Do you feel as though you’re not getting the most from your Google Ads campaigns? Whether you’re a Google Ads beginner or class yourself as an expert in building and optimising your campaigns, mistakes are common yet costly. To help you along, here are our top 5 things you’re getting wrong with Google Ads!
1. Not Enough/ No Conversion Tracking
In 2019, it was found that less than 50% of active Google Ads account have conversion tracking in place. Without conversion tracking implemented, you will never truly know how profitable your campaigns/ads are.
It is vital to understand what has led to a user contacting you or purchasing from you and without this information, you are missing out on data that is essential to the success of your campaigns. Trying to optimise a campaign with no conversion data is like driving with no destination – you have no idea if your marketing efforts are actually working and where you’re going with the campaigns.
Setting up conversion tracking is not difficult and is something that your agency should be implementing for you.
2. Sending Traffic to Your Home Page Only
It may seem like a good idea to be directing your paid traffic to a page where they have access to everything that your website has to offer. However, this ignores the fact that users are clicking on your ads expecting to find exactly what they were searching for so, by having them directed to your home page, it’s likely they’ll go elsewhere.
Put yourself in your customer’s situation; you’re searching for a specific product or service and click on an ad which describes exactly what you’re looking for. However, the ad then takes you to a generic page which shows all products/services that the company offers which means you have to search around the website yourself. It’s highly likely that you’ll return to Google’s results page and click on another ad.
Aside from bounce rates increasing, there’s the factor of quality score and relevancy. By directing a specifically targeted ad to your generic home page, you could be causing more harm than good. Google uses the relevancy of your landing page to determine the quality score of your ad (alongside other metrics), therefore, affecting the cost and positioning of this ad in the current and future auctions.
3. Too Many Keywords
As above, the quality score has numerous factors that are taken into account when providing a keyword/ad with a score. One of these is ad relevancy.
If you have too many keywords within an ad group/campaign, it’s highly unlikely that your ads will be relevant to every single keyword that you are targeting. As a result, quality scores then suffer, meaning that ad rankings, CTRs and conversion rates decrease and average CPCs increase.
To keep your campaigns and ad groups as relevant as possible, a single keyword ad group (SKAG) allows for optimal relevancy between keywords and ads as there is only one keyword. However, this structure is not always required and relevancy/quality score can be increased by ensuring that only very similar keywords are within the same ad group.
For example; an ad group for “Pink Ballet Shoes” only has keywords which are specific to this term such as [pink ballet shoes] or +pink +ballet +shoes.
4. Poor Ads, Extensions & Ad Testing
The ad is the first thing that a user will see before they actually interact with your company so it is hugely important to ensure that you capture their attention.
Writing an ad which is compelling enough for users to click through once they see it can be difficult. Ensuring that you include unique selling points (USPs) and vital information in your ads is a must, but taking advantage of ad extensions is also paramount.
It has been found that using ad extensions can be incredibly effective at increasing clicks and, consequently, CTR. Using a mix of the right ad extensions provides users with more information about your company, product or service before they’ve even reached your site. Additionally, it increases the quality of the traffic getting to your website.
Once you have your ads, it’s important to A/B test them. This allows you to examine the performance difference between two or more variants. Monitoring ads and acting on the data received allows you to build your way up to having ads with the highest conversion rates and click-through rates.
5. No Negative Keywords
As an agency, we have come across a shocking number of Google Ads campaigns with no negative keywords implemented. Having negative keywords implemented, you can then exclude keywords/terms that are not relevant to your product or service or have been generating high costs with no return. Having these within your campaigns can lead to lower costs allowing the budget to be attributed to keywords and search terms that your customers are using.
Negative keywords are absolutely critical to any advertiser using broad/broad match modified match types. The idea of these keyword match types is to reach a larger audience than the tighter targeted types so the search terms report quickly becomes filled up with a vast range of queries. Due to the nature of the broad match types, a lot of these search terms may be irrelevant to the product or service you are advertising so adding any of these terms as negative keywords prevent further wasted spend from occurring and allows you to reach only the most targeted customers.
Conclusion
On a positive note, many mistakes are easy to correct. With any Google Ads campaign, it’s paramount to be proactive in rectifying any current issues to prevent further ad spend from, essentially, being thrown away.
Are you unhappy with the performance of your campaigns and want to see what exactly may be causing this? Or are you questioning the work of your current agency due to poor performance? Our experts can take an in-depth look into your Google Ads account to create a bespoke audit which gives you further insight into how your campaigns can be improved.
Get in touch with our Google Ads experts to request your audit today!
