The 3 Most Costly Google Ads Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

1. Start here: The 3 Statements: Based on your experience with AdWords, Ask yourself these three questions. If you don't know the answer, don't worry. There are no wrong answers. As you work through the course, you'll also learn where to find the answers. If you're not sure whether a statement is true or false, mark what you believe is currently happening with your campaigns. You just might be surprised to find your answers changing as the course progresses. Statement. Number one sure falls. I am advertising on google dot com and Onley on google dot com. Statement number two. True or false? I have carefully chosen a list of target keywords, and these are the only key words I am bidding on. Statement number three. Sure faults. My account is organized thoughtfully. Note. If you have a campaign name, campaign number one mark, this is false. Then start the class and see whether your assumptions were true. When you finish the class share, which answers changed and what you're going to do about it 2. Google's Networks: the Google network. It's far more expansive than searches on google dot com. The network is divided into the Google Search Network and the Google Display Network. By default. AdWords campaigns Air set to show on both networks. Google says this is in the interest of giving your adds the most visibility. However, the most visibility also translates into the most potential for wasteful spending, even if an advertiser wants his ads to be seen everywhere. Most campaigns benefit for being distinctly a search campaign or distinctly a display campaign. And that's why it's critical to understand the difference. Let's start with the Google Search Network. The Google search Network is two components. Google Search and Google Search Partners. Google searches the Google you know google dot com google dot co dot UK google dot jp etcetera. This is where users visit the search engine, looking for something they type in a keyword like sushi restaurant near me. What you might not know is that Google search also includes sites like Google Maps, Google Play and Google Shopping. On Google Search, you'll see AdWords ads delineated by a small box that says add the's text ads appear on the top and bottom of the organic search results. Here's what it looks like on Google maps. Thes ads may also appear in the Google Maps Mobile app. The second component, Google Search Partners, includes non Google websites that partner with Google to display search ads. These partners include YouTube, eBay and Amazon. Unfortunately, Google is pretty opaque about which Web properties are search partner sites. You won't be ableto log in tow. AdWords to see a site by site breakdown of where your ads are showing. What you can see is whether you are on Google Search on Lee or the entire Google search network. Google Search Partners is all or nothing. Either you opt into the whole network or you opt out of the whole network to appear on Lee on Google Search and Onley Shoki were targeted text ads. You'll need to choose a standard campaign in your campaign settings. Here's how you find it in your dashboard. Click on the Settings tab and look under networks. You should see Google Search search partners and or display network, and that brings us to the second half of Google's ad network, The Display Network. The Display Network is a network of over two million sites. Some are hugely popular sites like New York Times dot com, L a times dot com and Lonely Planet. But the display network also includes personal blog's mobile lapse videos and YouTube. You may have noticed that YouTube appeared on both the search network and the display network. That's because on YouTube ads, air served in both the search results and with the videos. The display network enables you to use different ad formats, including Image Adds video and rich media. Text ads can also appear on the display network. Unlike the search network, you have control over which sites you choose to advertise on. You can include and exclude individual domains and see where and on what properties you're , adds air placed. When you advertise on the display network, you need to keep this in mind. Users are in a different mindset than when they go to Google search. They're not necessarily looking for something. Rather, they're looking at something there, reading an article, their social networking, watching a video or they're in an APP. You should also remember that not only are you competing for attention with the main content, some pages serve up lots of ads, including ads below the fold. Therefore, you should expect much lower. Click through rates on your display ads than your search ads. Despite having possibly much higher impression numbers, this is a main reason you want to separate your search and display campaigns. Combining them will make optimization is harder to manage. Emit campaign analysis Harder to understand, however, you can segment your campaigns by network in order to separate information from ads that have already run another pitfall. When you advertise on the display, NetWare Google defaults toe all of its inventory, and that includes mobile APS. Many clicks. Their mobile APS tend to be accidental, sometimes called fat finger clicks. You should also not advertise on mobile devices if your site is not optimized for the mobile experience. To control which devices and types of ad inventory where your display advertisements appear , choose advanced settings and check or uncheck devices or specific device inventory. Understanding the various components of the Google network will help you control where your ads air served. There are smart uses for all of that, but you should make that decision not Google's default setting 3. Keywords: Gruebel tries to make campaign creation user friendly. It takes you step by step through campaign set up. But when you get to the part where it asks you to add keywords, your habitual way of typing words may work against you. There are three main keyword match types. Broad match phrase match an exact match. There was also 1/4 match type modified broad match, which we will also cover in this video. When you type a keyword by itself without any special punctuation, it is set to broad match. And as the name implies, broad Match will match each keyword to the broadest set of queries that users type into Google. Broad match keywords enabled the Google algorithm to display your ad when someone types the phrase you typed in similar phrases singular or plural forms misspellings, synonyms, stem ings such as floor and flooring related searches and other variations that the Google algorithm considers relevant and that considered relevance can often become problematic. Let's say you're an elite tennis camp. If you use the phrase tennis camp as a broad match keyword, your ad might appear someone types in tennis camps. That's a good match, but your ad may also appear. If someone types in weight loss camp, that's not such a good match, is it? Before we diagnose and fix the problem, let's talk about the other match types. Frieze Match Keywords. Show your ad to customers who search for that phrase with additional words before or after the phrase. For example, if your phrase match keyword is high heel shoes, your ad might show when someone typed in any of these high heel shoes. Size seven. Women's high heel shoes. Women's high heel shoes, Size seven. The taxonomy for phrase match keywords is quotation marks at the beginning and the end of the keyword phrase. The easiest way to remember phrase match is that the user must type in what's inside the quotes in the exact order that it appears. But the user can ADM or words to the left and right of the quotes. Therefore, if the user query was high heel women's shoes, your ad would not be eligible to show exact match. Keywords mean pretty much that the user must type in exactly what the keyword is. The exact match key, where taxonomy his piano brackets. Your ad will show Onley when a user types a query that contains what's inside the piano brackets and nothing else. As previously mentioned, there is 1/4 match type modified broad match. This match type offers the flexibility of broad match but gives you the advertiser a little bit more control. With modified broad match. You specify that certain keyword terms or their close variants must appear to trigger your ad. Close variants include misspellings, singular plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and stem ings such as floor and flooring. Variants do not include synonyms or related searches, so let's say your keyword phrase is piano teacher, but you put a broad match modifier signified by the plus sign on Teacher. This means that some clothes variant of teacher must appear to trigger your ad so you might appear on searches for piano talkers, a misspelling piano, teachers, plural piano teaching stemming. However, you would not appear for a synonym such as piano lesson. Okay, let's do a quick review. Google defaults to broad match, which gives the algorithm the most leeway to match your ads. If you add a broad match modifier signified by the plus sign, you're telling the algorithm that certain terms or a close variant must appear in a user's search. If you add quotation marks, your keyword is now in phrase match. What's between the quotation marks must appear, but the user can add more words to the left and the right of the quotes. Finally, exact match signified by brackets means that the user's search must match exactly. In order to trigger your ad. There are appropriate uses for all match types, so you'll need to do some experimentation to see what works best in your campaigns. To gain more insight on whether your keywords are relevant, you'll need to navigate to the keywords tab and click on search terms. These are the actual search terms that users typed into Google. You can place a check mark on an individual keyword to see how broad matched, modified broad match or phrase match expanded your keyword list. So what happens if you find irrelevant surges in your search term report? Now it's time to introduce negative keywords. Negative keywords also have matched types. Negative broad match, negative phrase match and negative exact match. There is no negative modified broad match when you add negative keywords, you're telling the Google Algorithm that you don't want your ads to show if certain key words and phrases are included in a user's search. Let's say your keyword is women's bicycle, but your store only sells new bikes. Adding used to your negative keyword list means your ad won't show if someone types used women's bicycle. I can't stress this enough, especially if you use broad match. You have to use negative keywords and check your search terms report to cut out irrelevant searches. Over the years, as I've audited client accounts, I've found thousands of wasted dollars from clicks on ads that had absolutely nothing to do with what the user was searching. Another tip. When you look at your search terms, you have the option to add certain search terms as negative keywords. However, the default match type is negative exact match, which you'll see signified by the brackets in the used bike. Example. The word used would never be relevant, so it's better to add used as a negative phrase, match keyword. Rather than trying to add each iteration of user queries. This way, you'll filter out more junk understanding keyword match types, adding negative keywords and checking riel user search terms. is one of the most overlooked but most effective strategies you can implement to optimize your campaigns and spend your ad dollars in the smartest way possible. 4. Account Organization: Google's algorithm thinks a certain way. So you want your campaigns built with Google's thinking in mine. So where should you start? The best place is your own website. Take cues from your sights organization. Let's pretend where this furniture store, as you can see from the site. It's split into living room bedroom, dining, etcetera. Underneath each of these categories are pieces of furniture you'd find in each of these rooms. In the living room, you'll see sofas, recliners and coffee tables. In the bedroom. You'll see beds and night stands in the kitchen. You'll see cabinets and so on. Your AdWords account has several levels to understand. At the top is your account below that you have campaigns and each campaign is subdivided in tow. Ad groups. As we organize the account, our domain is up top. We could create a campaign for bedroom and a campaign for living room. Underneath the bedroom campaign. We'd set up ad groups for beds, dressers and night stands. Under the living room campaign, we would have an ad group for sofas, TV stands, and on it goes. Each level has its own settings. At the account level. You set your payment info, your time zone notification settings and users at the campaign level, you can set a campaign budget target. Different geographic regions set up the Google networks. You want your campaign to run on and the bidding strategy you want to use at the ad group level, You set keywords and add texts. This way. If someone searches on a sofa, keyword, they get served. A sofa ad, not a TV stand ad account organization is important because you want your ad groups to be tightly themed. You want your keywords to be closely tied to the add text you use, and you want that add text to be associated with the content of your landing page. If we're the furniture store in our sofa add group, we might include keywords like living room sofa in living room couch. We would then write an ad whose texts specifically includes words and phrases related to our theme that is so fizzing couches. These ads would then point to a landing page of different sofas rather than the home page. There are different ways to organize an account. The furniture example uses product categories at the campaign level and products at the ad group level. You could also create campaigns for individual products and organize your ad groups around product benefits or keyword concepts at the ad group level. So maybe we create an ad group for leather couches and fabric couches. The more relevant your keywords add text and landing page are to each other, the better your campaign will perform. Let's say we're advertising a book about better ways to study. We could create ad groups around product benefits like Raise your G P A. With keywords like raising my GP A. Improving grades do better on tests with keywords like test prep or test strategies. Learn study skills with keywords like study strategies or better ways to study. If you're advertising on both the search and display networks, another way to organize your account is by network. So if I was advertising that study guide on both networks, I would create a search campaign with ad group subdivided into keyword concepts and a separate display campaign. Now, a word of warning you can over organize. I've seen accounts where the advertiser tried to be extremely granular. There is no need to set up distinct ad groups around variations of a keyword as an example . You wouldn't need to set up one ad group for couches and another ad group for sofas. It just isn't necessary. Google's algorithm is concept based, so it's smart enough to realize that couches and sofas are related. Plus, any individual add group organized this way will only get a small amount of traffic. And you want to aggregate your traffic at least somewhat so that the algorithm can see that people clicking on your ad are engaging with your website. In conclusion, understanding that Google is looking for distinct keyword concepts in your ad groups and add text will help you organize your account. Take cues from how your website is organized. Account organization will help your campaigns perform better because your keywords are related to the ads that are served and the ads are relevant to the landing page on your website. 5. Conclusion: Revisiting the 3 Statements: remember those three questions? Let's answer them again. Statement number one. Sure false. I am advertising on google dot com and Onley on google dot com. Statement number two. True or false? I have carefully chosen a list of target keywords, and these were the only key words I am bidding on. Statement number three. Sure false. My account is organized thoughtfully. If any of your answers changed, then you got something out of this class I'd love to hear from. Used to leave a comment if you found this helpful.