Advertising Pay Per Click Sponsored

Three Common Pitfalls of AdWords Campaigns and How to Avoid Them

The AdWords program provides bloggers, businesses, and quite a few other individuals and organizations with the opportunity to reach interested clickers and viewers. For those who don’t know, AdWords refer to Google’s advertising options; clients can purchase ads based on the keywords that internet users search for on Google.

For instance, a Google search for “cheap hotels in Miami” will lead browsers to the highest-ranking websites—according to their search engine optimization (SEO) metrics, that is. Before that, companies, individuals, groups, and web platforms that advertise with AdWords will be displayed. Hotels in Miami will undoubtedly work hard to rank highly in the mentioned search, but an aggregator of the cheapest hotels in Miami could, with a bit of precision and focus, rank higher than those.

With all that said, and for as beneficial and useful as AdWords advertising is, there are several deadly—in a financial sense, of course, but the description is hardly an exaggeration—AdWords mistakes that will ultimately render advertisers broke—and without conversions, clicks, and a dedicated collection of visitors. The worst part of all is that many people and groups don’t learn of these mistakes until it’s too late, and they’ve lost a substantial sum of money and a great deal of time.

To help these and other individuals get the biggest bang for their AdWords buck, let’s take a look at three deadly mistakes that should be avoided at all costs!

Vague Keywords

Bluntly stated, vague keywords are disastrous—financially and otherwise—for AdWords advertisers. It’s imperative that those who use AdWords carefully research the keyword(s) they link their website, products, and/or services to; additionally, those who aren’t sure how to do so should consult a hands-off AdWords management service. These management services are affordable, reliable, and sure to help clients receive as many high-quality conversions as possible for as little money as possible.

Vague keywords will attract an abundance of clickers—many of whom won’t have the faintest interest in the advertised content/items. These clickers include accidental visitors, those browsing the web leisurely, and others. Importantly, vague keywords attract visitors who aren’t likely to buy, subscribe, and/or follow. In this way, entire advertising budgets can be spent on individuals who’ve a small chance of producing tangible results on the website and/or platform at-hand.

Lacking or Nonexistent Limitations

Limitations are integral ingredients in the recipe for AdWords success. Without limitations and specifications, campaigns can become overly expensive and underwhelming in terms of results. Consider that sellers of women’s apparel can safely omit the vast majority of male internet users from their campaigns; including these individuals will effectively reduce the efficiency (and increase the expense of) a campaign. In the long run, this will lead to weaker results and greater costs.

Moreover, failing to establish a reasonable cost-per-click (CPC) limitation can encourage overspending. CPC refers to how much an advertiser is willing to spend on a click from the targeted audience; the more in-demand a keyword is, the higher its average CPC will be. And the higher its average CPC is, the more clients will need to pay to competitively rank their ads.

Automatic CPC pricing, which is the AdWords default, will result in advertisers automatically spending more than the overall average spent by other clients—even when they don’t need to! In short, establishing CPC limitations can help AdWords users to reach more clickers for less money. Establishing a conservative overall budget—that is, the total amount that can be spent on a campaign—is also advisable. This amount can be raised in the future, particularly after the campaign at-hand is tweaked for efficiency. $10,000 is a lot of money, but with billions upon billions of users utilizing Google, advertisers can blow through the budget in no time at all.

Unspecific Demographic Specifications

Lastly, lacking demographic specifications can negatively affect even the most (otherwise) carefully planned AdWords campaigns.

Advertisers have the opportunity to specify virtually every characteristic of the audience they’d like to reach. Age, gender, the device used to access the internet, the time of day one is browsing, and much, much more can be specified—and it’s strongly recommended that advertisers take the time to specify these things. Even categories that don’t seem like a big deal can end up being significant.

In the past, many colleges didn’t bother to specify the time of day their target audience needed to be browsing the web; ultimately, as marketing and analytics developed, professionals realized that they were reaching most of their audience in the morning and early afternoon, and that these clicks were coming from the same IP address; middle and high school students were compiling large lists of colleges as part of assignments! This wasn’t a complete waste of advertising revenue, but spending a lot of money to reach individuals who visit the website for a minute or so is hardly ideal, and the dilemma could have been avoided by setting PPC time parameters.

Hopefully this information made clear just how much time and thought needs to be put into a successful AdWords campaign. The good news is that once this time and thought is administered, advert campaigns can reach a tremendous number of interested individuals.

Thanks for reading, and here’s to AdWords!

About the author

avatar

Will Bail