Google Ads is a highly effective tool for businesses to reach their target audience and boost conversions, with over 246 million unique visitors in the United States. For some individuals, the abundance of customization options is crucial to aligning campaigns with specific objectives. Despite its effectiveness, numerous individuals make mistakes in their campaigns that can impede success. In this post, we will dive into 7 common Google Ads mistakes and emphasize their importance for achieving success.
For your best performance, you need to double-check these errors with your ads campaign. Let’s begin to fix your mistakes!
Table of Contents
Overlook the usage of match keyword types
Match types define how Google Ads connects search queries to the keywords in your campaign. Advertisers in Google Ads can choose from three keyword match types: exact, phrase, and broad.
Broad match extends your ad reach to include variations of your target keywords, encompassing synonyms, related searches, and even misspellings. While a broad match expands your horizons, it may expose your ads to irrelevant search queries.
Phrase and exact match types restrict your ad display to searches that precisely match the phrase you’ve targeted. However, phrases can accommodate additional words before or after the targeted phrase. These two match types narrow your audience focus for more targeted ad placements.
However, be aware that Google now matches your ads to similar searches but not identical to your exact match keywords. To ensure the right audience sees your ads, regularly check your search term report and add negative keywords where appropriate.
Incompatible landing pages
This Google Ads mistake is the underlying cause of failure for 85% of advertising campaigns. Businesses must prioritize optimizing their landing pages to align with targeted keywords, fostering better campaign performance and lower CPC. Here are some suggestions for you:
- Layout and design: Create clear, concise, and objective-driven landing pages. Minimize navigation links that could divert users away from the desired action.
- Content: Effective landing page content should be valuable to the user, aligned with ad copy and target keywords, and include a clear call-to-action (CTA). To achieve this, incorporate a strong headline, clearly articulate your unique value proposition (UVP), and showcase social proof through reviews, testimonials, or other endorsements.
- Mobile Devices: Your landing page should be friendly with mobile phones. To do this, make sure it is designed with mobile in mind, easy to navigate, and loads quickly.
Neglect the quality score
For Google Ads, the Quality Score is the ultimate measure of success. Launching ad campaigns without delving into the elements that shape Quality Score leaves you at a considerable disadvantage right from the get-go.
Google assigns each keyword in your campaigns a Quality Score ranging from 0 to 10, with 10 being the hallmark of excellence. Set your sights on achieving a Quality Score of 7 or better. As your Quality score improves, your ads will appear higher in search results, increasing their visibility and likelihood of being clicked. Simultaneously, lower CPCs mean you’ll pay less for each click, making your ad campaigns more cost-effective.
We recommend several tactics for you to enhance your Quality score:
- Develop high-converting and pertinent ad copy that drives clicks
- Prioritize your keywords based on relevance and search intent
- Add high search intent keywords directly in your ad headline
- Adopt a Single Keyword Ad Group (SKAG) Structure
- Optimize the landing page
Wrong bidding strategies
Choosing the right bidding strategy is like steering your ad budget with precision. The wrong one? Like driving blindfolded. You might overshoot the mark on keywords, inflating your CPC and blowing through your budget before you know it.
Finding the perfect fit gives you the power to navigate your budget strategically and reach your destination efficiently. This chart below gives you the lowdown on which bid adjustments impact your bids when using different automated bidding strategies.
For peak campaign performance, monitoring is key. Analyze their performance and fine-tune your bidding strategies to squeeze out the best results. You can also change or pause the underperforming keywords or match types if you see the ineffective of them.
Lack of ad copy testing strategy
One of the most common mistakes in Google Ads is a lack of ad copy testing strategy. This means there’s no organized way of checking how good an ad is before it’s shown to people. Ad testing is about making different versions of your ad and seeing how well each one does with the people you want to reach. It provides valuable insights into which words, phrases, or concepts resonate most with consumers, allowing you to adjust your copy to maximize its impact.
The absence of a copy-testing strategy can lead to several disadvantages:
- Wasted resources: You might spend money on ineffective ads and landing pages without realizing it.
- Missed opportunities: You could improve your ad copy significantly, leading to better results at the same or lower cost.
- Guesswork, not strategy: Without data, you’re relying on assumptions to explain ad performance, hindering your ability to optimize campaigns effectively.
To fix this error, you should develop a systematic ad copy testing strategy which includes:
- Launch: Start with 2-4 active variations per ad group.
- Test & Analyze: Let them compete for data (around one month).
- Optimize: Pause underperforming variants and create replacements.
- Maintain: Ensure 2-4 active variations per ad group for ongoing testing.
Depending on the default settings
Because of the convenience and speed, many businesses will use the default settings for their advertising campaigns. However, default settings are often not optimized for the specific goals of each campaign. For example, the default settings may include all display networks, including Google Search Partners and Google Display Network. This will lead to ineffective optimization and wasting your money.
So, how can you fix this Google Ads mistake? What you need to do is consider these criteria:
- Customizing goals: Use campaign-specific goals, not just account defaults, to signal Google which conversions to prioritize for bidding and reporting. Assign different values based on the customer journey stage (e.g., awareness vs. decision).
- Aligning marketing objectives: Choose a Marketing Objective that matches your campaign’s main purpose (e.g., Sales or Leads) and link it to the specific conversion goal you set.
- Network selection: Start with just the Search Network for broad reach, but consider excluding Google Search Partners and Display Network unless needed for niche audiences or testing.
- Bidding strategy harmony: Ensure your bidding strategy aligns with your Goals and Marketing Objectives. For instance, use Target CPA based on the relevant customer journey stage.
Not tracking conversion
Tracking and attribution play pivotal roles in the success of any Google Ads campaign. Tracking enables you to pinpoint which ads are producing results and which are not. Attribution accurately assigns credit for leads, sales, or conversions to the responsible source, such as Google or Facebook. However, there are 2 common mistakes in Google Ads that businesses are likely to make:
- Tracking non-conversion as conversion: Counting non-conversion events as conversions such as page views, time on page, etc can lead to inflated performance data and misguided decisions. Track events that directly contribute to your goals, such as form submissions or purchases, for a more accurate assessment of campaign effectiveness.
- Tracking multiple conversions: Businesses should carefully configure their conversion tracking settings to avoid overcounting conversions from the same user. This is especially important for B2B SaaS companies, where multiple interactions from the same lead should not be counted as separate conversions.
Overlooking conversion tracking setup, neglecting to track crucial conversions, or misattributing conversions to the wrong campaigns can determine whether your campaign flourishes or flounders.
NestAds can help you tackle this problem. You’ll provide not only an all-in-one data dashboard to track all data from multiple advertising platforms but also a pixel that can maximize ROAS with accurate marketing attribution. Moreover, NestAds pixel is not affected at all by iOS14 tracking issues which may be the good news for E-commerce brand owners and advertisers who got into trouble with ad tracking blockage from Apple.
We believe that this compilation of typical Google Ads mistakes will assist you in promptly spotting readily available opportunities to enhance your account, ensuring that your budget has the most significant influence!
