AdWords – Top 5 Things You’re Doing Wrong

Over the years at Strategus, we’ve discovered many flaws that exist in our advertisers’ AdWords campaigns.  Here are the top 5 things you may being doing wrong in your AdWords campaigns.

You’re Using Broad Match Among Your Exact Match Keywords in AdWords.

Don’t let broad match terms engulf your AdWords campaign’s spend, and keep other keywords from reaching their true potential.  Broad match terms are great for volume, but they’re not great for your CTR, and sometimes not good for your CPC. Try and keep broad match terms in separate ad groups, or even in their own campaign. You can learn a lot from broad match terms, but use them safely and wisely.

You’re Not Using Dynamic Keyword Insertion in Your AdWords Ads

Some Advertisers think way too hard about what their ads should say.  Searchers, when searching on Google don’t want to see ads, or they’re not even “ad aware”. So, don’t make your ads look like ads. You’ll find that by simply communicating what’s most relevant to the search term will prove the best results. Don’t get me wrong, catching a searcher’s attention is a great strategy, but you’ll have better luck in the long run if you show a searcher an ad for exactly what they were searching for. Using dynamic keyword insertion solves this problem of irrelevancy. Visit Google’s help center to learn more about using dynamic keyword insertion.

You’re Not Paying Close Enough Attention To Your Campaigns

There is no autopilot in AdWords.  The landscape is ever changing and you have to stay on top of that constant.  One week your keyword could be in top position with great conversion rates, but the next week that same keyword is rarely showing due to a low quality score.  If you’re not consistently monitoring performance, you’ll never be able to get ahead of the curve, and keep campaign performance consistent.

You Build Out Campaigns to Try to Fit Keywords in Them.

Start with building out your keyword lists and then build your account/campaign structure. Building out keyword lists gives you an idea of what keyword groupings/categories exist. It will help you effectively structure your campaigns and ad groups.  If you try and start at the campaign level first, you’ll likely get to a point where you realize you have too much content in one campaign or ad group, and it should have been separated out a long time ago.

You Are Not A/B Testing Ad Copy

You never know what message will out-perform it’s counterpart.  That’s why even the best performing ads should be tested.  Start with testing 3 or 4 and start weeding out the ones that flounder in the metric that’s most important to your business.  Once you get down to the best performing ad, keep testing new copy against it and see how it fairs.  May the best ad win!

Doing these 5 things wrong in AdWords can really hurt your overall campaign performance, and prevent you from generating more leads and sales. This is just a start for now, and likely you, like all advertisers have more ways your campaigns could improve.