Google Ads is a terrific – to some, an essential – tool for a business’s marketing strategy. In theory, it’s as simple as picking keywords that match your users’ searches to your services and writing some basic text that encourages them to click.
But Google Ads is deceptively complicated, and people wouldn’t hire us if it wasn’t, right?
Google Ads is filled to the brim with nuance, and looking deeper at how Google Ads works is important. While researching, you may also find some examples of Google Ads failing a business’s budget, which often were simple mistakes causing a big impact. To save you some trouble, we are listing 5 simple, but big, mistakes that people make when setting up Google Ads for their businesses.
1. Confusing Impressions for Results
This is the case with all online marketing, but it’s an important principle to keep in mind when using Google Ads. Impressions are not results. Impressions are views, and nothing more. Impressions increase when your ad merely appears in someone’s search results. Many see this number and stop looking, and continually add keywords without considering a campaign’s results. How much money are you making back from your Google Ads? That’s the question to ask because remember, a single sale is a single sale, whether you got 1 impression or 10,000,000.
2. Not Thinking Like Your Customers
As business owners, we tend to have a single-minded view of what our keywords should be. Those keywords are often offerings, services and product names. Those things should be keywords, but they are not enough. Those are the ideal searches, but often, it means you are not reaching the people who truly need you without knowing to look for you. Tons of people search Google, not looking for one thing directly, but looking for Google to provide a series of solutions. So the next time you update your keywords, always ask yourself: “What do my clients search for?”
3. Your Keywords are Too Broad
Broad keywords are keywords with no “quotation marks” or [brackets], meaning Google will do its best to make assumptions about those keywords. Google will automatically match your keyword with similar keywords in an attempt to catch more attention for words you don’t explicitly write down. This is a great tool – sometimes. It is easy to assume that every keyword should be broad, but doing so can cost you money down the road, not to mention having the potential of false leads. We usually recommend your keywords be “phrase matched” (within quotation marks). It’s a balance between broad and exact matching. This strategy tends to have good results without placing you at risk for showing up for keywords that you shouldn’t be. When in doubt, targeting a more narrow set of keywords is more recommended than the alternative.
4. Not Using Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are the opposite of keywords. They are words you do not want your ad to show up for, and it is common for new users of Google Ads to ignore them. But they are just as useful as keywords! We are always optimizing our campaigns, which means we are often adding negative keywords. Every negative keyword you add saves you money on a result or click that you do not want to pay for. We highly recommend that anyone using Google Ads utilize them as often as possible.
5. Having a Poor Post-Click Experience
Even if your Google Ads are the best in the world, the most important thing to remember is where you want those searchers to go: your website. That click should point them to what they wanted to see, ideally a landing page on your website that gives them the answer they wanted immediately. Your landing page should be fast, reliable and easy to use, with clearly displayed contact information and calls to action. (If you need help building one, or optimizing yours, feel free to reach out!)
Google Ads are complicated for all of those reasons and more. That is why many businesses opt to hire a marketing agency with experience. At Southern View Media, we have made Google work for hundreds of clients across hundreds of industries. If you are interested, call us today!
