Stop making these five common Google Advertising mistakes - and save your budget!
Google Advertising can be a minefield to set up and manage effectively which is why we offer fully managed Google Advertising as well as quarterly reviews and one-off account audits. If you aren’t in a position to work with a digital marketing partner on your Google Ads then get your head around these five common mistakes and stop wasting your ad budget.
Wasting your budget on irrelevant search terms
The Search Term Report should be your best friend when running Google Ads - this report shows you every instance where your ad was triggered and which search terms triggered your ads to appear.
You should set up your account with a standard negative keyword list - for example, you may want to always exclude searches with the words jobs, certificates, qualifications, vacancies - but you should be adding to this list every week at least by checking out the Search Term Report.
Forgetting to set up your conversion goals
It breaks my heart when I log into a Google Advertising account where conversions have not been set up - you need to know what valuable actions are being driven by your ad spend.
The easiest way to set up conversion goals is in Google Analytics, especially if you have an e-commerce store. You can then connect your Analytics account to your Google Ads account and that conversion setup will flow through.
Aside from e-commerce actions, you should track clicks on email addresses & phone numbers and this will require Google Tag Manager. And if you have a contact form, loading a thank you page on submission makes tracking successful contact form completions very easy.
Sticking with default match types
Your match type determines how broad or specific a search term needs to be to trigger your ad to appear. The smaller your budget the more exact heavy keywords you should begin with.
For example, if I were advertising ethically made handbags I have the choice of setting up my match type as:
exact match
Keywords: [ethically made handbags]
Search terms need to be exact (although sometimes Google would also accept “handbags ethically made” in this example
phrase match
Keywords: “ethically made handbags”
Search terms need to include the three words in order for example “ethically made handbags made in New Zealand” could trigger my ad
broad match (the default setting for campaigns)
Keyword: ethically made handbags
Search terms can include any of the three keywords - so you can imagine how much budget could be spent on irrelevant clicks.
Example searches that may trigger ad - Michael Kors handbags, handbag repairs, handbag organiser, leather handbag
So you can see too many broad match keywords are likely to rip through your budget with irrelevant traffic and as this is the default setting for campaigns it is easy for a newbie to stumble through campaign creation and setup all keywords as broad.
However, it’s always a case of balance - often there’s an opportunity to attract people to your brand who might have been looking for something slightly different. It really depends on your available budget.
Forgetting to consider your location targetting
This year I had my first baby and like many first-time-parents-to-be, my husband and I began researching antenatal classes in our area. And every time we searched for a local class, we triggered ads for classes more than two hours away from our location.
This is a huge budget risk for those advertisers because people are both a little lazy and don’t read the full ad text (so many not pick up that you’re based two cities over) but also most people expect that they won’t be served an ad wildly irrelevant to their location.
This oversight will lead to a low click-through rate and a low quality score which may increase all of your ad costs in the future. Noooo!
It’s also a good reminder that if you service a specific geographic area you might want to include your service area in your headline where people are likely to spot it quickly. There are two ways to target people by location:
people who are interested in your location (so they might not be in the area right now)
people only in this location.
With radius targetting you can drop a pin on a map to create pretty specific geographic targetting and this is even easier if you have connected your Google My Business account to your Google Ads account.
Not using all the extensions
Extensions are a way to add additional information to your ad. Most small businesses are using site link extensions only - these allow you to direct people to other pages on your website such as your contact us or about page, pages that aren’t directly related to your main ad URL.
But many small businesses seem to skip using other types of extensions like
call out extension
allows you to promote specific offers like free shipping, 24hr a day customer service
phone number extension
Allows searchers to call directly from your ad and skip heading to your site
promotion extension
Allows you to highlight your current promotions or sales
Not using all of the extension options available simply means you miss an opportunity to provide a searcher with compelling reasons to choose your ad, your product, your service.