Venturing into the world of Google Adwords when you don’t have much knowledge can prove to be an expensive mistake.

I’ve reviewed hundreds of Google Adwords campaigns set up by small business owners and in this article I’ll share six of the worst mistakes you can make.

Not setting up individual ad groups

When you’re setting up your Adwords campaign, you need to have relevance at the forefront of your mind. It’s best to group together relevant keywords rather than having lots of different terms under one general heading.

For example, let’s say you had an online florist store. There will be a wide variety of keywords you want to target for different occasions such as weddings, funerals and Mother’s Day. Putting keywords into ad groups by relevance gives you more control over your campaign.

Writing a ‘one size fits all’ advert

I’ve seen many Adwords campaigns that targeted multiple keywords with just one generic advert. Again, you need to have relevance in mind when writing your adverts. Ideally you should have at least two unique adverts for each keyword at the outset to make them as relevant as possible.

For example, when someone types “funeral flowers” into Google, they will want to see results that mention their keywords. If you just have one general advert that doesn’t even mention funeral flowers it’s unlikely people will think your advert is the most relevant result. When this happens you may get lots of advert impressions but very few clicks through to your site.

Targeting the wrong keywords

The Google Adwords interface has a built-in keyword research tool to help you find the most relevant words and phrases for your campaign. Too many people don’t take the time to research properly and end up spending money on clicks that don’t deliver new sales/enquiries.

You may think you know what people are likely to type in to find your product or service, but it’s never a good idea to really on guess work over hard facts.

Lack of monitoring

Another common mistake when it comes to Google Adwords is to set up a campaign and just leave it alone. To get the most out of your budget, it’s wise to check in on your results on a daily basis to see what keywords are performing well and those that aren’t.

Not having any tracking in place

Whenever you’re spending money on promoting your business, you should have some form of measurement in place to gauge your ROI. You can track Adwords conversions via Google Analytics or if you don’t have this set up, you should make a point of asking everyone who contacts you where they found your details.

Getting caught up in a bidding war

The final common mistake is to get carried away and trying to constantly outdo one of your rivals. Google takes a variety of factors into account when ranking PPC adverts. If you ignore the basics and just decide to throw money at trying to get to the number one spot, you could end up paying a lot more than you have to.

If you liked this article you should also read: Six little Google Adwords Tips to Try

Image credit: Mel B

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 11th, 2012 at 8:48 am and is filed under Pay per Click. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.