Google Ads is a powerful platform that can be used to promote your business on Google search results pages, the Google Display Network, and YouTube. Paid advertising is a serious business and Google’s largest source of revenue, earning US$116.32 billion from Google advertising in 2018 alone (Statista).
Setting up a Google Ads account and starting advertising is relatively simple, but it is much more difficult to master.
Even if you have experience, you can make mistakes, and the good return on your ad spend is affected by the way you set up your campaign and the time it takes to optimize it continuously.
To help you get the most from your ad spend, here are seven common Google Ads mistakes to avoid.
Generating sales and potential customers is the main goal of most companies' advertising campaigns. Traffic and brand awareness are also important, but sooner or later you need to see the return on advertising spend to ensure you get more budget.
Advertisers need to understand their profit margins in order to measure performance and appropriately optimize their activities.
Smart advertisers spend time calculating the lifetime value of new customers to calculate how much they can spend to acquire new customers.
The following equation shows how to calculate lifetime value and average net profit per customer.
Clarifies how much you can pay for leads and understand the percentage of leads your team converts to sales.
Calculate the average number of transactions, the average order value and the gross profit margin, subtract the marketing costs and the operating costs to understand the average net profit for each customer.
Calculate at least the target return on ad spend (ROAS) you need and break it down by product or service category. You can then optimize your Google Ads bidding strategy and consider achieving the results you want.
When setting up a new search campaign, if you don't change the settings, the default search network campaign settings will show your ads on the Google Display Network (Google's third-party display network).
Google's recommended setting is "Search Network and Display Network" because it states that it provides "the best opportunity to reach the most customers." This is technically correct, but the Search Network and the Display Network behave very differently, so it's best addressed through separate campaigns.
The AI-powered Google Smart Shopping campaign, which is in beta and accessible to Google partner agencies, also combines display ads, remarketing ads, and search shopping ads.
Don’t mix Search Network and Display Network settings in search campaigns, as this will affect your ability to measure and optimize the effects of these very different networks. Impressions).
New Google Smart Shopping campaigns use machine learning technology to show your ads to the right users on the Display Network and Search Network when they want to buy or query.
The algorithm uses more than 200 signals of intent to determine who, when, and where to show you an ad. This sounds great, but if you want to have full control or even transparent display of where your ads are displayed, you need to create separate campaigns for each network.
By default, keywords added to your Google Ads account will default to the "broad match" match type, unless you choose otherwise. "Broad match keywords" trigger far more words than you would like to display, and will attract clicks and impressions for queries that are not relevant to your advertising goals. If you manage it carelessly, this will quickly cost you money.
Use broad match to modify a combination of keywords; (for example) + wood + dining room + table), phrase match keywords and exact match on your account, rather than pure broad match keywords.
Split the match type into a single ad group or a single keyword or SKAG ad group known in the industry.
If you are unsure of the match type in your account, select the column option in the Keywords tab, then click the custom header and select the attribute and check "Match type". Check out Google's description of the different keyword match types.
In Google Ads you can see the phrases that triggered clicks on your adverts. You must regularly review your search terms to refine the performance of your account.
Use the "Search Terms Report" to identify negative keywords you can add to your account to prevent your ads from showing irrelevant phrases.
The search terms report can be easily accessed from the keyword tab in a campaign or ad group, or you can set up an automatic report to send you this information every week or several days.
By carefully reviewing the search terms report, you will determine the new keywords you want to add to your account and where you might waste money.
If you are running a Google Shopping campaign, you also need to look at the search terms that triggered your ad. Pro tip is to use campaign priority settings to aggregate search queries with different intent or conversion rate levels. This is also highly recommended.
The worst thing you can do is to leave your Google Ads account to run unsupervised. Your campaigns need to be managed frequently otherwise performance can deteriorate and costs increase.
It is a big mistake not to spend time managing your advertising account to optimize performance. Once you have enough data, take a look at the keywords that are driving traffic and sales. Typical tasks include adjusting your bid or bid strategy, viewing search terms to add negative keywords, creating new ad copy, adding new keywords and campaigns, stopping underperforming keywords, and addressing low click-through rates. and the problem of quality levels.
Smart bidding options, automatic rules, and budgeting will help you control spending, but the price you pay for each lead may increase or the impression share may decrease and traffic may decrease. If your keyword ranking is too low, your click-through rate will suffer, your quality score and your return on advertising will also suffer.
If you don't have time to manage your account, let an agency recognized by Google Ads Excellent Partners manage it for you.
You must set up automatic reports in Google Ads to send data by email on a regular basis.
Just like the old business adage, billing is vanity and profit is sensible-if you have little or no consideration of the cost or return on investment of each potential customer, then bidding for position 1 in Google Ads is vanity.
Lowering bids allow you to maximize clicks, conversions, and cost-per-conversion within your budget. Compared to competitors, setting a high price per click will also increase advertising costs, because when a competitor raises a bid to match you, you will start a bidding war with your competitor.
Understand what the cost is of advertising in the top positions.
Try bidding to appear lower to assess the trade-off between lower CPC costs, clicks, and orders in these positions compared to when bidding for the top positions.
It is worth mentioning that the Ad position metric is soon to be depreciated from Google Ads and so you will need to use metrics such as absolute top impression share, top impression share instead.
A common mistake in Google Ads is not setting up sales or query conversions to measure return on investment. As mentioned above, you also need to know the profit margin of each product or service you sell so that you can set a price per click that does not lose money.
To set up a conversion for sales or inquiries in Google Ads simply select conversions from the ‘Tools’ menu option and add a new conversion.
Import conversions from Google Analytics if you have already set these up.
Check for duplicate conversion actions, particularly with Google Ads conversions and imported Google Analytics data. Duplicate revenue can be a disaster for your bidding decisions.
Remember to check and backtest your conversions to see if they work
Use the following formula to understand the cost per sale for each product. If your Google Advertising cost per click is £0.57 and your site conversion rate is 2% then the advertising cost of a lead will be:
£0.57 x 100 divided by 2 which equals = £28.50. For every 100 clicks, you will get 2 orders at a cost of £28.50 per lead.
Hope the tips above can help you avoid some common Google Ads mistakes. The important thing is to learn from the mistakes you make and develop strategies to highlight problems before they become important.