Don’t Set It and Forget It!
Neglecting your AdWords campaigns is a common mistake made by many. Google AdWords requires consistent management – even the most perfectly set up campaign will ultimately fall if it is not managed properly.
There are many areas of AdWords which require maintenance on a regular basis, for example, you should review regularly about how targeted your ads and keywords are for your ‘ideal customers’ and what they’d be searching for. Of course, we all have our own ideas about this, but we do not know for sure until our ads go live.
Data must be gathered and wisely interpreted to discover how you should make changes to your account for improvement. This includes targeting factors such as geographic location, device and time of day.
The fact of the matter is; if you are looking for greater returns, you must carry out work on your AdWords campaign. Alternatively, hand it over to a Google Premier Partner with qualified specialists who can manage your account professionally!
Lack of Conversion Tracking
This is a FREE tool available to us on Google AdWords that shows you exactly what happens when a customer clicks on your ads. The most common types of conversion tracking are the completion of enquiry forms, phone calls, purchasing a product, downloading a brochure etc.
If you do not have the tracking of conversions set up in your account, you can expect a significantly lower ROI.
After investing money into your Google AdWords advertising, it is important to make the most out of this and discover which keywords and ads leading to success. This data can then be optimised to improve performance further and you can stop wasting money on irrelevant clicks.
Lack of Negative Keywords
In every campaign, there are endless amounts of keywords which you do not want your ads to be showing for and driving irrelevant traffic to your website.
It might be difficult to establish what exactly ‘bad’ traffic is. Firstly, there are search terms that the majority of advertisers definitely do not want their ads to show for. For example…
- Job seeker terms such as ‘jobs’, ‘careers’, ‘salary’
- Bargain hunter terms such as ‘cheap’, ‘free’, ‘deals’
- Adult content and inappropriate terms.
You will find some handy websites on Google that provide tireless lists of negative keywords that should apply for 99% of campaigns.
The search terms report is one of the most powerful tools you can use. It allows you to identify poor performing search terms which your ads are appearing for and exclude these (add them as negative keywords). This minimises your Ad Spend and allows your budget to be spent more wisely. Likewise, you can add highly performing search terms as keywords to bring in more conversions.
