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7 Biggest Google Adwords Mistakes Made by Small Business Owners

By Matthew Whitworth

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 09Sep2009 Word count: 522 Viewed: 219 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

In this article I wanted to share with you what I have found from consulting with dozens of small business owners on Google Adwords.

During the last 6 years, we have consulted with small businesses routinely who have set up an Adwords campaign and have just about given up on this medium. Usually the complaints include things like:

>I receive lots of clicks (which costs tons of cash), with very little to show for it. >I really have no clue what I am doing on Adwords – it is too complicated. >I do not understand how to set up Analytics or conversion >I have a good set of keywords in my campaigns, but I seem to get too many clicks, for no leads. >I have set everything up, but I don’t see my ads anywhere.

7 Biggest Google Adwords Mistakes

Once we get to take a look at the settings in these campaigns it is usually pretty obvious why the company is not achieving the results it expected:

1. The website is not designed to be compelling, nor capture leads or sales.

2. The keywords are too broad in nature – e.g. ‘carpet’ and ‘cleaning’, instead of ‘carpet cleaning Houston’

3. The keywords are lumped into single adgroups with no attempt at putting them into themed groups: e.g. ‘carpet cleaning’, ‘tile cleaning’, ‘upholstery cleaning’ are all in a single adgroup.

4. Conversions are not set up, so there is no method to track leads and what keyword, ad etc. generated the lead.

5. Ads do not match the keywords, or do not point to the relevant page in the website.

6. Ads are poorly constructed and do not entice visitors.

7. Bid costs are too low relative to daily budgets or vice versa.

It is perfectly possible to stick a bunch of seemingly relevant keywords into a campaign, slap together an ad and let it rip!!!

However, doing this will almost certainly not bring you the results you would like.

Does Google Want You to Fail?

Of course the answer is no, but you have to understand that Google has built its dominant market share by realizing that people using a search engine want ‘relevance‘ – they want to find what they are looking for quickly and easily. This means that if an advertiser is bidding on the keyword “dogs”, but they sell “custom dog collars”, they will get a ton of searches for anything containing the word “dog”, 99.9% of which will not be relevant for “custom dog collars”, so the click through rate (CTR) will be very low for this advertiser. (CTR is the percentage of clicks relative to the number of times that an ad was shown in a search).

Google will penalize this advertiser by showing their ads lower down the page (or more likely on page 24!!!) because they are not relevant to most people searching for dog related keywords. This gives a better experience to the search engine user, which is the goal.

How to construct a well put-together Adwords campaign is not rocket-science, but it does take a degree of understanding of the mechanics of the system to ensure the type of results that are desired.

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