I just got back from National Pavement Expo (NPE) in Nashville and from giving my talk on internet marketing tools. Of all the things we talked about, Google Adwords was by far the biggest topic of conversation. Fulled by the many (fantastic) questions being asked, here are some points to avoid that will keep you from spending tons of money with little results. Here they are in no particular order.
1. Setting too Large a Service Area
A good rule of thumb for seeing the target area of the ads is to set it as the same size as your service area. What good does it do to target people outside your service area?
You’ll chew up your budget on prospects you can’t service.
The default target area for new accounts (assuming you’re in the USA) is the entire United States. Unless your service area is the entire United States, you need to restrict where your ads show.
If your ads are showing up in areas you can’t service, you could be wasting money on clicks that will never turn into customers.
2. Using Keywords that are Too General
One word keywords in adwords campaigns are an ingredient for disaster.
While one word keywords like ‘sweeping’ or ‘paving’ have huge search volumes they’re way too broad to drive any cost effective conversions.
Lets use ‘paving’ as our example.
The term if one of your keywords is ‘paving’ anyone looking for the book ‘Pave the Way to Your Success’ or a 5th grader doing a report on ‘The history of paving’ is going to trigger your ad.
Neither one of these people are looking to pull out their check books after click on your ad.
Also, the term ‘paving’ by itself doesn’t indicate any commerciality. Commerciality meaning that the person typing that term into Google is signaling that they’re looking to make a purchase.
Using longer tail keywords such as “parking lot paving St Louis”, while they have a much lower search volume than ‘paving’, has a huge commerciality value.
Someone typing ‘parking lot paving st louis’ is in the buying phase of their search. They’re looking to a specific solution to their problem and would likely purchase your solution.
3. Not using Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are words that you have determined should disqualify a searcher from seeing your ad.
Take the term ‘sweeping service’ for example. ‘Sweeping Service’ is a great term for a street sweeping company.
This term, however, is also going to trigger your ad when somebody searches ‘chimney sweeping service’.
Unless you do chimney sweeping, the term ‘chimney’ should be a negative keyword.
By adding “chimney” as a negative keyword, you’re telling Google that anybody that searches for that term is not somebody you want to advertise to.
This cuts down on clicks (costs) by people that will never higher you.
4. Using Industry Jargon
To pick good keywords, keywords that will lead to your desired outcomes, you need to see your campaign though the eyes of your customer.
Using complicated technical keywords that your customers don’t know means that they’ll never be searching for them.
Use the terms that your customers use to describe what you do.
Once you get them to your site then you can gradually educate them on the finer points of your service.
5. Not Split Testing Ads
The best feature about Adwords is that you don’t have to know how to write a perfect ad.
You just have to know how to test them. Each Ad Group allows you to run multiple ads simultaneously.
That means you can write 2 different ads and some people will see version A and some people will see version B.
The most basic performance metric for your ads will be the ad’s Click Through Rate (CTR).
The CTR is a percentage, how many people clicked on your ad divided by how many times people saw the ad. Ads that are more compelling, that relate to the customer better, will have higher CTRs.
To do this, write 2 ads. Let them run for 30 days.
After 30 days see which one has the higher CTR. Pause the lower performing ad and write a new ad to try to beat the better performing ad. Visit in another 30 days.
Your goal should always be to try to beat your best performing ad.
6. Sending ALL traffic to the homepage
The homepage of your website is great for showing visitors what you do and helping people find the exact service that they need.
Searchers, however, that have already told you exactly what they’re searching for (via their keywords) should be taken the most specific page on your site as possible.
For example, let’s say you’re a property maintenance company and you offer sweeping, portering, and pressure washing.
If you have an adwords campaign for portering, the ad should take people to the page on your website that has the most detail about portering.
If the ad for porting takes them to your homepage, you’re forcing your visitor to take extra steps to find information about porting.
If you don’t have specific pages for each of your services then go ahead and send them to our homepage.
But when in doubt, be as specific as possible.
7. Focusing on Features not Benefits
One of the key tenants of copywriting your ads is to focus on what your product or service does for the customer, not what it is.
Your customer doesn’t care that the seal coat you put down on their parking lot is ‘weather resistant’, they care that they get ‘double the useful life of your parking lot.’
When you talk about a feature of your product or service follow that up with “so that..”.
What follows after “so that” will usually be the benefit your customer will receive from that particular feature.
Benefits are what they get out the product, features are just what gets them there.
Not spending enough to get Real Data (i.e. Decision making power)
8. Tiny budgets get tiny data (usually).
Unless you have zero competitors in your market, chances are you’re going to be competing against people with your ads.
Starting off with too small a budget can mean that you don’t get an accurate representation of how effective your campaign is.
When I’m starting with a client I recommend starting with a minimum budget of $500 per month for two reasons.
One is that I know what I’m doing an can easily show a return on investment in the first month.
Secondly, larger budgets means more data points.
I can make better decisions sooner because we’ve taken a better sampling of the market.
Most business owners don’t want to start growing their business 6 months from now.
They want to start growing it today.
Invest more today to get more out of your campaign tomorrow.
9. Ignoring Quality Score and how it Impacts Costs
Quality score is a 1-10 scale of how relevant your site, ads, and keywords are to a searcher.
The more that all of elements are inline, the higher the quality score.
Campaigns with high quality scores pay less per click and get placed higher in the Ad placements.
Look for keywords in your campaign that rank a 4 or lower.
Consider updating your ad for that keyword and the page on your website that ad is pointing to.
All three elements should be representing the same idea.
10. Not Connecting Google Adwords with Google Analytics
Adwords gets visitors to your website. Analytics tells you what they did once they got there.
Because Google Analytics is a free product there’s no excuse not to do this.
By connecting the two services (which is easy to do if you’re an administrator of both services) you’ll get to see more detailed data about each of your campaigns.
Are visitors via Adwords bouncing off your page as soon as they get there?
Are visitors visitors via Adwords engaging with your content? By seeing some of these data points you can make more informed decisions about campaigns.
Conclusions
The key to good Adwords Campaigns is giving the searcher a good search experience. The more your product or service is the best solution to what the searcher is looking for, the more Google will reward you with better pricing, better positioning, which should lead to better results and better ROI.
“Should I focus my marketing on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or PPC (Pay Per Click Advertising)? This is a question I get asked all the time so I thought it would worth discussing some of the pros and cons of SEO vs PPC.
In this video we cover some of the advantages of each and how they might apply to your business.
Leave a comment below if you’ve tried doing either of these strategies in your business or are interested in how they might work for you.