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How To Waste Your Time & Money With Adwords

April 30, 2012

 

common ppc sheeple mistakes

I’m not sure what it is?

Is it the deeply ingrained 'kiwi ingenuity' in our psyche or the 'she'll be right mate' attitude?

Maybe it is simply ignorance.

Would you start trading on the foreign exchange markets without first learning the basics?

The same goes with Adwords.

Time and time again business owners in New Zealand attempt to run Google Adwords campaigns themselves, with ZERO knowledge of how pay per click advertising actually works. I blame Google for dumbing it down too much. Sure, it is super simple to create a Google AdWords account. However, running a successfully AdWords account requires knowledge, time investment and some know-how.

You need to either invest the time into mastering the discipline of pay per click advertising, with its constant demands requiring you keep up with continual changes, or let a specialist look after it. I am yet to see a client's PCC account that I consider to be well run.

AdWords accounts require a lot of care and attention - they need to be continually improved. That includes the accounts we run here at Apex Digital - which is why we check our clients’ accounts daily. There is no such thing as the perfect PPC account. If you want it to improve your return on investment, you must continually test, tweak and improve.

You must continually work at it.

Sometimes when you test things you make mistakes. There is nothing wrong with this - it is how we learn. However, the common PPC mistakes I have been covering in these posts are no brainers. Avoid these errors at all costs, as they offer zero benefits and only waste valuable time and money.

Ok end of rant.

On to the common mistakes:

1. Increasing Bids Instead of Quality Score

Before you increase a bid on a keyword - have you done everything possible to raise its quality score first? If you don't know what quality score is about, I suggest you start here:

If you improve your quality score, you not only improve your Ad Rank, but can in fact LOWER your cost per click for the keyword.

Neat huh?

2. Targeting the Wrong Keywords

Keywords are the foundation of a successful search marketing campaign. Google AdWords is a great way to test these keywords before starting a SEO campaign. But just because you think a keyword is important, doesn’t mean it necessarily is. Just because a keyword is expensive, does not mean it is valuable. Just because a keyword brings a ton of traffic, could just mean you are the only one silly enough to bid on it! Make your decisions based on data. Not what you think is right.

If a keyword is not pulling its weight – cut it.

3. Not Using Landing Pages Effectively

I see this one time and time again. People pointing all their ads at their homepage. I did it too when I first started out. Always point your ads at relevant landing pages.

Don’t have a relevant landing page?

Then make one, because landing pages are an indispensable part of marketing

Fix even just those three, you are better off than 90% of the PPC beginners out there.

In my final upcoming post on common ppc miskates we will that look at the following mistakes:

  • Not Testing Ad Copy
  • Using Automatic Bidding  
  • Not Monitoring Your Results

You also might want to read my other posts in this Adwords series if you have missed them:

Also don’t forget to subscribe to our blog if you haven’t already.

^ top
Filed under Digital Marketing

Written by

Mark is the Manager of Digital Marketing at Apex and has worked in the digital marketing industry since 2004. Prior to joining Apex he worked in a variety of traditional marketing roles in both the corporate and SME environment in NZ and abroad, but these days much prefers the tangible measurability and transparency of digital marketing.

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Add a comment2 Comments

Reply Brad Williams | May 16th, 2012 at 3:43pm
How do i subscribe to this blog?
Reply Aidan Rogers | May 18th, 2012 at 11:11am
Hi Brad

Thanks for your question.

You can subscribe to this blog in three ways:

1. The RSS feed (click the link on subscribe to this blog) - then view the posts in something like Google Reader
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3. Or you can subscribe to our newsletter (you will find the email subscription box on the homepage)

We are rolling out some changes soon that should make these sorts of this easier to do in the future.

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