And that's where the problems start. Yes, it is very easy for a beginner to set up and run their own account, but if you just accept all the default settings and don't take the time to properly understand all the finer points of how Google Ads works, you’ll end up spending a lot and getting very little return on your advertising budget.

In this article, we're going to explain the top ten costly mistakes that people make with Google Ads so as you can avoid getting your fingers burnt.

If you bid on the wrong keywords, you'll waste money driving the wrong kind of visitors to your website –the kind of people who have no interest in the products or services you sell. An obvious and extreme example would be if you sold handbags and were bidding on keywords to do with filing cabinets. That would clearly not get you good results. But there are more subtle mistakes people can make when choosing their keywords.

For example, suppose you ran an estate agency or real estate business that dealt with commercial properties but not residential ones. You might be tempted to bid on the keyword "estate agents" because if someone searches for that on Google there's a chance they want to buy, sell, or rent a commercial property – and that means they are your ideal kind of visitor. But there's also a good chance they want to buy or sell a family home – which means they are not the kind of person you want to have clicking on your Google Ads ad. So you might be able to reduce your costs, and yet still get just as many good enquiries, if you dropped that keyword “estate agents” and replaced it with "commercial estate agents" instead.

Taking that idea, a step further, you might want to tighten your keywords even more so as they focus on people who are showing an intent to purchase. For example, if you ran a commercial kitchen cleaning business, you might find that someone who searches on Google for "commercial kitchen cleaning" is looking to pay someone like you to clean their kitchen for them. On the other hand, they might simply want to find out some information about how to do the job themselves. Therefore, if you were to change your keywords so you only targeted people searching for "commercial kitchen cleaning companies" that could again mean you reduce your Google Ads bill without reducing the volume of good quality visitors coming to your website.

Finally, be aware that people will often make multiple searches prior to getting to the point where they are ready to contact you or make an online purchase. In the world of laser eye surgery, for example, lots of people will search for “laser eye surgery” but many of them won't be ready to take action yet. So, that keyword might get lots of traffic but a low conversion rate. By contrast, fewer people will search for “lasik in birmingham”. But the ones who do search for that are indicating that they have already done some research and now know which type of treatment they want and whereabouts they want to have it done. And those more specific searches tend to have higher conversion rates. Being aware of this can help you refine your choice of keywords and improve your return on investment.

By performing a gap analysis you will be able to review how your Google Ads integrates with your SEO.

Personalisation has been shown to increase ecommerce conversion. According to research from Dynatrace, marketers report an average uplift in online sales of 19% from personalizing web experiences.

In our article on personalized product recommendations, we show how Millets increased conversion rates by up to 332% on some pages by promoting personalized product recommendations to customers.

Personalisation is highly relevant to B2B too, where different decision-makers have distinct needs. Let’s take the example of Sage selling accounting software to SMEs, where multiple people are often involved in the purchase decision:

- The end user is the accountant/finance person who will use the software and needs to know it enables them to do their job and satisfy compliance regulations

- The IT team needs to know the software aligns with their enterprise technology principles and can integrate with other relevant systems

- The procurement officer needs to know the pricing and product/service quality aligns with the business policy for supplier selection

A one size-fits all content strategy fails to address each audience’s unique needs and barriers to purchase. Personalization tailors content to suit each person and helps e-commerce teams tackle potential barriers in the user journey

Find a way to segment your customers based on their demographic profile and/or browsing and purchasing behaviour, then tailor content and promotions to each audience.

Negative keywords are just as important as keywords. They tell Google that phrases that contain them should not enter any of your ads into the ad audition. This is especially important if your campaigns contain broad, broad match modified, and phrase match keywords as you can potentially show your ads to search terms not directly specified in your keyword list.

For example, if you are an estate agent that only deals with residential property, you would need to include “commercial” in your list of negative keywords.

Here are some example terms you might want to add into your negative keyword list (they are generic and can be applied across all industries – but make sure you research your own negative keywords to apply to your campaigns):

- bargain 

- career 

- careers 

- cheap 

- cheapest 

- clearance 

- closeout 

- closeouts 

- closeout 

- closeouts 

- curriculum vitae 

- cv

- discounted 

- employer 

- employers 

- employment 

- free

- full time

- hire

- hiring

- intern

- interns

- internship

- internships

- job

- job opening

Having dealt with all the obvious negative keywords you should be reviewing the Search Terms Report in each of your Google Ads campaigns, to find out the actual searches that have caused your ad to appear each day. You should be doing this on an ongoing basis at regular intervals - ideally once a week.

Because of the way keyword matching works, a lot of these actual searches that you've appeared for won't be the same as the keywords you are bidding on. For example, you might be bidding on the keyword "basketball shoes" and be appearing when people search for "nike basketball shoes", even though that's not a relevant search term for you because you're not able to stock them.

Whenever you spot that your ad has appeared for an irrelevant search, you should add the appropriate negative keyword to your campaign in order to stop your ad appearing for that kind of search again.

The more often you review your Search Terms Report and add new negative keywords, the quicker you'll be blocking irrelevant searches and clicks, and the more money you will potentially save.

The Search Terms Report used to be quite tricky to locate in your Google Ads account. Now Google has made it much easier. All you have to do now is go the Keywords tab and click the Search Terms button:

A lot of people (including some who have been using Goole Ads for a while) think that the position of your ad on the search results page is determined purely by how much you bid, and that the more you bid the higher up you’ll appear. But in reality, Google calculates your Ad Rank score and positions your ad accordingly against other ads that are bidding on the same keywords. Ad Rank is calculated with your bid and your ad's Quality Score, which is explained in the video below from Surfside PPC:

Every keyword in your Google Ads account has a Quality Score from 1 to 10, with 10 being the best. To improve the score of a keyword you need to:

- make sure the ad copy is highly relevant to the keyword; rewriting your ads and restructuring your account so you have a greater number of ad groups and a smaller number of related keywords in each group will help with this

- make your ads more compelling and eye-catching; by doing this you’ll get a better click through rate (CTR), and the higher your CTR the better your Quality Score will be

ensure the landing page your ad points to is highly relevant to the keyword; also make sure the page gives a good user experience interms of providing useful content, having a clear privacy policy, and not having annoying things like pop-ups or lots of ads.

If you put in the effort to improve Quality Scores across your Google Ads account you will potentially be able to still achieve a high Ad Rank, even if you bid less money on your keywords.

You can check the Quality Score of any keyword in your account by going to the Keywords tab and then hovering over the speech bubble next to each keyword. The pop up that appears will tell you the score for that keyword and highlight what needs addressing to improve it.

STRATEGY RECOMMENDATION: Learn How Quality Score Works

Improving your Quality Scores can get you more clicks and reduce your costs. 

As already discussed, the better the click through rate (CTR) of your ads, the better your Quality Scores will be. There are lots of ways you can make your ads more eye catching and more engaging. Doing this will increase your CTR and hence improve your Quality Score, which means you pay a lower cost per click. Here are just a few examples of things you can do to your ads to make them more clickable:

Below are common problem for e-commerce sites:

- Make your ad content more relevant to what people are searching for

- Use title casing - i.e. capitalize the first letter of each word in the ad

- Include clear benefits and USPs so people can easily see how you are different from, and better than, other advertisers

- Not using a CDN (content delivery network) to serve static assets from a separate domain.

- Include a call to action - e.g. "Find Your Nearest Clinic”, or “Start Your Free Trial!”

- Mention any awards or endorsements you have got

- Experiment with different wording or styles of language

- Quote figures in your ads - e.g. a recruitment agency might say "We found jobs for 1,430 people last month"

- Mention any discounts or special offers people can get

- Include relevant keywords in your Display URL

Also, make sure you are using all the Ad Extensions that are relevant to your kind of business. Ad Extensions are extra bits of info which can be displayed underneath your main ad copy. They give searchers more information and also make your ad larger and more prominent. All of this increases the chance your ad will be clicked in favour of someone else’s. In the ad below, you can see some of the more common ad extensions highlighted as follows:

Purple = Callout Extension (these are not clickable but do allow you to put extra USPs and benefits into your ads)

Blue = Review Extension (useful if you have reviews from independent websites)

Orange = Sitelink Extensions (these are clickable links pointing to other pages of your website and giving you further space to include additional benefits and calls to action)

An account is split up into Campaigns and Ad Groups. If you don't structure your Google Ads account properly with the optimum number of Campaigns and Ad Groups you will miss out on valuable visitors and end up paying too much for the clicks you do get.

An Ad Group is a container for one or more keywords and one or more ads. When a keyword in Ad Group A is triggered, Google will display one of the ads from Ad Group A. If a keyword from Ad Group B is triggered, Google will show an ad from Ad Group B. And so on.

By using Ad Groups to group similar keywords together you can ensure that the ad that someone sees is always one that is relevant to the keyword they triggered with their search. That’s important because, as mentioned earlier, a highly-relevant ad will help improve your Quality Score.

If you simply follow the default options and put all your keywords and ads into one Ad Group you won't get that degree of control. That means that if, for example, you were running a website that sold flowers, then someone who searched for “red roses” could end up seeing an advert for pink carnations. On the other hand, if you put all your keywords that were related to “red roses” in one Ad Group (along with ads about red roses) and all your “pink carnation” related keywords and ads in another Ad Group, then people would always see an ad that was well matched to what they had searched for. And that means you’d get a better CTR – which is another thing that will improve your Quality Score.

A Campaign is a container for one or more Ad Groups. By splitting your account up into multiple Campaigns you can make it simpler to manage your account because it is easier to find your way around it. You also get better control over things like location targeting and budgets. 

This tactic has been debated by many marketers – some believe bidding on your own brand name and products is a waste of budget, whilst others would rather spend the extra bit of money to protect their brand’s search presence and keep competitors away. A few years ago, dirty tactics such as bidding on a competitor’s term were squashed by Google adding Quality Score to ads.

Having as much of your brand offering visible on SERPs is vital if you want to increase the likelihood of click-throughs. Research shows that ad rank positions are directly related to percentage clickthrough. Wordstream suggests good CTR targets based on high quality scored are:

Position 1: 6%+

Position 2: 4-5%

Position 3: 2-3%

Position 4: 1-2%

Position 5 and lower: 1%

What has this got to do with bidding on your own brand name or products? The aim is to use as much real-estate on SERPs as possible to ensure click-through – even if you are organically positioned first or second. Having an ad at the top of SERPs will also help brands direct users to designated landing or product pages. For example, take a look at Smart Insights’ brand name search results:

Organically, we rank first and have organic site links that take users to six different pages on our site. We do not control these and, instead, they are placed there by Google on what they think is relevant to the user. Instead, we placed an ad for the search term “smart insights” and added our own site link extensions. This way we can potentially increase the targeted traffic to specific landing pages we know engage and convert new users to the site.

Since our brand keyword is not competitive, the potential return on ad spend outweighs the cost per click and we see when a user converts via the designated sitelink extension pages. By using the sitelink extensions option in Google Ads you will increase your real estate and direct traffic to better-targeted pages.

Here is an example of why protecting your brand against competitors is important:

In a bid to ‘out-do’ Apple, Samsung bid on Apple’s term “iphone 6s” a product/keyword specific to them and replaced them with an ad that played on the idea the user had obviously search for the wrong item.

This type of outbidding is much harder to achieve now that Quality Score and page relevance is considered and would be very unlikely Samsung could pull this off again.

Since our brand keyword is not competitive, the potential return on ad spend outweighs the cost per click and we see when a user converts via the designated sitelink extension pages. By using the sitelink extensions option in Google Ads you will increase your real estate and direct traffic to better-targeted pages.

Here is an example of why protecting your brand against competitors is important:

In a bid to ‘out-do’ Apple, Samsung bid on Apple’s term “iphone 6s” a product/keyword specific to them and replaced them with an ad that played on the idea the user had obviously search for the wrong item.

This type of outbidding is much harder to achieve now that Quality Score and page relevance is considered and would be very unlikely Samsung could pull this off again.

If you’re paying money to drive people to your site via Google Ads, it’s really important to know which of those visitors end up making a purchase or submitting an enquiry, and which ones don't. It’s only when you have that information that you can start to optimize your campaigns by cutting back on the keywords that don't produce conversions and putting more money into those that do.

Tracking conversions in the form of online purchases or enquiry form submissions is pretty easy, either with Google Ads itself or by coupling it with Google Analytics. But for many businesses (particularly service-based ones) a lot of the enquiries or sales will happen over the phone. These conversions via the phone are just as important as online ones but, by default, you won't get any data about them in your reports.

The way around this is to use a call tracking system. Google provides a call tracking service free of charge to Google Ads advertisers and this does a perfectly good job of tracking how many people call you after visiting your website via an ad.

There are also various third-party providers of call tracking software and these systems will help you track calls not just from Google Ads but from other traffic sources too. There are, however, monthly charges involved with these services.

Call tracking works by displaying a different phone number on your website to people who visit it via Google Ads. The number is changed automatically by some simple code that you or your web developer can add to your website. If the visitor, then rings that alternative number the call routes through to you as normal. But details of the call are logged in the call tracking system along with information about what Google Ads keyword they triggered with their initial Google search. This information can then be viewed within your account.

This means you can get the full picture about which of your keywords generate business for you and which ones don't, so you can reduce the wasted spend on ineffective keywords.

If your business gets sales or enquiries via inbound phone calls then it’s vital that you implement some form of call tracking.

So, particularly if budgets are severely limited, it may improve profitability to use mobile bid adjustments to reduce the amount you're prepared to pay per click if the search is happening on a mobile device.

On the other hand, you may find that for your type of business visits from mobile users are more valuable to you because they convert better than average. In which case, you can use mobile bid adjustments to increase your bids on mobiles by up to 300% compared to your standard desktop bid.

By applying the principles listed above, you should be evolving towards a customer-centric approach to e-commerce design where you better understand what customers want/need, and how to deliver this across devices.

But don’t think your work is over yet!

This is just the start. A common mistake e-commerce teams make is to launch new designs and then move on to the next project. As long as the KPIs are positive, the risk is to think it’s working well.

However, you should apply the core principle of conversion rate optimization (CRO) to all site development; the only way to optimize performance effectively is to interactively test your design to discover how you can further improve results.

- What brand messages to communicate

- What service elements to promote

- How to use reassurance and persuasion messaging How to promote product

- What content to use and how much of it

- How to be creative

If you don’t understand the problem, how can you fix it properly?

Example scenario:

- Client exit intent campaign suddenly drops revenue by 48% WOW

- The number of times the overlay has been triggered has fallen significantly 

- Engagement rate with the overlay has dropped by 28%

- Emotional reaction = something wrong with the campaign!

But after some digging in the analytics data:

- Traffic on the website is down – so fewer sessions for exit intent

- New overlay versions were added, these aren’t performing

- Underlying performance of old overlays is stable – it’s AOV that’s hit revenue the most 

- This is in-line with the overall site performance

Conclusion:

To improve big numbers, we need to look beyond the campaign; to improve small numbers, we need to optimise the new designs. http://ow.ly/PnKM30qAU7Z