3 Mistakes You’re Probably Making in AdWords

“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.”
-Eleanor Roosevelt

A number of small business owners have hired me to review Google AdWords accounts they’ve set up. I’ve noticed a number of the same mistakes over and over again in these campaigns. If you’ve set up your own AdWords account, chances are you’re making the same mistakes too.

Here are 3 of the biggies that you should fix immediately!

1. Not split testing ads. Split testing is the most powerful, yet underused feature in AdWords.

A split test is basically a competition for your AdWords ads. You have two or more competitors in each AdGroup that run against each other. The one the generates the best response from the audience is the winner. Then you bring in new competitors to try to beat the winner. By letting your prospects pick the winners, over time, you end up with the ad that gets the gold medal in bringing you lots of gold (or, cash, if you prefer).

One bonus mistake I’ll mention that’s related to split testing. When split testing, go into your campaign settings to the “Ad serving” option under “Advanced Settings” and make sure you select “Rotate: Show ads more evenly.” Leaving the default option of “show the better performing ad more often,” will skew your results and won’t give you a good read on which ads are the true winners.

2. Running keywords on Google search and the content network in the same campaign. Google gives you a few options of where your ads will show:

Google search shows your ads when someone searches for your keywords on Google.com
Search network shows your ads when someone searches for your keywords on Google’s search partner sites (ie. AOL.com and Ask.com)
Content network shows your ads when someone visits a webpage in Google’s content network that Google believes is relevant to your keywords (these can be sites ranging from the New York Times down to Joe Blow’s blog)

Google search and the search network are a very different beast than the content network. On Google search and the search network people are typing in keywords related to your business. This means they are actively searching for something related to what you offer. They have a conversation going on in their brains at that very moment that makes them a highly relevant and motivated prospect.

People surfing the pages on Google’s content network sites are not actively looking for you. They are in a much different mindset than someone who’s actively typing in keywords. You have to interrupt the people on the content network to get their attention. The clicks you get from the content network are often not as high a quality as those you’ll get from search traffic.

These differences between search and content traffic have a few implications for your AdWords campaigns. First, the ad text that might work on search, might not work in content and vice versa. Second, the bidding strategies are different. Generally clicks are less expensive on content than on search. Lastly, having content and search in the same campaign can throw off the results of your split tests. And as we learned above, split testing is vital to your success so you want your results to be as accurate as possible.

Content and search traffic don’t play nicely together. So while it may take more time to set up and monitor the same keywords in separate campaigns, it’s time well spent.

3. No negative keywords. Keyword research is essential to success in AdWords. But keyword research is not just about finding the search terms that will drive relevant traffic to your website. It’s also important to find search terms that may drive irrelevant traffic to your website. This is especially important when using the broad matching option in AdWords.

I’ll make up an example. Let’s say you have a company that manufactures raffle tickets that are sold to charities for their fundraisers. If you bid on the broad match keyword ‘raffle tickets’, it’s possible that your ads will appear for search terms such as ‘airline tickets’, ‘football tickets’, ’speeding tickets’, etc.

It’s easy to blow a sizable chunk of your AdWords budget on irrelevant traffic. Adding a comprehensive list of negative keywords can go a long way towards making sure visitors to your site are actually interested in what you have to offer.

There are a few places you can find good candidates for negative keywords.

Keyword research tools like the Google Keyword Tool or Wordtracker.
Running a “Search Query” report in AdWords which will give you a list of search terms that have triggered your ads.
Looking at your website logs to see what search terms people are typing in to find your site.
Your brain.

So there you have it. Three mistakes (plus a bonus) that many small business owners make in AdWords. Eliminate them from your campaigns and you will improve your CTRs, Quality Scores and drive higher quality traffic to your site.

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