What are the mistakes you made in Adwords and what did you learn from them?

What are the mistakes you made and what did you learn from them?
I read that many have learnt things the hard way. According to comments about Adwords in this forum it sound to me that the broader the keyword, the more money one looses and the more specific the keywords the better they convert. Is that true?
What are other mistakes you have made and learnt from them a great lesson the hard way?
Thank you in advance for sharing with us!

 

yes in adword people makes mistake by selecting cpc rates they does not know what to put into the bidding area and mostly get huge bills just we have to search on Google about it and manage our campaign very neatly so don't waste time is another network adwords is the best i think so.

 

People have written ebooks about this topic and started paid membership sites to have historical archives with almost 100,000 posts in them about this very subject.

 

Yes, that is overwhelmingly true.

Here's data from my client database you might find interesting. It is the conversion rate for the number of words in a keyword ("widget" is a one-word keyword, "red widget" a two-word keyword). It represents 2.6 million clicks and over 47,000 conversions and data from both before and after I started managing their campaigns.

Words CR
1 1.00
2 1.70
3 3.00
4 6.99
5 5.00
6 6.13
7 9.54
8 3.61
average 1.80
content network: 1.43

By match type:

Broad 1.39
Phrase 2.27
Exact 2.25

4-word keyword, phrase match: 8.49
4-word keyword, exact match: 8.46
4-word keyword, broad match: 5.63
1-word keyword, broad match: 0.52

 

When you start off, things look pretty complicated. However, it's not as difficult as people think. You need to spend time exploring the resources and helpcenter at the same time work in your account regularly. Most of us expect AdWords to work in auto pilot mode. That's the BIGGEST mistake. If you fix that, things will fall into place automatically.

 

Sounds like good advice.
What did you find difficult in the beginning? How did you solve the problem?What did you learn in the process?
I would love not to have to make the same mistakes!

 

if your keywords really match the content in a good way,you will get related ads,and visitors will click on it.i saw that the place where you place the ads it is very important

 

I think Adwords is actually a very simple thing to use well, but part of the reason why some people like myself do well on Adwords, is because most of my competitors don't know what they are doing and make lots of mistakes... making my job easier.

Mistake 1: Not using conversion code.
I got started with Adwords because someone in the same business as me, at the time was using it and he was bringing in a lot of leads. However, even he didn't do things such as use conversion code so he didn't know which keywords/ads were converting. Even though I'd never touched PPC before I could see from a mile off that this was an odd thing to leave out.

Mistake 2: Not split testing
Practically all my competition for one of my campaigns (themes) don't do split testing. If you go into the Ad Preview Tool and do a search for one of your keywords, the easiest way to find out if your competitors do Split Testing or not is to simply hit the Search button a few times. Do their ads rotate or are they always the same ad? If it always shows the same ad, it'll mean they only have a single ad in that AdGroup.

Mistake 3: Poor Account Structure
Without going into detail about keywords to Adgroups and match types to Adgroups (as this has been covered umpteen times before), it's important to have your account set up correctly.

Mistake 4: Poor Maintenance
You need to make sure you're checking your account daily, to start off with and in time that will become weekly.... every 2 weeks etc, the more confident you get with your account.

 

Earlier when I started, everything looked complicate. The whole thing about bidding and understanding on how to target your ad. However as I kept learning more about it, I became more confident.

Some of the common mistakes that beginners make:

Ad targeting - with a range of options (geo targeting, position pref, content ads, ad scheduling), it becomes difficult to get the right combination whithout doing sufficient research. Most of them tend to use these options just because these are available and don't really understand the purpose of these (it all depends on what you promote and your user behavior)

Ad Variation - Never bothered to use this feature util I found the ads were going offline because of approval issue (any edit to the ad require to be approved). Having an ad variation helps ensure that your ad is online all the time and once the ad is approved you can switch to the new one.

There a many similar stuff, keyword bids, keyword selection, match type, ad format, tracking and so on. It could me made into a book . Note that these were the mistakes that I made when I started out (over 4yrs now). Now you have better resource center and a lot of help available. So these kind of mistakes can be reduced if you are serious about running your campaing effectively.

 

over bidding without check competitior bid.

 

The very first thing you need to is research what your comptition is doing with adwords and without adwords. "KNOWLEDGE IS KING" study study study
Another thing is the setting of bids, I started by placing low bids because I thought that if you bid $3.00 for a keyword you would be charged $3.00 for every click. And that is not true, many times I am only charged like $1.60 for a click. The high bid will put tou in the #1 spot and that is what people click on.

Also be sure to use all of the google tools to monitor your ads and use the negative keyword tool.

 

Don't join ppc-coach, you won't find any threads to help with bidding strategies which explains why he didn't give you an answer

 

Thanks a lot guys - it looks like continous learning will iron out our mistakes.
Do you have any other mistakes you made from which you have learnt?

 

Does anyone set a daily limit and then let adwords automatically bid?

 

Good Advices! keyword bids, keyword selection, match type are great for a success

 

I have competitors in my industry who still use Broad match only! They have been online for over 2 years as well. Great news for me of course

So yes, keyword match type is very very important and if you're a beginner and don't understand the different match types, make that a priority.

 

- use long tail keywords....they represent a focused search and covert better
- Write Great ads - you will get better CTR
- your landing page should be professional and connected to your ad content

one last thing, google constently making changes so always test & improve your campaigns.

 

PPC and Google is no different than the real world in the sense that THE NICHE pays off.
Streamline your audience and utilize your traffic as best as possible if not it's going to cost you a lot of money on people who were looking for something a little more specific - that's really the first thing you should concern yourself with... thousands of people have yet to learn this lesson (if not, millions).

Myself, i research my keywords using google's keyword tool - and to refine, i use the 'phrase' tab to get a much better fit as to what i'm looking for...

One discovery i have learned along the way while doing all my research for as long as i am doing this now, is that - funny enough - people talk to the computer like it's a computer.
They will search in odd ways, but rarely are they asking the search engines the same way they would speak .. for example...

... if someone was looking to book a lakefront hotel, they wouldn't search 'Lakefront Hotel' as much as they would search "Hotels Lake"... funny, but true
... at the time of this posting, using the same google keyword tool (under phrase) you will find
:
"Lakefront Hotels" - only 2,400 searches a month (on average)
"Hotels Lake" - 74,000 searches a month (on average)

(who speaks like that?)

PLUS...
doesn't seem like it should be THAT big a deal, but that 'S' at the end of your string could either make you or break you... consider the alternatives when researching:
• Hotel
• Hotel(s)

 

Darn good advice and information 'Motelsex'. I ahve been using adwords for several years and you just showed me I need to use the keyword tool to upgrade my campaigns.

 

My mistakes were
1. Putting every keyword I could (e.g. "the" and "as")
2. Using AdWords at all. MSN adCenter is much better