AdWords is tough. There is no reason you need to make it any harder on yourself. Throughout my AdWords consultations & optimizations I have narrowed down these 7 common mistakes.
1. Not Tracking Conversions
2. Not Linking Your AdWords & Analytics Account
3. Not Opting Out of the Content Network
4. Not Using Relevant Ad Groups
5. Not Split-Testing & Improving Your Ads
6. Not Using Negative Keywords
7. Not Using Different Keyword Matching Options
1. Not Tracking Conversions
No AdWords campaign should be running without conversion tracking activated and the conversion script properly inserted into X-Cart. For detailed instructions see: How To Install AdWords Conversion Code in X-Cart.
2. Not Linking Your AdWords & Analytics Account
Using your AdWords dashboard to evaluate your account performance limits you to half of the reporting power you need. Google allows you to tightly integrating these two services by Linking Your AdWords & Analytics accounts.
This provides greater reporting information such as your Revenue generate, Cost and Return on Investment with AdWords – just to name a few. This is an excellent way to make sure your account is contributing positively to your bottom line.
You get much more insightful data from linking your accounts.
3. Not Opting Out of the Content Network
By default all campaigns are set-up with automatic enrollment into the Content Network. Because the Search and Content Network are two entirely different advertising methods is a standard best practice to keep their campaigns separated. This will help you in split-testing your ads, mentioned later.
To make sure you are opted out of the Content Network under ‘Campaign Settings’ make sure ‘The content network’ is NOT checked.
Make sure the content box is not checked
4. Not Using Relevant Ad Groups
Your Campaigns and Ad Groups need to be relevant if you want to avoid the inevitable ‘Google Tax’ of poorly organized campaigns. The simplest way I can recommend setting them up is to model your X-Cart stores category structure.
Think Category -> Subcategory -> Product = Campaign -> Ad Group -> Keywords.
As for how many keywords in an Ad Group, a good range is 1 – 30 relevant keywords. Obviously every situation is different and your mileage may vary.
5. Not Split-Testing & Improving Your Ads
Every Ad Group you set-up should always have two ads running against each other. Once you have a statistically signification winner you delete the loser and try to write a better ad. You would be surprised how little changes such as one word or display URL can make.
Correctly split testing your ads requires two steps
a. Make sure your ads settings are ‘Rotate: Show ads more evenly’ under the campaign settings.
b. Make sure are using a tool to confirm that the differences between the two ads are significant.
You can check manually for free using www.SplitTester.com and entering in the two ads CTRs and number of clicks.
If you prefer to save time you can use Winner Alert. I use Winner Alert because it e-mails me anytime I have a ‘winning ad’ so I can hop right in and throw up a new contender. While their webpage won’t win any design awards they have been around a long time and their tool works.
6. Not Using Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are keywords that will stop your ads from showing. They are a very important factor in AdWords and this is probably the most overlooked mistake.
How does it work exactly? Let’s say I am bidding on the broad keyword: custom wood cabinets because the client sells custom cabinetry. Using one of the two methods below I notice I have received a click from the search query : “custom wood cabinet instructions”.
Since the client does not offer or sell any instructions that would be flagged as a term for the negative keywords and I would add it to the negative keyword list (either at the Campaign level or Ad Group level). Yes this takes time, but there are tools to speed things up.
How do you find out exactly what the visitor typed in? Well there are two methods you can either use Search Query Reports or you can use your Google Analytics data (if you set it up to record this information). The Complete Analytics Package for X-Cart does include this function and a special spreadsheet tool to speed up the process (Yes that is a shameless plug!).
7. Not Using Different Keyword Matching Options
AdWords offers several keyword matching options: broad, phrase and exact.
They work as follows:
Broad matches any combination of the keyword(s) and can match even if the keyword(s) aren’t necessarily in the visitors search.
Phrase matches any search that contains the phrase entered in the quotes in that order. So “dell laptop” would match dell laptop but NOT laptop dell
Exact matches only exactly what is inbetween the brackets [].
Example
Broad- dell laptop would match: dell laptop, fix laptop dell, buy laptop dell online, etc
Phrase- “dell laptop” would match: dell laptop, buy dell laptop, dell laptop for sale, etc
Exact- [dell laptop] would match: dell laptop
Well there you have it – time to get to work on improving your AdWords performance!
It is best to think of your account like a sculpture. You should always be fine tuning and cutting away the excess while highlighting the better parts.
