Are You Wasting Money on Google Adwords?

Google Adwords

Google Adwords may be quite profitable for your company when handled properly. Unfortunately, mistakes frequently result in losses for your company and leave you incredibly dissatisfied with your Google Adwords ROI (Return on Investment).

As a digital marketing agency near London, we’ve seen many clients struggle (and even loose money) with Google Adwords in particular before opting for our services. We understand the ins and outs of Google Adwords and are well aware of the many expensive mistakes you can make. So, we’ve put together this article to highlight few signs that show you may be wasting money on Google Adwords. Here they are:

1. You’re Overusing Broad Match:

Adwords offers you four alternative options for how to target each unique keyword when you select your keyword targeting. Exact, phrase, modified broad, and broad match are these match types. Depending on the structure and objectives of your campaign, each of these match kinds has a certain function. However, there’s one match type we advise people to use as little as possible – Broad Match. Here is Google’s explanation of the advantages of utilising broad match in your keyword targeting:

“When you use broad match, your ads automatically run on relevant variations of your keywords, even if these terms aren’t in your keyword lists. This helps you attract more visitors to your website, spend less time building keyword lists, and focus your spending on keywords that work.”

This sounds fantastic at first. You may increase traffic to your website while spending less time creating elaborate keyword lists. All of this is nice and good, but a substantial amount of the “extra” traffic you are bringing in might not even be interested in your goods or services.

So what strategy should you employ to counter this? We recommend utilising the modified broad match type instead. This gives Google some flexibility while allowing you to still have enough control to weed out the irrelevant queries without having to spend days on end creating exhaustive keyword lists.

2. You’re Not Actively Tracking Your Conversions:

[Google Adwords ]

The ability to track the success of your advertising strategy is one of our favourite features of Google Adwords. This is why it might come as a shock to you to find that the most frequent Google Adwords error we encounter is businesses not monitoring their conversions. You would be astounded at how many businesses use Google Adwords and spend hundreds of pounds a month without monitoring the ROI of that traffic. Does your audience purchase goods? Do they complete the “Contact Us” form? Do they want a free demonstration? Without adequate conversion monitoring, all these questions are left mysteries.The key to figuring out whether Google Adwords is profitable for your company is by tracking what visitors do on your website after clicking on your ad. We can even integrate your inward calls and link them up to your CRM to give you real acurate ROI’s.

This is not only a crucial step in calculating the campaign’s overall ROI, but it also reveals which keywords or ads are doing the best for your business. You can observe which keywords are bringing in visitors who convert as well as which ads have the best likelihood of bringing in a converting user by setting up conversion tracking. You might discover, for example, that users who search for “handy man in London” are less likely to convert than users who search for “Plumbers in London” or that users are more likely to convert when your advertisement mentions Free Shipping than when it mentions Quality Guarantee.

3. Your Landing Pages Aren’t Up To Mark:

[Google Adwords ]

Your website’s homepage may look fantastic. It may not, however, be the most effective website to direct your Adwords traffic to. We consider three main factors when assessing a landing page:

(i) Is it relevant to the visitor’s search?;
(ii) Does it offer enough details to address their inquiry or meet their demand?;
and (iii) Is there a clear call to action?

Although this won’t always be the case, we strongly advise using your homepage as your landing page if it is designed to do so. This is especially true for businesses that offer a variety of products or services.

We advise you to direct traffic coming from visitors looking for men’s shirts, men’s caps, and men’s jeans to the appropriate category sites rather than your home page if you own an eCommerce clothes store. The digitsl age has made it so that people place a strong value on convenience. They expect the solution to be available right away when they click on the search result for their query. They don’t want to have to browse to the category page, no matter how simple it may be get there. When someone clicks on your advertisement and is taken to a page that doesn’t address their problem, they are likely to hit the return button and try another listing. You lose money by wasting a click like this.

The secret to success with Adwords is to direct traffic to the landing page that best matches one’s search query.

4. You Aren’t Taregtting Locations Correctly:

Showing your advertising to people who are outside of your serviceable location is the simplest way to waste money on Adwords. Location targeting is crucial whether you own a local firm that only serves a single city or an online store that only ships within the UK. Targeting a specific area or a radius surrounding a specific location is simple with Adwords.

Make sure that only the locations that are appropriate for your business are being targeted by any and all of your advertising. Additionally, entering Google Analytics will allow you to confirm that this is the case. You can easily determine how effective or precise your location targeting is by segmenting out only traffic originating from Google Adwords and looking at where these users are coming from.

5. You’re Not Making Use of Negative Keywords Enough:

Negative keywords are your friend when it comes to Google Adwords. You can exclude traffic that might match your keyword targeting but isn’t from your target market by adding negative keyword lists. This helps you save money. For instance, numerous products or services are searched for online by using the phrase “free.” If you don’t give users a free alternative, this could be a perfect place for a negative keyword.

Consider what terms you want to block out when creating campaigns in order to prevent them from triggering your adverts. Do you provide used goods for sale? Do your products cater mostly to men or women? These are a few ideas to keep in mind while you create your initial keyword list. When your campaign is set up, the negative keyword options don’t end there. We often review the Search Terms Report to check for terms that don’t apply to our target market. Simply add that word or phrase to your list of unfavourable keywords if you frequently encounter it among individuals that are not your ideal clientele. As you expand this list, you will pay less for irrelevant traffic, allowing you to put more of your money into the important clients.

6. You’re Fighting For Spot #1: [Google Adwords ]

Being in the top spot can increase your confidence, but it doesn’t always indicate your Adwords campaign is providing the best return on investment. Paying to be #1 in many fiercely competitive markets entails significant financial outlay. Being consistently in the #2 or #3 slot will often result in you receiving enough clicks to deplete your budget. This means that compared to the #1 place, you are paying less for clicks. Additionally, research has been done to demonstrate that ad position has no impact on the conversion rate.

This is a terrific way to overpay for clicks because too many individuals keep boosting their bid price until they observe that the average position reaches 1.0. We recommend trying to maintain your average position between 1.8 and 2.5 to avoid being buried at the bottom of the page while also avoiding spending too much for clicks.

Conclusion

There you have it. These are 6 of the top reasons you may be wasting money on Google Adwords. Managing your business’s ad campaigns and digital marketing efforts can be difficult. As business owners, believe us, we know. That’s why we’re always looking out to help company’s bring their business online, the right way. If you need a helping hand that can guide you through the digital world and represent your brand properly, look no further. Explosion Digital is here for you.