10 Worst Adwords Campaign Management Mistakes

In this article I’ll explain briefly about the worst Adwords campaign mistakes I see new advertisers make with their pay per click campaigns.

1. Not Taking Quality Score Into Account

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to let your campaign go live without making pretty sure that you won’t have any quality score (QS) issues. If your QS is poor it might be difficult to recover from that initial poor start.

2. Relying Purely on Click-Through-Rates (CTR’s)

Just focusing on CTR is the wrong way to measure the success or failure of your Adwords campaigns. CTR should be part of your overall objective and you should also focus on increasing Impression Share, reducing cost per click and increasing conversions.

3. Failure To Set Up Conversion Tracking

Setting up conversion tracking can help you to see how well your keywords and landing pages are performing. Simply make use of the instructions that Google provides on how to set up conversion tracking. It’s not difficult to do and it is something that you should not neglect to use.

4. Not Tracking Adwords Campaign Performance

You have to continually track which keywords/ads/landing pages are responsible for the most sales.

This is not something you can set and forget about.

If you don’t track your Adwords campaign performance, you will find it extremely difficult to optimize your account properly and your profits will be poor as a result.

5. Failure to Use Landing Pages

If you direct all the traffic you get from Adwords to your homepage, it’s a mistake to think (hope) that people will navigate through your website until they find what they are looking for.

You have to use landing pages that are dedicated to a single service or product which gives a visitor all the information they need without having to struggle to find what they want.

6. Not Being Unique

You have to give visitors a good reason to do business with you. You only have a few seconds to convince someone to stay on your website. If your value proposition or unique selling proposition (USP) is poor, don’t expect that your conversions to be high.

7. Not Using Call To Actions

You have to use a clear call to action in your Google ads and on your landing pages where you have tell your visitors exactly what you want them to do.

8. Wasting Money on Negative Keywords

You have the ability in the form of negative keywords to give Google an indication of the search terms you don’t want your ads to be shown for.  For example search for PPC in South Africa and you’ll find sites about PPC advertising and sites about PPC cement.

If you’re bidding on the keyword PPC (pay per click) then you would obviously add cement as a negative to your keyword list.

9. Separate Search and Display Network.

A mistake that new advertisers make is to mix the two networks in a single campaign and not to adjust the bid prices for these networks.

By separating the networks it allows you set different CPC bids, different budgets and so on. This will give you a much better idea of which network is most profitable for you.

10. Expecting Miracles

The majority of people that click through from a Google ad to your website will not follow through the conversion process. That is why it’s vital to collect email contact details so that you can follow up with them and make residual sales.