Even though I’ve been managing Google Ads for quite a while now, every now and then I make a stupid mistake.
Here’s 4 things to avoid when you are starting out.
1. Advertising on the Display Network
Firstly, advertising on the Display Network is a great idea, if you know what you’re doing and if you have a decent budget. If you are just starting out though chances are you will be wasting a lot of money, because you will get a lot of impression and a lot of clicks, but your conversion rate will go down and your cost per conversion up. If you are not careful you can spend a couple hundred bucks on a conversion, because your ads are showing up on the wrong site in Googles network. So even though Goggle recommend advertising on the Display Network for new advertisers, don’t do it unless you know exactly what you are doing.
2. Only one ad per Adgroup
This is not a big deal, but will be quite helpful to know. When you create your first Adgroup, and your first ad, come up with a few more. Keep the main content and change the headline, or change the way you spell somehting, or change the url (instead of “www.mysite.com” try “www.mysite.com/keyword”.
Why is this helpful?
Well, firstly you will test your ads against each other. When you notice one performing better than the other ones, pause the low performing ones and replace them. You can also segment a little who clicks on your ad. with one ad you might get a great click through rate, but you conversion rate sucks, while with another ad your CTR is not quite as good, but your conversion rate is a lot higher.
3. creating only 1 Campaign
Another mistake I made was not segmenting my Campaigns, or wrongly segmenting them. When you first set up your Campaigns, you want to set up your Campaigns with logic in mind. For example you could segment them by country, or by keyword. Now I have a few Campaigns by country and language, then others where I target all countries, but have the Campaign segmented by keyword. Having a number of Campaigns also helps with adjusting your budget.
4. stuffing too many keywords in one Adgroup
When my Campaigns started off and I got some clicks, Google started to suggest keywords to improve my Campaigns. So I blindly added suggestions that sounded good to my Campaigns. What happened though, was that my Adgroups got stuffed with too many keywords, and the overall performance dropped. IWhen you do that, you loose track of what’s going on. It is better to create new Adgroups or Campaigns to add those keywords, especially when they are only loosely related. As a general rule yo want to keep your Adgroup tight with only a small number of keywords.
This is only a few mistakes I made, and I am sure there are a lot more, that I haven’t even learned about.
All the best with your Campaigns!
