Google Adwords is a lethal direct marketing tool, which can give you amazing results if used correctly. However, since it requires you to invest money, it can get pretty risky. The whole Adwords game can slowly become too costly to handle and burn a whole in your wallet if you’re not careful. In this article, we will look into the top 5 mistakes that you need to avoid when you’re working with Adwords.
Don’t Bid Very High - In case you do not have any predetermined data, which indicates bidding high would be profitable and give a positive return on your investment, it’s recommended that you try and keep your bids low. Although it’s not entirely possible to get large amounts of traffic within highly competitive markets, but it will allow you to collect conversion data and CPC before going too deep.
Broad keywords - General search terms can eat into your budget and you can end up losing a lot of your money, without any notable conversions. Consumers searching for very broad terms such as “money, flowers, phones” etc, don’t usually buy as they are still at the research stage of the whole buying cycle.
Low Daily Budget - Your ad won’t get served if your daily budget is set too low. Google has its own system in place where it calculates and determines the average traffic volume, and then uses your daily budget to serve your advert accordingly. If your budget happens to be too small, your ad will not even come up in the sponsored listings.
Using the Content Network - One of the most common mistake advertisers make is, using the content network early on. You should avoid advertising on the content network at all costs, unless of course you have ample amount of experience. As you will notice, the content network is turned on by default whenever you create a new ad campaign, which can go against you. The quality of traffic you get from content networks is not even near to the quality of organic search traffic. Apart from that, you can go through big losses very quickly when using the content network.
Destination URL & Affiliate ID – A lot of Adwords newbies don’t really understand how they would be getting credit for a sale, and hence don’t make use of the affiliate link as their destination URL, this is when you are ‘direct linking’ to the merchant’s site. This means nothing but loss for the advertiser, as they won’t be credited for the sale, thus driving “free” traffic to the merchant.
There you go! Five mistakes that can make you lose your shirt with Adwords if you’re not careful. The basic difference between a successful online marketer and an average one is the mistakes they make. Even though it’s good to learn from your mistakes, some advertisers just can’t afford to lose their hard earned money making silly, avoidable ones. Before you give up, or give in to the big bad world of Adwords advertising, be smart enough to do things carefully and take decisions wisely.