Do You Make These 8 Mistakes With Google Adwords?
Posted on November 19, 2007 by
Dee Barizo 
Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, PPC (Pay Per Click) 
21 Comments
This is a guest post written by Vittorio Bosio of Tech Savvy Marketer.
Google Adwords is the fastest way to drive traffic to your website. It seems so easy to set up your account and start advertising on your main keywords. However, it is not uncommon to make these 8 mistakes that cost you money.
It just takes a little discipline to correct them, and the rewards are increased Click-Thru and Conversion Rates, lower Google bills and more money into your pocket at the end of the month.
1. Sending People To Your Homepage
I still see advertisers who use their homepage as the landing page for their ads.
Unfortunately, your homepage is usually too general in content to convert your traffic. Your visitors need to find what they are looking for immediately, without the need for extra-clicks.
If they don’t find what they are looking for fast enough, they are going to hit the back button and leave. But at that point you’ve already paid for that visitor.
2. Putting All Your Keywords In One AdGroup
If you put all your keywords in just one Adgroup, you are almost guaranteed a low Quality Score. Google penalizes advertisers who are not relevant enough by increasing their Minimum Cost Per Click. With a low Quality Score, you will have to pay a higher Cost per Click to have your ads appear.
If you want a High Quality Score instead, build many Adgroups, each one focusing on a particular keyword, then write a targeted Ad for each one. Make sure to include the main keyword of that Adgroup in the Ad itself. This will not only help your Quality Score, but also your Click-Through Rate.
3. Search And Content Network In The Same Campaign
Advertising on the Content Network means having your ads appear on websites that are related to your keywords. The Search Network, instead, is composed by Google and other Search Partners.
These two types of traffic are very different and you should create two separate campaigns, so that you are able to track the conversion rate of each one. You could find out that the Content Network doesn’t convert as well as the Search Network and you may be required to build a different landing page to target those visitors more effectively.
4. No Name Squeeze Page
If you are selling a digital or physical product, don’t drive your Adwords traffic directly to your sales page. It is very hard to sell a person on the first visit.
Instead, come up with a free gift that you can give away in exchange for the visitor’s name and email address. The page where you offer this freebie is usually called “name squeeze” or just “squeeze” page.
By doing this, you give yourself the opportunity to sell to that person over time. If he is not ready to buy now, you can start a conversation via email and convince him to buy your product when he feels ready.
Your gift can be an ebook, an mp3 audio, a weekly or monthly newsletter, a live teleseminar, and so on.
5. No Follow-Up
I have been guilty of this myself. It feels good to create a database of leads thanks to Google Adwords. But your job doesn’t end there.
You need to keep a conversation going with your list, or they will download your free gift and then forget about you. You should communicate with your list at least once a week, by sending them relevant information, that gradually moves them closer to the sale.
You can do that on autopilot with an Autoresponder software, such as Aweber or GetResponse.
6. No Tracking
Google gives you a free javascript code that you can paste in your thank you page (where people download your free gift), so that you know which keywords send you the most targeted traffic (targeted enough to take you up on your free offer).
By knowing which keywords convert best, you can start bidding higher on them and weaving out the keywords that don’t convert at all.
And if you want to know the conversion rate of both your landing page and your sales page, you can use a software such as AdTrackz. I will mention it in the next point too.
7. No Testing
You will be surprised by the kind of improvements in CTR and Conversion Rate that you can achieve just by running A-B split-tests.
An A-B split-test consists of running two ads or two landing pages at the same time, serving the first version to one visitor, the second to the following and see which ones gets more clicks or conversions.
You can split-test Adwords Ads just by adding a second version in your AdGroup. Google will automatically rotate them for you.
You can split-test your landing page with a software such as AdTrackz or the Google Website Optimizer, which is free.
8. Only One Landing Page
I know, this one takes a little bit more work. But if you take the time to tailor your main landing page based on the keyword the visitor used on Google, you usually see your conversion rate go up.
The offer you make on your Squeeze Page can be the same, you can simply highlight different benefits of your free gift based on the keyword the user searched for. And you can include that keyword in the headline too, so the visitor feels like you are continuing the conversation he has going on in his mind as he searches for your products or services.
Did I Miss Anything?
I am sure there are many other mistakes people make when advertising on Google Adwords. If you can think of any of them, please leave a comment below, so we can all learn from each other.
If you are looking for Video Tutorials and Articles that can teach you how to Drive Traffic to your Website and Convert it into Sales, then your search is over. Head over to www.TechSavvyMarketer.com and meet Vittorio Bosio, the author of this article.
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This is a great article. I have a budget to spend hundreds of thousands on adwords in 2008, and I’m very nervous about flushing money down the toilet.
I just printed out your article on actual paper, that’s how much I like it.
Here is one adwords tip I learned last year. I don’t remember where or I would site the source.
A company analyzed their conversion rates by day of week and time of day. They then spent less money for google ads on bad converting times and days, and more money on times and days that converted well. They were able to decrease their overall spend and increase their sales by doing this.
Hi and thanks for the kind words.
It is indeed a smart strategy to test how traffic converts on different days during the week or hours during the day. In your Campaign settings, you can indeed schedule when you want your ads to run.
Successful Adwords advertisers practice what Anthony Robbins calls “CANEI”: Constant And Never Ending Improvement.
You start with your keyword list, you find out which one converts, you see which hours or days have the best traffic, which position converts best, etc.
If you are a geek like me, it can be a lot of fun. :-)
Vittorio,
Thanks for the guest post. Great article. PPC seems to be all about making small improvements consistently over a long period of time.
I will have to get your advice whenever I launch my new sites and products.
This is a useful post for explaining basics to PPC clients. It’s sphunn here: http://sphinn.com/story/14975
Thanks, Marty. It hit the front page :)
Hey Marty,
thanks for sphinning my article. I saw that other 16 people have sphunn it so far.
Hope the Net Business Blog had some extra-visitors thanks to you.
Great write up! Anything short and to the point always makes a great article.
To add to your post, especially number 8, with some javascript, you can pull in the query string from the URL and determine what headline or even image to show from a database. Just be careful not to copy the query verbatim or you might have some unexpected results in your headlines!
The simple way to do it, as you said, is to make multiple landing pages for different keyword ads. Try to match up the headline of your adwords ad with your landing page. They should be exactly the same or as close as you can get it. This helps a lot with getting people to know immediately where they are and that they’ve hit the right place. If they clicked on it, that means they like it, so use it again! Else you could drive them away with a “new message” that confuses or gives the wrong impression.
The next step is to use Google Optimizer to test out different variations on your landing pages to increase conversions even more :)
-Billy
Optimization Analyst, Widemile
This is a great article. Very informative. One can waste a lot of money by setting up their AdWords campaigns incorrectly.
Billy - It’s true, if you know how to create a dynamic landing page, you can avoid create multiple html files. Instead of using javascript (which can’t be read by Google bot), I would use php or asp, though. This way even Google bot can find that you are using the main keyword of the Adgroup in your landing page, and give you a higher quality score. You can find the script that does that here: http://www.techsavvymarketer.com/2007/10/30/dynamically-insert-keywords-in-your-landing-page/
James - Yes, you are right. There are minor things that you can change and save big time in return.
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Excellent pointers. I’ll bet that a lot of businesses fall under the points noted. :)
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Thats some very good points in this article, thanks of course for sharing i learnt a lot from it.
Will definitely take these tips into consideration because my campaigns are all running at a loss so for now I have them all paused……
Richard
Thanks for the great tips. I only have one ad group with a pretty small budget by Google standards (but not by mine!). We have a good click through rate and max out our budget every day, but we’re finding that these people just don’t convert…ever…whereas our organic Google traffic are star customers. We have different landing pages for different keywords, just not different ads…maybe that’s the key. Anyone else notice that adwords traffic doesn’t convert as well as organic search traffic?
guaranteed targeted traffic…
…
I was making mistakes until I started using Glyphius to check my work. It has helped me generate more business to my site. good luck!
very useful posting….I still learn the best way to use campaign google adwords…..to increase my income, your post very helping me as guide…thanks