How to Avoid 4 Beginner Mistakes with Google Adwords
The first article of the month of August is a little late, mostly because I am having a lot of workload (which is very good!), So in this article I am going to deal with a fairly common problem in people who start with Google Adwords.
The number of contacts I receive and the accounts I help to optimize that make the same "beginner mistakes" is incredible, not just people who just opened their accounts a few days ago, but even people and companies who have been advertising for months or months. even years.
Actually, these errors are not "errors" properly speaking, they are simply bad advice ... from Google itself.
In fairness, we can't blame the folks at Google, the executives have targets to meet, and the small / medium-sized advertisers en masse are VERY tempting.
So here are some tips to avoid the 4 most common "beginner mistakes" in Adwords
1) All sites available (recommended for new advertisers)
It always seemed to me that the “recommended for new advertisers” statement next to the “Everyone” option in the Network settings section has no good reason to support it.
If this "recommendation" were a person, it would be the abusive boy who steals lunch money from lower-grade boys at school.
The Network options you select for your campaigns depend on the product / service you offer and the specific objectives of that particular campaign, it cannot be arbitrarily stated that using the Search Network and the Display Network at the same time is the best for a new advertiser.
2) Automatic CPC Offers
Automatic CPC bidding is the ideal way to lose a lot of flexibility in setting the maximum CPC bids for your ad groups.
While the clarification "to try to maximize clicks from the target budget" may sound good, the reality is that I would not recommend this option at all.
Setting the same maximum CPC amount for an entire campaign is ridiculous, as it is not worth bidding the same amount for all your ad groups and keywords.
In some ad groups it will be worth bidding well above the average to try to squeeze as much traffic as possible, while with others you will hardly need to bid the minimum to be within the first page, it all depends on the profit you get from them. the moment of truth.
The idea behind Adwords is to have flexible campaign structures that allow you to easily "relocate" your investment to make the best possible use of it and thus optimize your advertising spend, sacrificing that flexibility "just because" doesn't make much sense.
3) Heed ALL automated system suggestions
The automated suggestions that Adwords provides in different parts of the platform have more to do with "How you can spend more money" and less with "How you can get more money."
Adding keywords that were suggested in an automated way left and right will hardly improve the performance of your campaign, think twice before accepting that kind of thing.
4) Trust the different tools blindly
While the Keyword Tools, Bid Simulator, etc. They are VERY useful tools, you have to draw a very clear line between the estimated data and the reality.
No tool provides perfect data, so spending time over-analyzing the data obtained from it is a waste of resources and time.
I once saw an outraged person on a LinkedIn group when he discovered that "The approximate CPC data from the Keyword Tool is wrong", as if he discovered that his wife of 20 years ago is cheating on him with another man.
All this frustration can be saved by emphasizing the fact that "APPROXIMATE" is part of the data name.
And what other beginner mistakes would you add to this list? 😉
