6 Mistakes to Avoid When Creating Your Next Google Adwords Campaign

Source: Neil Patel

I talk about Google AdWords a lot.

The reason I talk about them so much is because it can be hard to put together a successful campaign.

Even the pros sometimes get sucked into the same mistakes over and over.

You could use AdWords to successfully drive traffic to your site, for example.

But you still might not see results because you’re sending them to the wrong pages (we’ll get to that later).

It’s the little things that trip you up when it comes to AdWords.

But there are certain mistakes that I see repeated more often than not.

I can’t stress enough just how important it is to understand the “dos” and “don’ts” of AdWords before dropping all that money on a campaign.

But do people listen? Well, hopefully, they will now.

Here are some of the most common mistakes I see and how to steer clear of them.

Mistake 1: Not using Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAGs)

Everyone wants a spot at the top of the SERPs.

That shouldn’t be surprising.

The top three paid ad spots for each keyword get 41% of the clicks on that page.

But getting to the top means knowing how to target the right keywords in the right way.

A keyword like “business services” is highly sought after. However, that also means it’s incredibly expensive at $58.60 per click!

So you’re probably not going to rank for those.

The solution is to come up with ads relevant to those keywords that might grab some of the attention.

You can do this with keyword ad groups.

But don’t expect to rank at the top of the pile just because you grouped the most popular keywords together.

For example, you do not want to just lump together 10 to 20 loosely-themed keywords, like this example for “dresses”:

You probably won’t rank for very many of them, if any.

And if you do, they’re going to ‘share’ ads.

That’s a huge problem in this case!

What if one ad says “red dress” and it shows up for a “black dress” keyword?

That’s obviously not good, right?

A better approach is to pull out the best-performing keywords from this list and organize them differently.

Ideally, you want to put a single keyword in each ad group.

These are called “single keyword ad groups.”

And they can often result in more accurate ads, better Cost Per Clicks, and lower Cost Per Conversions.

If we use our previous example, our single keyword ad group will look like this instead:

This improves your relevance score and nets you a higher chance of ranking.

In essence, better ad relevance leads to a higher click-through rate (CTR). That leads to better quality scores. And if all goes well, you can expect lower costs.

In one case study from Clicteq, they implemented single keyword ad groups and increased their quality score from 5.56 to 7.95.

Not bad, right?

But the best part was that it also reduced their Cost Per Lead by 37.5%.

Once you’ve grouped together your keywords, you should create your ads within the group that includes the exact keywords you want to rank for.

So from the group example, our ad would maybe look something like this:

Here’s a general formula for creating your ads based on your single keyword groups:

• Headline 1: Include your Keyword
• Headline 2: Features and Benefits
• Description: Features and Benefits + CTA
• Display URL: Include your keywords

The keyword in the “blue socks” example is included in both the headline and the display URL. Then everything else revolves around it.

This isn’t some crazy AdWords hack when you think about it. These potential results aren’t magic.

Reorganizing your campaigns like this is better for the end-user.

The searcher ends up getting better results. The ads and landing pages they see should now match the exact words they just typed in.

So it might be a little extra work initially. But it’s worth it.

Mistake 2: Not using negative keywords

It’s easy to get bogged down in “keywords.”

I talk about them constantly.

Inside AdWords, you bid on keywords to reach new people.

However, you’re not technically paying for keywords.

Instead, you’re paying for search terms.

That’s a critical difference. And this little nuance flies under the radar of most people.

So this is one of the biggest AdWords mistakes that I constantly bring up.

Negative keywords can help you control the search terms you are paying for.

Not using them properly can prevent your campaigns from reaching the right audiences.

You can find negative keywords on your campaign dashboard by going to “Keywords,” Negative Keywords,” and then looking for the Campaign Level box:

Negative keywords are keywords that wouldn’t make sense to your audiences or bring in the leads you want.

They tell AdWords not to show your ads for searches with those keywords.

Google already has this feature for search results.

If you wanted to search for “men’s socks,” you would get these results:

But if you had a grudge against the term “bold socks” you could use a minus sign to eliminate that keyword from your search, like so:

Now there’s no mention of bold socks to be found!

On the AdWords side, negative keywords are your “minus” sign. They eliminate any search results that you wouldn’t want to be found under.

For example, if you ran a teen driving school, your search results might look like this:

In this case, you could also rank for adult driving school even if someone typed in “teen driving school.”

But if you didn’t want adults signing up for your classes, you would use the word “adult” as your negative keyword.

It would be equivalent to someone typing in “teen driving schools –adult.”

See how the results change?

The beauty of negative keywords is that you can run them on both the ad-group level and campaign level.

If you’ve never worked with negative keywords before, Google will walk you through the process step by step.

If you’re struggling to find negative keywords to start with, you can open up Google Analytics.

In your Analytics dashboard, click “Acquisition,” “Adwords,”…

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