Google Adwords: The 10 Worst Beginner Mistakes
A couple of days ago I received a great article thanks to the newsletter of Perry marshall (If you are not yet a subscriber, do it right now!).
I liked the article so much that in fact it seemed necessary to translate it into Spanish, give it a personal touch and make it available to my audience since it explains in a simple way the 10 most common mistakes that beginners make when creating and managing campaigns of Google Adwords.
The 10 Most Common Beginners Mistakes in Google Adwords
1) Refuse to perform Split-Tests with your ads: One of the funniest and simplest things we can do in our Adwords account is create more than one ad for each of our ad groups and see how the ads compete against each other.
Small changes to headlines and ad body can do magic in terms of CTR and CR. It's like practicing psychology without a license hehe
2) Let Google remove your Ads: One of the ad rotation options at the campaign level is "Optimize: show the best performing ads more frequently", this option could be working against you in certain cases since Google is reducing the percentage of impressions received by the ads with " lower performance ”.
That sounds great, but many times the "underperformance" can be due to random or temporary factors.
If we review our campaign every day, it is good to use the option "Rotate: show ads more regularly" to make sure that both ads are treated equally and then we choose the best and the worst ourselves.
3) Do Split Testing only for CTR: While CTR is very important and the easiest metric to measure up front, what really matters at the end of the day is the Conversion Rate and the cost of acquiring a new customer.
Concentrate your Testing efforts to increase the Conversion Rate.
4) Ignore Visible URL: The visible URL exists for purely marketing purposes, take advantage of it to attract attention.
If we have the domain "http://www.uneexample.com" we could use "www.anexample.com", "anexample.com/mykeyword", "anexample.com/CallToAction" to attract attention and create a more visible URL attractive to the user.
5) Create Adgroups with Unrelated Keywords: Don't create an ad group just to create an ad and then add all the keywords on the face of the earth to it.
It's best to create ad groups that are well focused on few keywords and tie them closely to your ads and landing pages.
6) Mix Search and Display results: By creating the same for both channels (Search and Display), it is difficult to measure the channels separately and to optimize them.
Ideally, create separate campaigns for the search network and the display network.
7) Ignore the 80/20 Principle: As with many things, it is not uncommon for roughly 80% of our results to come from 20% of our effort.
It's much easier to manage and optimize large campaigns if we focus more on the ad groups and campaigns that deliver most of our concrete results.
8) Declare test winners very slowly: The faster we get enough quantity to determine the winning ad for an A / B test, the faster we will optimize our campaigns. Do not take many weeks to make the analysis and decision.
9) Declare test winners very quickly: Just as being too slow is detrimental, so is being too rushed. It takes a good deal of experience and knowledge of the particular campaign to know when to decide on a winning ad.
Campaigns with high volumes of traffic require less time than smaller campaigns.
Do not worry too much about these last two points if you are just starting with Google Adwords, the more you practice the faster you will learn to interpret the data of your campaigns effectively, that is the important thing at the beginning.
10) Ignore Negative Keywords: Negative keywords have great power to filter out unwanted traffic and increase both CTR and Conversion Rate as ads are no longer showing to those who shouldn't see them.
You should always think about which negative keywords could be useful for your campaigns.
What other errors do you think should be added to the list? 😉
