5 common AdWords mistakes

It also seems a bit tricky! i heard that setting up a high limit can benefit you to achieve better position and price

 

What great information and thanks for sharing. What a great forum!

Lucid you hit on another nagging question for me ... the singular/plural difference. If I include -- plumber -- as a broad match do I need to include -- plumbers -- too?

 

I believe you do, or at least doing so will only increase your relevancy.

I prefer it this way, to be honest. It's much better than, for example, Yahoo's Standard match type which includes misspellings and plurals by default, meaning that you can't actually not match to them (their strictest negative uses the same rules as standard match).

 

So true. The use of broad match keywords is quite fatal to your adwords campaign. Been there, done that.

 

No you don't. That's what broad match does for you, the expansion of words I talked about. But, as a matter of course, I would include both just to know how many use each version, although because of the expansion, I don't know how accurate that would be, another reason to use the phrase match. It should not affect your relevancy by the way.

 

Good post, once spoke to a guy who sold furniture and decided to do it by himself. He set tables as a keyword, £1000 in a day and nada for it. Opps!

 

Agree with #1, its basically not using google adwords for its main intent, targeting niche audiences.

 

Actually I had to revert the keywords which were given as exact matches to broad match types as I found that the traffic and clicks decreased considerably. I dont know if it is exact reason, but there was remarkly low clicks after I changed to exact match. Hence I had to revert back. Hope to study the trend for some more days in order to decide. Also our conversion and cost is based on CPA (Cost per acquisition).

 

Are you sure about this? It seems intuitively that it should. Just interested to see the reasoning.

 

The question was, should I use plumbers as well as plumber in the broad match. We assume the landing page is selling his services as a plumber. Therefore, there is, or should be relevancy. The system should figure out, given enough information on the page (enough text content) that it's about a plumber/s. The singular/plural doesn't matter, the system is smarter than that. Same thing if he used the phrase or exact matches.

If his landing page was about his electrician services and was using plumbing keywords, there would be no relevancy. That's what relevancy means. Keyword dog is equivalent to dogs, canine, doggy, pooch and puppy that may be found on a landing page. Keyword dog is not equal to cat, kitten, feline just as keyword apple is not equal to orange. The system does lateral relevancy (dog=dogs=canine) very well but not class relevancy. Apples and oranges may be fruits but if you use apple juice as keywords to an orange juice page, there is no relevancy.

 

I'm not sure it's obvious that the system would give plumber and plumbers equal weight, though. I can see them being similar for relevancy purposes, but if there is any distinction between the two surely it would be strictly better to have both?

The reason that I would have guessed that there's at least some distinction is because there is distinction in matchtypes for keywords - for example, we know that Yahoo's Standard matchtype matches to misspells, plurals, and so forth, whilst Google's Exact matchtype does not. Plus, I would have guessed that the system would be smart enough to serve up a result for "plumber" in front of a result for "plumbers" if the user searched for "plumber", as there could quite easily be a difference (even if negligible) in intent there.

It's certainly an interesting question, anyway. Trying to peer inside the black box is always hard.

 

10 worst adwords compaign mistakes inclued:

1. creating a long list of less than targeted keywords

2. failing to identify unique aspects of your product or service

3. a lack of keywords in your ad text

4. directing users solely to your home page

5. creating single ad groups

6. utilizing single campaigns

7. using broad match only

8. failing to optimize ad serving for your ads

9. failing to track results

10. entering the content network without modifying bids

 

I read each post from starting and I will have to say that I learn a lots about Adword. Now a day I am improving my knowledge on it and this thread really help a lot, specially the contribution from -Lucid Web Marketing and Eschatonic
Thank you guys for valuable inputs.

 

The key is to learn from your mistakes so you don't end up paying for them again and again.

 

I observed the changes after reverting back to broad match and also I set the landing page to the home page which was the one they had before. But could not observe any appreciable change. Actually there was some problem in the managed listings network and we did not get good number of impressions also. Only 2 days back we changed a few ads and added some keywords. There has been an improvement in number of clicks and impressions now. Will keep you posted.

 

You're welcome. Just trying to stamp out PPC ignorance. It's just taking longer than I expected.

> 1. creating a long list of less than targeted keywords

Yep, seen this more often than I care to count.

> 4. directing users solely to your home page

This happens sometimes too. I've seen bidding on a very generic keyword. For example, if I search for "nokia model123 phone battery", there's always some who bid only on battery and land you on their home page. They expect you to search again on their site. Of course, more often than not, they don't sell the type of battery I just asked for. What a waste of money.

> 9. failing to track results

PPC is not a set it up and forget it activity. It should be on-going. To improve, you must track results or you don't know if you are successful or not.

> 10. entering the content network without modifying bids

Content network campaigns should be separate from search campaigns, bids being just one small reason.

 

nice piece of advice i would more likely go with facebook ads for my forum least till my site makes tons of money and then even stick with facebook.

 

thanks for all the great info - i would have stumbled on pretty much every one of those. im marketing dietary supplements. any specific advice? thanks!

 

some people dont add region for their ads

 

Can you give me an example of why you refuse to use broad match keywords? In my case, we operate a local service business (marital counseling) and with geo-targeting, I know I'm only hitting my target markets (Washington DC area). My broad match keywords perform just as well, if not better, than some more specific queries.

I check the keyword reports and although they are very specific, none I would move over to the negative list.

Just curious.