It’s easy to set up an AdWords account in order to run ads on Google, but it’s even easier to fail AdWords campaigns, especially if you manage them poorly.
Paul Downs is a small business owner who manages his own AdWords campaigns and realizes that his campaign was being wasted on the wrong people. “Google’s algorithm saw the total number of clicks generated as evidence of success, regardless of whether we closed any business,” he tells the New York Times, “By all of its own metrics, the AdWords campaign was a home run. I had received lots of impressions and bought lots of clicks. The only problem was that these apparently were the wrong clicks.”
This is classic example of how people fail AdWords campaigns.
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How People Fail AdWords Campaigns
Here are six ways for you to fail AdWords campaigns, especially if you don’t prepare for the unexpected:
1. Failing to Link to a Landing Page
Website visitors will be lost in the shuffle if you send them to your home page, causing you to fail AdWords campaigns if you don’t find a way to lead them to the right direction. By setting up a custom landing page with either a plugin or an HTML company, you can convert your AdWord leads into sales. The process becomes simple and focused on one action. Limit the copy to what you want your visitors to do — such as subscribing to a newsletter, making a purchase, or downloading a free sample.
2. Failing to Understand Your Customers
The foundation of any marketing effort is identifying who your customers are and what problems they’re facing. Failing this step is what dooms business owners to fail AdWords campaigns that they run.
As Perry Marshall and Bryan Todd mentioned in their article, “These people probably don’t know about you, but they do know about your product. Often they have an immediate problem and have decided to go online looking for a solution. They may have already made up their mind about how they want to solve the problem. Now they’re searching Google, trying to locate the product that fits their solution and then buy it.”
3. Failing to Understand Keyword Matching
Some keyword groups are broad. If you sell computers, “laptop” would be a broad keyword. They’ll become more specific as you specify a brand, such as Toshiba. There are also exact match keywords, such as a particular laptop model by Toshiba. Naturally the exact match will reach fewer customers, but they are more likely to purchase your product. Nevertheless, broad match keywords are important too.
This is what Anton McCarthy shares at his article on Shopify, “Broad keywords can be a useful match type to use at the outset of a campaign in particular, and when you may not be all that sure which keywords customers are most likely to use when searching for what it is you sell. Then, you can use it to refine your campaign, eliminating the keywords which aren’t bringing you value.”
4. Failing to Create More Than One Ad
Every customer and industry is a little different. That’s why you need to experiment. Kalena Jordan writes for SitePro News, “You should always create multiple text ads for each keyword so that you can measure which ads work best. Not everyone will click on the same ad so you need to create and test multiple ads with different wording to see which convert best. AdWords will gradually show only the best performing ads over time.”
5. Failing to Remove the Display Network
The key to AdWords success is targeting your ads on the most relevant searches on Google. Including the display network with your AdWords campaign will make your ads appear in extremely broad search results that will drain your advertising budget quickly, a common cause for people to fail AdWords campaigns.
While you may want to create specific campaigns that target display ads, it’s not sustainable to run all of your ads in the display network. The search display provides a far more focused range of keywords for your ads.
6. Failing to Read Your Search Query Reports
One surefire way to fail AdWords campaigns is by failing to evaluate your results, refine your copy, and tinker with your keywords. It sounds like a lot of work, but investing some time in the early stages of your campaigns enable you to refine them to the point that regular maintenance won’t take too long.
Jeremy Decker mentions in Search Engine Journal, “Rather than attributing your clicks, costs, and conversion data to particular keywords within your account, this report allows you to see exactly what users are typing into Google to generate your ads. This data is extremely useful when it comes to expanding your negative keyword list. If you see that there are particular searches that are not relevant to your product or service, simply add these search phrases as negative keywords within your account.”
It’s really easy to fail Adwords campaigns, but through research, planning, and testing, you can turn it all around.
This post was sent by Lior Levin, who works for a a company that provides shopping cart abandonment services to ecommerce companies.
