10 common Adwords Campaign mistakes
January 23, 2011 • Adwords, Online Marketing, search • Comments
If you browe the web long enough I’m sure you’ll find plenty of guides and articles about Adwords and how to get the best results from your campaigns. In spite of how useful this guides can be, getting to know what not-to-do can be equally as useful, considering how important is to avoid mistakes rather than actually trying to do the right thing. 
1. Bidding to low from the very beginning
You’ll never know how good or bad your adverts are unless they will show up in the first positions. Don’t be afraid of getting a lower quality score for bidding to high from the beginning, things will even out in the end, but you need to know your adverts perfomance on the first positions.
2. Mixing content with search campaigns
Search and content campaigns behave in a completely different way, thus with different performances and optimization routines. Mixing up the two will make decision making and optimization harder.
3. Running all keywords with broad matches from the beginning
Unless you’ve got already a comprehensive list of negative keywords, activating all keyword with broad matches might result in a huge amount of impressions with low CTR’s. However it depends on your budget: for the sake of keyword research you might want to activate all keywords with all matches available in the same time,which would result in a more expensive setup, but the insight you might get would be really valuable.
4. Tweaking bids too early
CPC will lower itself once you’ll get a good quality score, most of the times there is no need to lower CPC yourself. Just give it some time, do not act like you’re always in a rush, Adwords optimization needs time and effort.
5. Forget about testing
Always save some time on adverts testing, beside the normal keyword research. Testing is essential in order to reach good CTR’s, while most people start off running a few adverts and keep the one with the best CTR running indefinitely.
6. Running too many keywords
Fewer selected keywords mean getting more focused on the specific niche you want to get your message to, narrow your focus with different groups of highly selected keywords to increase CTR and quality of your adverts.
7. Forgetting about single keyword performance
A specific campaign could reach a satisfactory CTR giving us some peace of mind but if you dig down another level of analysis you might find out that most of the keywords are no producing any clic and they’re just a waste of impression. Always analyze through different levels and perspectives, through adverts, keywords, campaign performance.
8. Focusing on one (wrong) metric
Do not focus only on a few metrics, try instead to get a global vision of your performance. Most people get focused on they’re ads CTR’s forgetting about cost for conversion or overall conversion rate (in the case you’re dealing with objectives). Even if you’re not using Adwords to increase your sales or you’re just aiming to get some more exposure to your brand, CTRs is not the only thing that counts.
9. Not considering landing pages as a factor affecting overall performance
Beside directly affecting conversion rates, landing pages can also affect quality score and overall campaigns performance. Always build some kind of semantic relevance in between the advert copy and the landing page content and keep in mind bounce rates. These factors can seriously affect your ads quality score hence your results.
10. Give up to early
Managing Adwords Campaign can be quite of a daunting task. You might feel to give up to early unless you realized that it is all about a trial&error process, when everyday you learn something new. Setting up a really successful campaign require mostly time and effort, whether you’re an online marketing consultant or a small business owner.
