Avoid These 5 Common Google Ads Mistakes

Digital marketing is an integral step to driving your business in the right direction. And Google Ads is a powerful tool that can fuel its success with more clicks, more visitors, and more leads. Google’s ad revenues are projected to hit $75.9 billion in 2023, rising a further 8.2% over 2022.

Google Ads come power-packed with a broad range of ways and tools that help customize your advertising campaigns and reach the right target audiences. However, this can often be overwhelming, especially if you are just getting started with Google Ads. Hence, it is likely to make costly mistakes that can wreak havoc on your advertising campaign, budget, and your business too.   

In this blog, we will walk you through some of the most common Google Ads mistakes and ways to avoid the same.

Avoid These 5 Common Google Ads Mistakes

If you are wasting your money on the following Google advertising mistakes, then beware. Watch out for these mistakes and fail-proof your advertising campaign.

Mistake #1: Not Setting the Right Conversion Actions

The key objective of a Google Ads campaign is to help build brand awareness and drive more sales for your business. Conversion tracking is a key tool that monitors users’ actions on your website and enables you to measure the outcomes.

Now, the concept of “conversion” may vary from one advertiser to another. And in most cases, they make a mistake here.    

For instance, your desired advertising outcome might be to get more traffic to your website. But each visitor that turns up on your website does not necessarily convert in terms of high-value conversion actions, such as filling out a form, signing up for newsletters, or making a purchase.

Many Google Ads accounts might be flooded with “pageview” conversion actions but when it comes to sales, the result is unimpressive. If you are not specific with the goal of your advertising campaign, you may miss out on tracking vital metrics such as “conversion,” which actually matter for your business.    Hence, choosing the right goals or conversion actions is important. It can give your campaign a direction and help you optimize it using the right tools that Google Ads provides.

Mistake #2: Auto-Applying Google Ads’ Recommendations

To help optimize your campaign, Google Ads provides recommendations on different aspects of advertising such as targeting, bidding, budget, etc. These can help leverage new opportunities and improve your campaign performance. While some of these recommendations may help optimize your goals for the better, these are mostly based on industry best practices and may not deliver optimum results for your specific ad account.

A good way to avoid this Google ad mistake is by turning off automated recommendations. Only apply for the actions that you think might be necessary but make sure you review the suggestions before updating them. Ultimately, you should have complete charge of your ad campaign and not Google.

Mistake #3: Considering Only Broad Match Keywords

One of the biggest common Google Ads mistakes that advertisers do is taking only broad match keywords into account when setting up the campaign. Typically, there are 3 types of keyword matches – exact, phrase, and broad. The below example using the keyword “iPhone case” will help you understand these:

However, when it comes to setting up Google Ads campaigns, most advertisers are likely to use only broad-match keywords to target a wide audience base. But this is a mistake. Broad match keywords should be used moderately and only in scenarios when you have lots of audiences, conversion rates, and strong past performance. Otherwise, they can show your ad even for search queries that do not match your business.    

Mistake #4: Not Using Negative Keywords

Avoid Google’s ad mistakes of not using negative keywords for your ad campaign. Not using negative keywords may cause Google to match your ads even to search queries that may be irrelevant to your business.

Suppose, for example, you sell men’s shoes, except sports shoes. So, when someone searches for “men’s sports shoes,” your ad may still show up for that query despite that you do not sell men’s sports shoes. This may result in a wastage of your ad budget, without driving effective results. To avoid this, use “sports” as a negative keyword. This will direct Google not to show your ad when people search for men’s sports shoes. Hence, you can drive only relevant traffic and direct your ad spend in the right direction.

Mistake #5: Not Testing Your Ad Copies

Your ad copy is the first thing your audiences will see and needless to say, it has to be impactful. While Google Ads provides you with plenty of options to customize your ad copy, one of the biggest Google advertising mistakes advertisers tend to make is not testing the copies before getting them live.

Typically, advertisers make two types of mistakes here.

(i) There is just one ad per ad group. That means only one message is sent out to target all their audiences.

(ii) There are numerous variants in one ad group, exposing the traffic to a large number of options.

Both of these ad copy strategies have their own faults. In the first strategy, all your audiences are exposed to the same ad copy whether or not they are relevant for it. In the second strategy,  it is likely for the audiences to get confused when they are exposed to too many ad options.

To address this problem, it is important to test all your ad copies, including the headlines and descriptions to determine if they are targeted to the right set of audiences. Additionally, make sure you have at least 2-4 ad variants in each ad group. Allow each of these ad copies to run for a certain period of time. Now, study the report for each ad campaign and analyze how each ad copy is performing.

Pause the ad copies that are underperforming and replace them with new ones, ensuring you have at least 2 to 4 ad copy variants in each ad group.

The Final Words

Being vast and complex, it is not unlikely to get overwhelmed with the Google Ads platform, particularly if you are just getting started. Hopefully, this blog will help you understand how to avoid Google ad mistakes and make the most of your ad campaign. At the same time, make sure you have enough budget for each campaign so that Google can render the best value for your investment.

If you are already running a Google Ads campaign but not achieving desired results, get in touch with an expert PPC agency that makes your ad budget worth it.