8 Common Adwords Pitfalls

You know you’ve probably clicked on that Adwords ad that lead nowhere or possibly made you feel like been bait-n-switched right? Well, some of these might seem pretty obvious to you, but you would be surprised how easy some people forget to check-off these little things before running their Adwords campaigns. Here with these tips below, you can avoid wasting your money and frustrating your visitors:

1. Insufficient Tracking – Don’t forget to track visits and conversions with your web analytics and conversion tracking through Adwords.
2. Poor Global Targeting – Showing ads globally using eastern standard time, so the ads only show in Australia during the night. (That’s an example country).
3. Focusing too heavily on your brand/trademark terms rather than general terms. People are searching on your brand name already know how to find you. Make sure you’re visible for the people who don’t yet know about you.
4. Bringing people to your home page, where they’ll have to hunt for content relevant to their query, or might just leave. Instead, place them deep into your website on a page relevant to their query.
5. Taking people to a page that doesn’t reference the reason they clicked the ad.
6. Being diffuse and wasting ad clicks in the display network. Start first in the Adwords Search Network and learn what is successful for you there before branching out into other paid search platforms and before experimenting with Google’s Display Network.
7. Managing the search network and the display network as if they were one and the same. The search network shows ads on searches, while the display network shows ads next to content. In the search network, CTR can affect your quality score and therefore your costs. CTR isn’t relevant to quality score in the display network, so the two campaigns can be managed differently.
8. Assuming all visitors are equal. Eventually, you may decide that certain terms have higher bids than others because of the quality and type of leads they produce.