In today's highly competitive world of Google AdWords pay-per-click search engines, it has never been more important to optimize pay-per-click advertising to the extreme. Each of us wants to get the maximum ROI, and we invest in the keywords or phrases that are most relevant to our business and that are most likely to bring targeted traffic to our website.
As cost-per-click prices continue to rise on various pay-per-click search engines, we must avoid making mistakes that will undoubtedly hurt the effectiveness of pay-per-click advertising.
This article will introduce these errors one by one to make readers aware of the problems caused by these errors and know how to avoid them.
1. Make a list of non-optimal target keywords
When starting an AdWords campaign, it's important to avoid "keyword stuffing"—resist the temptation to create a list of popular keywords that are poorly relevant. For example, if you're a car dealer, your best bet is not to use words like "truck." The cost-per-click for popular keywords is much higher than for more specific and relevant keywords like "T-Z783 Extended Cab."
Similarly, if you only sell cars, keyword phrases such as "tail light covers" will not bring traffic conversions. Maybe someone will visit your website, but once they find that they don't find what they are looking for on your website, they will leave immediately.
Targeting the target market and directly selling your products and services to users in need is the most important thing. Don’t kid yourself into thinking that bigger is better, at least in AdWords, that’s not the case.
2. Lack of positioning of the unique advantages of one’s products or services
Before you complete your AdWords campaign, you must understand where you stand out compared to your competitors. Identifying what makes your product, service, or price unique allows you to see how you stand out from your competitors, and then express your strengths in keywords and phrases.
My advice would be to do a competitor analysis, analyze their business and the phrases they are using. Once you have analyzed this, coupled with your knowledge of what makes your products and services unique, you can mentally formulate a strategy to overwhelm your competitors.
3. No keywords in the ad copy
When creating descriptive ad copy, you must embed keywords into the title and description while keeping the copy concise and relevant. When users read your copy, they know exactly what they will see after clicking on the ad and entering the website. Such copy is good copy.
4. Direct users only to the homepage of the website
Few website owners take the time to carefully consider which destination URL each ad should lead to. Instead, they direct all their ads to the home page of their website and then wonder why the conversion rate on the site isn’t high.
If you’ve taken the time to complete a list of relevant keywords and highlight your unique strengths, why would you send people to the homepage and have them search the entire site to find what they’re looking for?
Why not direct them directly to what’s described in the ad copy? Referring to our first example, if you are a car dealer and your ad copy contains the keyword "T-Z783 Extended Cab", which URL will you direct your target customers to? Of course it is www.auto-motive-dealership.com/T-Z783_Extended_Cab.html , not www.auto-motive-dealership.com .
5. Create a single ad group
If you group several ads containing related target keywords into the same AdWords ad group, you gain a high degree of control over the entire campaign.
Let's say you have a sporting goods store, and you would group all your ads for hockey cleats into one ad group, then create another ad group for hockey sticks, another ad group for hockey gloves, and so on. This ad group structure allows you to drill down into individual ad groups and make real changes that will impact your long-term advertising performance.
6. Use a single campaign
Once you have your categorized AdWords ad groups, it's time to move on to the next step: create an ad campaign.
In the example above, we created ad groups for different products: hockey shoes, hockey sticks, hockey gloves, etc. The next step is to create a campaign "Hockey Equipment" that includes these ad groups. We can then repeat this process to create different ad groups for tennis - tennis shoes, tennis rackets, etc., and group these ad groups into the "Tennis Equipment" campaign.
A highly organized campaign is key to determining which ads create the greatest conversions. Don’t list all your ads as one series—breaking them into different series makes it easy to track and correct ad groups.
7. Only use generalized matching
Learn to take advantage of the phrase matching options provided by AdWords, otherwise you may miss potential customers and incur high cost-per-click.
As the name suggests, general match is slightly less targeted than exact match and phrase match. Broad matching is the default option. After selecting broad matching, your ads will include expanded keywords, such as plural or related keyword variations.
After you select Phrase Match, the results will display the search terms you specified, in the order you selected, and sometimes other terms. Exact match is by far the most targeted option, so don’t ignore it! Ads will display the precise keywords you specify. The Negative Keywords option is also a great tool – in this option you can specify the words you don’t want to appear in your ads. Now let's take a quick look at how these options work:
• Generalized match: Default option: blue widget
• Phrase matching: keyword in quotes: "blue widget"
• Exact match: keyword in square brackets: [blue widget]
• Negative matching: add a negative sign before the keyword: -blue widget
Take some time to test these matching techniques and make adjustments to improve your conversion rates. Generalized matching is not necessarily the best—or only—option!
8. Lack of optimization of ad serving services
When using AdWords advertising service, ensure that your most popular ads are served frequently.
In the same ad group, the AdWords platform pays attention to the ads with the highest click-through rate and will place such ads multiple times. Ads with low click-through rates will also have a lower exposure rate.
9. Not tracking results
To understand how effective your AdWords campaigns are, you must be able to identify which keywords are working and which are not. Google AdWords provides many useful tracking tools. Google has also built Google Analytics into the AdWords interface - a great web analytics tool that provides in-depth reporting on every aspect of your campaign performance.
I can't stress enough the importance of setting goals for your AdWords campaigns and then measuring your success by comparing those goals with actual results.
10. Don’t modify bids when choosing content network ads
The AdWords platform recently allowed advertisers to set different bids for the content network rather than the search network.
If you don’t set different bids for keywords on the content network, you’ll pay more per click than you should. Lower the price of some keywords, and you will find that the number of clicks on your website is still the same as when the bid was high.
Conclusion
The purpose of this article is to make AdWords advertisers aware of common mistakes they may make when using this network and eliminate the frustration they may have when managing Google AdWords campaigns.
The ten points listed above are summed up from the mistakes I have made time and time again. I hope these tips will help you create marketing campaigns that will increase your business' profits.
Original address: http://www.bizark.cn/articles/886_2.html
Copyright statement: This article was compiled by Commercial New Lines. Please indicate the source of the article when reprinting it.