Google Ads is one of the most effective marketing tools in the digital marketing world, helping businesses connect with their target audience and drive significant conversion. In addition to being cost-effective and immediately measurable, Google Ads offers unmatched reach and precise targeting capabilities. Despite their effectiveness, many marketers fall prey to common mistakes in their Google Ads campaigns that hinder success and waste their advertising budgets. To help you avoid them, we’ve compiled the five most common mistakes, as well as a solution to each one, so you can approach your Google Ads campaign with confidence and achieve the results your business is aiming for.
Wordstream reports that businesses using Google Ads generate an average of $2 in revenue for every $1 spent on advertising.
Incorrect Intent
It’s surprising how many marketers aren’t familiar with the term ‘intent’ when it comes to their Google Ads campaigns. Search intent, or user intent, is basically the ‘why’ behind whatever someone is searching for. The reason why intent is so important is because understanding what the user hopes to accomplish with their search can help you optimise your Google Ad Campaign. Intent includes everything from whether someone is seeking answers to a question, looking for a particular website, searching to buy something specific, exploring a topic or just browsing. When we identify the intent behind the search, we can tailor our content to match exactly what the user is looking for, making our marketing communication considerably more relevant and engaging.
Using the wrong conversion actions
Every marketer uses Google Ads to achieve a common goal – increasing sales and boosting business. A large component of that is conversion tracking, which monitors the actions of customers on our websites. There are several conversions most businesses track, including clicks, downloads or purchases – or anything that the business deems as a valuable interaction.
What many businesses get wrong is that they track all actions, and hold them in equal regard. The problem is that an action like a pageview, for example, is neither valuable nor does it suggest any significant intent from a user. Businesses often include weak actions like pageviews in their reports, which they’ll then use to make decisions about how to optimise their ad spend. But, because the data is low quality, that business is allocating its budget to leads that have shown very little intention of purchasing whatever they offer.
To ensure your data is accurate and relevant, only prioritise high-value actions like form submissions or purchases. By focusing on meaningful goals and making decisions based on that data, we can optimise our campaigns for the actions that truly impact our business’s success.
Weak Copy
If your strategy were the engine, your copy would be the body of the racecar. Too often, businesses start strong and ace their strategies, but fall short in execution by allowing weak copy onto their ads. Unfortunately, this is like putting an F1 engine into a tractor and expecting it to go fast.
Strong copy is essential for any successful Google Ads campaign. Your copy should be designed to connect with the public in a compelling way, by emphasising the unique value proposition of whatever you’re selling. Solid copy shows an understanding of the audience, explicitly offering value to the reader and connecting to them through a relatable insight or emotion.
Negative keywords
You’ve got everything set up, your copy is strong, and your campaign is well thought out. But for some reason, a large portion of your click rate doesn’t result in sales or valuable actions. This looks like a job for negative keywords. Negative keywords are a powerful tool to help you refine the targeting of your Google Ads campaigns.
They essentially allow you to specify certain terms or phrases that you don’t want your ads to be connected to. When a user searches for something that contains any of your specified negative keywords, Google’s algorithm will ensure that your ad is not displayed for that particular search. This prevents your campaign from being shown to users who are unlikely to be interested in your product or service, preventing irrelevant traffic to your site.
For example, if your company sells high-end custom home builds, you’ll want to exclude terms like ‘cheap’ or ‘affordable’ to ensure that your ads are only displayed to users interested in high-end home builds.
Landing page relevance
This mistake forms part of the marketing ecosystem, but is no less linked to your Google Ads. Google reports that ‘Landing page relevance plays a major role in how Google Ads calculates your Quality Score. The more relevant your destination page is to your chosen keywords, the higher your Quality Score will be.’
Irrelevant landing pages can have a significantly negative impact on Google Ads campaigns. If a user clicks on an ad expecting to find something specific, but lands on a page that doesn’t fulfil their expectations, it creates a negative user experience they’re not likely to forget. This mismatch between the ad and the landing page often leads to high bounce rates, where users quickly exit the page without taking any further action. This results in Google lowering the quality score of the ad so fewer people see it, which, of course, you don’t want.
The trick is to make sure that your landing page aligns closely with your ad content. You can do this by carefully selecting and using specific keywords, and being purposeful about managing and directing the user’s expectations, based on what you are offering them in the ad.
Make your Google Ads work harder for you
By avoiding these mistakes, your Google Ad campaigns will be more targeted, more effective, and will make use of your ad spend more efficiently.
At Pixeld, we use a data-driven approach to create targeted ad campaigns that aim to increase traffic and conversions while focusing on cost-efficiency and measurable results. Our experience with Google Ads helps businesses grow by improving their online visibility and reaching their target audience more effectively. Get in touch with us to help you make your Google Ad campaign work harder, and achieve the results you’ve established for your business.
