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The foundation of digital marketing is undoubtedly Google Ads advertising. It’s simultaneously an incredibly effective and dangerous tool for inexperienced users. We frequently encounter the need to repair damage caused by unskilled use of Google Ads when seeking additional website traffic or simply trying to generate business revenue. In a few words, we’d like to share with you the 8 fundamental mistakes that are commonly made at the beginning of the journey with this advertising tool.
Where do the problems come from?
Every agency managing Google Ads accounts on behalf of companies charges a commission for creating, configuring, and optimizing advertising campaign results.
1. Keyword Selection
The first mistake appears already at the stage of adding keywords that will trigger ad displays to users online. It’s based on these keywords that Google knows when to submit a given creative to auction for clicks and when it’s not appropriate for the advertiser. An example could be a hair salon. Every hairdresser in a city is interested in having their ad displayed for queries such as:
- “best hair salon in the city”,
- “where to get a haircut in the city”,
- “who do you recommend as a hairdresser”,
- “quick hairdresser nearby”,
but not necessarily for:
- “worst hairdresser in town”,
- “how to cut hair short”,
- “which hairdresser to avoid”,
- “how to become a hairdresser”.
Unfortunately, each of these searches will display the hair salon ad if the keyword was simply set as “hairdresser.” When creating a search advertising campaign, remember that it’s not just the list of desired keywords that matters, but also the match type, exclusions, and bid per click for each keyword. This protects against unwanted ad impressions to people not interested in the offered services.
2. Location Settings
Very often, when we take over a Google Ads account, take over optimization from another company, or audit ad configurations, we encounter the same VERY important problem – incorrectly set ad display location.
Geo-targeting of ads is important in three aspects:
- Budget
In some situations with a low advertising budget, you need to limit ad targeting to a specific area (municipality, state, country). - Audience language
Are you sure you want to display ads to audiences worldwide? Would someone in Chile be interested in a service offer written in Polish? In such cases, you should limit the searcher’s origin to the entire country. - Service area
The hair salon mentioned above wants to find potential customers who will visit the salon’s location in a given city or municipality. There’s no need for people in distant cities to see the ad for a local hairdresser.
While a single click costs little and may increase brand awareness, remember that several or tens of thousands of such clicks means significant budget waste, and optimizing and improving budget utilization is the primary task of an agency managing advertising campaigns.
3. Responsive Ads
Several years ago, Google added the ability to create responsive ads to its advertising system. These are creatives that automatically select headlines and descriptions to maximize audience interest and match the displayed ad to user expectations. In the previous generation of advertising, the main task was to prepare multiple ads (minimum 3) so Google could choose the most optimal one for a specific auction. This process was automated with the introduction of responsive ads. The agency’s task is to develop multiple ad groups, each with up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions for specific keywords. Ad quality is one of the fundamental factors affecting CPC (cost per click) and campaign effectiveness in terms of click-through rate and cost per conversion. Using responsive ads provides the possibility of 32,760 different ad combinations within a single set (3 of 15 headlines and 2 of 4 descriptions). Google automatically selects and displays the creatives that deliver the best results to increase effectiveness – but only when the ad account uses responsive search ads.
4. Extensions
Let’s look at our business’s ads in Google and Google Maps:
At first glance, you can notice several additions beyond the standard ad text. The first creative in paid search results features a clickable phone number for initiating a call directly from the ad, our business address for navigation, and business hours. The second ad comes from Google Maps search results. Here, our creative includes a five-star rating, category, city, open status, and again a phone number. All these elements are called ad extensions in Google Ads. They serve to provide additional information about the business. Google distinguishes the following extensions:
- Structured snippets,
- Callouts,
- Lead forms,
- Ratings,
- Call extensions,
- Location extensions,
- Affiliate location extensions,
- Sitelinks,
- App extensions,
- Promotion extensions.
By using extensions in ads (which is completely free), the creative occupies more space in search results, Google has more opportunities to match the ad to the audience’s needs, and its quality automatically increases. Isn’t it more convenient to get the hair salon’s location directly when you’re nearby, or the phone number when that’s exactly what you’re looking for? Google and its artificial intelligence know exactly how to improve displayed ads to match them to every user profile. However, very often people forget to add extensions or skip these settings when creating advertising campaigns. In our opinion, this is a serious mistake that weakens campaign effectiveness.
5. Remarketing
Each of us has experienced browsing something in an online store and then seeing the same products on various advertising banners and campaigns elsewhere on the web. This phenomenon results from a very important tool called “Remarketing.” One of the most serious problems when creating advertising campaigns is ignoring outgoing traffic from the website. Purchase decisions are made over time. Some people, before taking a specific action, prefer to first check competitor websites, Allegro, a brand’s social media, and then if they remember, they’ll return to the site/store to convert. And the key here is precisely the phrase “if they remember.” Remarketing is a tool that leaves a trace of the user’s visit to the website and the subpages they visited. With this information, we can, for example, increase bids for returning visitors or serve completely different creatives to those who have already been on a brand’s website and left without converting. Tracking and remarketing are powerful tools when properly utilized.
6. Defining Target Audiences
Google, like any large company, likes increasing budgets and never has a problem with increased advertising spending on a given account. It certainly won’t be a problem if the advertiser allows Google to select the target audience and optimize ads on its own. Since this point is on this list, such behavior obviously isn’t ideal. But why? Regardless of the budget, the billing method with Google is the same – CPC (cost per click) means that every ad click matters, and consequently, ads should only be shown to users who may actually be interested in a company’s services or may pay attention to the products or services offered by a brand. Google Ads has several tools for properly defining the target audience and manipulating it so that website traffic is precisely defined and every dollar spent on advertising campaigns has a potential chance of increasing business revenue. You can use:
- In-market audiences,
- Custom intent audiences,
- User segmentation.
Google provides many tools for precisely defining ad targeting to have a chance of increasing interest. Combined with appropriate keywords, this tool delivers excellent results and allows maximum utilization of every dollar in Google Ads.
7. Conversion Tracking
The era of radio advertising, very expensive TV advertising, or billboards has passed for one most important reason – the internet has analytics. All web traffic can be tracked, and consequently, online advertising has the advantage over older solutions that campaign results are fully measurable and available in real time. This gives incredible optimization opportunities and the ability to adapt creatives to the market’s changing needs. Unfortunately, however… most accounts we take over don’t leverage this capability and don’t have properly configured conversion tracking.
A conversion is an action expected by a brand and performed by the recipient of a marketing message.
The internet enables verification of every user’s source, their behavior on the site, and the results of their visit – whether they made a purchase, called the company, drove to the office, or perhaps submitted a contact form. All these actions are called conversions, and if you properly inform Google about expecting these specific actions, Google will select website visitors in a way that maximizes the chance of fulfilling the requirements. After all, the vast majority of advertising campaigns aim precisely at this – increasing conversions and minimizing the cost per action. For this reason, we move to the last mistake: improperly set bidding strategy.
8. Bidding Strategy
The most important question to ask at the beginning – when setting up a campaign – is:
What is its goal?
There are ads aimed at increasing brand recognition. There are those designed to communicate holiday promotions and discounts, but the vast majority aim to deliver revenue, meaning broadly understood conversions. That’s exactly why, right from the start when creating an advertising campaign, Google asks: what bidding strategy is appropriate for this creative?
You can directly cap the maximum cost per click, but you can also aim to maximize the number of clicks, impressions, or conversions. Only proper configuration allows for significantly increased effectiveness. And it’s precisely based on this setting that Google selects incoming traffic to the website. Because does the cost per click matter to someone focused on conversions? And would someone who wants to inform a large number of people about a fundraiser maximize conversions? No – that’s exactly why choosing the right bidding strategy is so important.
Summary
There are many mistakes that can be made when creating advertising campaigns, and much can be done to improve existing ones. The cost per click and per conversion depends on the results of each auction and is a function of ad quality, competition, and landing page quality. Each of these factors should be at a high level for the advertising campaign to deliver the best results. There’s a lot of work to be done, and there’s no room for mistakes. That’s why, in our opinion, you shouldn’t try this at home – the management and optimization of advertising campaigns should be entrusted to certified specialists. Anyone who contacts us referencing this post for advertising campaign management will receive a free business audit and a month of optimization completely free of charge.
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