Four Common Adwords Mistakes To Avoid

Feb 18, 2016

Four Common Adwords Mistakes To Avoid

For small business owners who run successful campaigns, Adwords offers a highly effective tool for attracting customers that are actively searching for their goods or services. However, Adwords can also become a source of frustration for business owners who don’t receive the kind of return on investment they were hoping to achieve.

In many cases, advertisers who get unfavorable results using Adwords have only themselves to blame. Like any other form of advertising, Adwords can help generate new customers for your business, but only when done right. There are four primary reasons why small businesses fail when running an Adwords campaign. Let’s take a look at why an Adwords campaign may fail, and what you can do to avoid these common traps.

Poor Landing Page Or No Landing Page At All

The first page any visitor to your website sees after clicking on an Adwords ad is referred to as the landing page. A landing page ranks as a vital part of any successful Adwords campaign, and good one can immediately increase the lead you get from Adwords (without you needing to raise your per-click bids).

If a user clicks on an ad highlighting your selection of spring dresses, but lands on a page containing winter coats and scarfs, you can imagine how confusing this must be to your potential customer. Winter coats is not what they were looking for when they clicked on your ad, and the odds they navigate around your website in search of your spring dress collection isn’t very likely. Not only have you wasted the money spent on that click, you have also wasted an opportunity to impress a new customer.

Not having a dedicated landing page designed to convert visits into sales is a huge mistake. It’s estimated that an average small business website converts approximately 5 percent of the traffic it receives. However, a well-designed landing page tailored to drive sales can easily convert at a rate of 10 to 20 percent. Even if you assume a quality landing page converts at a more conservative rate – somewhere around 10 percent – versus the 5 percent that’s typical of a standard page, you’d still be doubling the number of new leads your business acquires each month while running an Adwords campaign. That difference could be what separates a profitable business from a successful business.

Poor Ads With Low Click-Through Rates

Due to the limited number of characters, most Google ads tend to look and read the same. However, just as a compelling landing page can increase lead generation, a Google ad with a high click-through rate can also double the number of leads you receive. The best part is that Google will even reward you for creating a high performing ad. Not only will you potentially double your lead generation, you may also end up having to pay less per click, as well.

The reason you pay less for higher performing ads is because of Google’s Quality Score algorithm, which determines how much you need to pay for each click. To make Adwords fair for businesses of all sizes, bidding the highest amount does not guarantee your ad will appear at the top of the page. Google rewards relevance, and if you can demonstrate to Google your ad is more relevant to the keywords you’re using than the competition, your ads can end up appearing at the top of the page for less per-click than those appearing directly below.

Poor Call Or Conversion Tracking

For many small businesses, between 60 to 70 percent of the leads they receive come from phone calls. Additionally, phone calls also have the added benefit of being higher quality leads because someone had to take enough of an interest to actually pick up the phone and call rather than just fill out a contact form found on your website.

If you don’t have a system in place to track call conversions, then you’re not only missing out on the majority of the leads you business receives every month, you’re also missing out on the hottest leads you’ll get. Failing to track call conversions also means not being able to optimize your Adwords campaign towards conversions either. You can spend a lot of money paying for bad clicks if you’re not tracking calls and have the data on which keyword terms cause the phone to ring and which don’t.

Poor Adwords Campaign Structure

Creating a successful Adwords campaign means having the right structure in place. That means selecting the geographic region that best reflects your local market, setting your ads to run during the right hours of the day when potential customers are searching for your products and services, utilizing the right keyword lists that adequately reflects what your target audience is searching for, and making competitive bids for the most relevant keywords. Other examples include only using one ad group, having too many keywords, and going to broad in the keyword used as part of your campaign.

While Adwords may not work for every small business, you can dramatically improve your Adwords results and increase your ROI by avoiding these common mistakes when running an Adwords campaign.

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