of just about any PPC campaign out there. And finding the right keywords is part art and part science.
From conducting competitive analysis to using the right tools that can actually help you with your efforts, you need to find the right keywords that your audience is most likely to actually search. But at the same time, you need to focus on the type of keywords you’d like to target (we’ll talk about that in the next section) and identify the ones with a suitable cost-per-conversion (CPC).
While conducting keywords research, one of the big deadliest mistakes most Google Ads professionals make is targeting too many keywords at once. Too many keywords result in too many ad groups which in turn lead to crafting too many ads and landing pages.
Summing it up, it’ll be an extremely time-consuming process. The best rule of thumb is to use no more than 20 keywords per ad group.
The higher the number of keywords you target, the lower the clicks. Instead, we’d advise you to laser-focus on the keywords that are most likely to deliver results. Not only will you be saving your time and efforts, but you’ll be saving your top dollars by cutting your cost-per-action (CPA).
Our advice: focus on a limited, but effective amount of keywords and allocate your budget to these keywords. You can’t win every battle. But to win the war, you need to choose the right battles and focus on them the most.
Not Using Keyword Match Types
As a business owner looking forward to running the most brilliantly crafted Google Ads, you need to be familiar with the three categories of keywords:
Broad Match Keywords
When you add broad match keywords, your audience will be presented with your ads when they type in the keywords you are targeting, regardless of their order. For example, if you are targeting the best leather bags, your ads will appear in front of them when they type in:
- Leather best bags
- Bags leather best
- Best bags leather
- Best leather bags in California
- California best leather bags.
And more!
Broad match keywords are the ones with the most potential. However, one of the big downsides of using broad match keywords is that sometimes you may end up wasting money even if your buyers are in the initial stages of their buying journey – the discovery phase.
So, if your keyword is, “buy leather bags,” and your target audience looks up – “should I buy leather bags?” then your ads may be displayed. And if they click on them, you’ll likely end up losing money.
Hence, you need to be extremely careful with this keyword category.
Phrase Match Keywords
Your Google Ads will appear in front of your audience when your targeted keywords are in the same exact order in their search queries. This means – if your targeted keyword is “best leather bags,” then your ads will be displayed only when your audience’s search queries have your keywords in the same exact order. For example:
- Which are the best leather bags?
- Best leather bags in California
- Which company sells the best leather bags?
The search query doesn’t exactly have to be “best leather bags,” your keyword just needs to be a part of your search query – but in exact order.
Exact Match Keywords
When your target keyword matches your audience’s search query, your ads will be displayed. This means – if your target keyword is “best leather bags,” then your ads will not be displayed if your audience types: “which company sells the best leather bags”
Instead, your ads will only be displayed if your audience looks up “best leather bags.” That’s all.
Research indicates that exact match keywords convert far better than phrase match and broad match keywords. That’s because, with exact match keywords, you can target the high-intent keywords or the keywords that you know will definitely convert.
However, sometimes you may find your audience not searching for the exact match keywords at all. And if that’s the case, you may be missing many of your prospects that could have been redirected to your landing page.
So, while researching and adding keywords, you need to be strategic and choose the right keyword categories for your ad campaigns.
Skipping Branded Keywords
One of the big mistakes most businesses make is not building their own brands. Worse – they don’t bid on branded keywords while running their Google Ad campaigns.
If you have recently launched your business, people may not be familiar with your brand. But with consistent efforts, you may effectively be able to build your brand from the ground up.
And as you show consistency, your customers will look up your brand on Google. Also, they will refer their friends and family members who will do the same. But if you skip the branded keywords, you’ll be making it harder for them, if they face a hard time finding you organically on search engines.
For example, our agency’s name is “Market Connect.” So, it makes sense for us to bid on the keyword “Market Connect [exact match].” But if we don’t do that, our audience will find it hard to discover us. And we don’t want to make things harder for them.
At the same time, not many of our prospects will look up “Market Connect.” This means – the CPC will be low – when we compare this keyword with generic keywords like “advertising agency” or “digital marketing agency” or “traditional marketing agency.”
Branded keywords = less competitive = less costs = efficient brand building.
Being Too Shy with Negative Keywords
Many advertisers are afraid of adding negative keywords to their campaigns. There will be some keywords you’d want to appear at the top for. Whereas there’ll be some you’d want to avoid ranking for.
We’ve seen advertisers and businesses being under the impression that if they add negative keywords, they may not rank at all and miss prospective customers. And by not including negative keywords, they end up being confused as to why their ads aren’t performing the way they expected.
Let me clear the fuzz – don’t be afraid of negative keywords. A compelling negative keyword can make or break your Google Ads campaign. By including negative keyword(s), you can save your money on keywords that aren’t a really good fit for your business.
For example, if you sell black running shoes, then you’d want your ads to appear in front of your audience when they look up “black running shoes” and not when they search “blue running shoes.” So, here “blue running shoes” is a negative keyword that you can include to make sure that your ads don’t appear in front of your target audience for the wrong keywords.
With negative keywords, you’ll be hyper-targeting your ads, saving your top bucks, and boosting your ROI.
Some of the benefits of adding negative keywords include:
- Excluding Irrelevant Traffic
- Reducing Your CPC
- Improving Your Google Ads’ Click-Through Rate
- Increasing ROI
Feel free to reach out to us to learn more about negative keywords.
Poor Landing Page Experience
You may have the most brilliant Google Ads up and running. But once your audience clicks through your ads, they’ll be redirected to a landing page or one of your web pages – depending on where you want them to land.
Now imagine spending thousands of dollars on attracting traffic towards your website or landing page only to later realize that the place you’re redirecting them to isn’t up to the mark by not being optimized for conversions.
Maybe it loads extremely slowly.
What if it’s not secure?
Or worse – what if it’s not mobile-friendly?
Poor landing page experience can overwrite your Google Ads campaigns’ brilliant performance. So, while crafting your Google Ads campaigns, you need to put in a lot of thought around where you want your audience to land. And if you don’t have a good landing page, we strongly advise you to get one up and running.
Otherwise, you’ll witness a huge bounce-off rate – which is not good for business.
Don’t Make the Same Deadly Google Ads Mistakes Most Advertisers Do!
In the world of advertising, you’re supposed to make mistakes. That means you’re taking risks and experimenting to drive results higher. But at the same time, if you want to succeed, you need to understand your mistakes and fix them in your future campaigns to achieve the best possible results.
Don’t solely learn from your own mistakes. Try to gain insights into what advertisers (even the top ones) did wrong with their campaigns. Capitalize on these mistakes and you’ll have a brilliantly crafted Google Ads campaign printing money for you.
