Creating a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign using Google Adwords is a great way to market services and products online. A well thought out campaign can increase brand awareness and boost sales. From small businesses to large companies with worldwide reach, PPC offers a quick-to-market, highly targeted means of advertising.
Although it is pretty straightforward to set up an Adwords account, creating and maintaining a successful advertising campaign can be quite difficult. This is in part due to its widespread popularity and success (Adwords remains Google’s biggest source of revenue). As a result of having to cater to such a wide customer base, you are given control of a huge number of parameters, making it rather complex to understand without expert experience and knowledge.
Because of the many pitfalls, advertisers run into problems and this is why it is always advisable to consider hiring an Adwords trainer or look into Adwords training programs to avoid costly mistakes. Here we list a number of common mistakes that occur time and time again among amateur users setting up their accounts for the first time.
Poor Keyword Choice – The Google Adwords dashboard has a built in keyword research tool which allows you to find the best keywords and terms for your campaign, showing you both how many searches are made and how high the competition is for each term or word. Many people do not spend enough time or understand the various different filters here to identify the best terms to target.
This results in poorly selected keywords that will cost money without resulting in new sales or leads. It may be tempting to rely on your own intuition when selecting keywords, but it’s always better to go with concrete evidence rather than guess work. An Adwords trainer can help you here by explaining all the different research parameters in the tool, as well as permutations of your keywords or terms.
Ignoring Location – Location is one of the many ways of optimizing your advertising campaign, especially for businesses offering services locally. By targeting local searches, you can save money on searches in other areas, as well as preventing customers feeling mislead when they enter a local search term and are led to your page.
Setting Up Ads To Run All Day – This ties in with the previously mentioned location optimisation, in that if you are targeting local traffic it would make much more sense to have your adverts running during business hours, rather than all day, loosing money unnecessarily. Additionally, if you check your analytics data, you can determine what times and days you get more traffic and make sure that you focus your advertising during those hours. An Adwords trainer can help you make sure that you have correctly set up analytics and explain how to make sense of this interface as well.
Overpaying for mobile platforms – Unless you have a version of your landing page that works well on mobile phones or tablets, you should ensure that this is turned off as one of the options. If your website is optimised, it is worth monitoring the conversion and click through rate, as user behaviour on these devices can be quite different, and often more purchase-shy.
As you can see, there are many stumbling blocks that beginners fall into when setting up their Adwords accounts. The ones here are only a small portion of those for people without any Adwords training. That is why hiring an Adwords trainer is a good idea, to prevent mistakes, speed up the process and setup an optimized strategy.
Featured images:
- License: Creative Commons image source
This article is written by Chris Mayhew who works for Marketing By Web; an internet marketing company in Bristol. Not only do they provide professional SEO and pay per click services, they offer Google Adwords training too.
