Google Ads is one of the most popular advertising channels in the world. The results of their success are measured by formulas called Conversion rate and Return on Investment (ROI).

Google Ads are successful because businesses of ANY size can reach millions of users. However, some marketers make common mistakes that are stopping them from finding that success. This article lists the mistakes to avoid so you can find success!

Did not read the Google Ads community rules carefully

Many marketers skip the Google Ads community rules check before they start creating an ad campaign. This inadvertently causes their content or behavior to violate community rules and be rejected, or even blocked, from their ad accounts.

 

Google Ads Community Rules Notes

Do not run ads with content prohibited by law: Google Ads prohibits the sale or promotion of counterfeit goods or certain products or services that cause damage, harm, or injury. So some items will be banned or restricted from showing on google. Specifically, to promote fairness, Google Ads doesn't even allow the promotion of products or services designed to allow dishonest behavior. In particular, you will not be allowed to advertise or display content that is shocking or incites hatred, intolerance, discrimination, or violence.

 

Therefore, if your product or service is related to prohibited content, beware of Google Ads before it costs money without bringing high efficiency.

Ads avoid violating prohibited acts: Currently, to ensure transparency and fairness, Google's policies have set forth regulations on behavior that cannot be performed if you want to advertise. In particular, the prohibited acts are abusing the ad network, collecting and using data, posting misleading content, etc. discovered by Google.

 

Content must meet Google standards of “useful advertising

Not only does Google ask about products that run ads, but Google also reviews campaigns based on the advertising content itself. To bring a useful ecosystem to users, Google will appreciate and favor more useful advertising content for the community. Some criteria to evaluate content according to google standards that you need to pay attention to are clear, professional presentation and lead users to content that is relevant, useful, and easy to interact with. In particular, the ad should ensure to provide relevant search value, etc. These will help Google appreciate your proposal and more.

 

Optimize Landing Pages to Increase Conversion Rate

Not optimizing landing pages is one of the most common mistakes marketers make when using Google Ads. Sometimes the customer is very interested in your ad and immediately clicks on the landing page link, but when visiting this landing page, the customer feels everything is too confusing and is no longer interested in the product.  This makes the conversion rate low, and your ad campaign will no longer be effective.

 

How to optimize landing pages?

A landing page or landing page is an independent website, created according to different marketing campaigns to express the specific intentions of the marketer. Accordingly, landing pages contain concise, minimalist content, logical layouts, and visual images that call users towards a specific behavior.

 

However, for an effective call to action, optimizing the landing page design is essential to boosting the purchasing power of users, thereby directly increasing revenue for the business. The main question is how to make the landing page effective? Here are some solutions:

 

·         Call-To-Action Optimization

With its primary function being a call-to-action, Call-To-Action is one of the most important components of a landing page. Therefore, the CTA sentence must be concise, short, recognizable but still attractive to customers. Usually, Call-To-Action sentences with encouraging meaning, direct calling will easily lead users, for example: "See All", "See More", "Buy Now Before Missing", …

 

·         Use a minimalist look for your landing page

Minimalism does not mean monotony and lack of aesthetics, but rather provides an intuitive, recognizable, and clear layout. The landing page is not the main website, so presenting too much content and colorful images will distract the viewer. Instead, provide useful content to optimize the landing page, thereby stimulating visitors to take targeted action.

 

·         Leverage social proof

There's no denying the important role social proof plays in boosting business revenue. The social proof will show the actual customer experience of the product or service - most specifically the reviews, experiences, and reviews of old customers. So, cleverly integrating feedback into the landing page will optimize the landing page, increasing the persuasion for visitors.

 

·         Create an easy approach message

Simplify your messages so that they are close, accessible, and easy to understand for readers. That's how you optimize your landing pages effectively. Concise information that includes only the necessary information will not make users feel bored, waste a lot of time as well as make them make unnecessary inferences.

 

Unbalanced Advertising Budget

Most new marketers forget to balance their advertising budgets regularly. Someones think that increasing the budget will mean more customers. Setting a daily budget higher than the recommended amount is often recommended by marketers to increase traffic. Recently Google has increased the number of streams (the number of times the ad appears each time a visitor loads the web page) in ad campaigns using this technique. The problem is that this extra boost relies on broad match keyword phrases that aren't very well targeted. This results in low conversions and a low CTR (clicks/views as a percentage). This will negatively affect your site's Quality Score and can hinder the effectiveness of your advertising campaign. Another reason you want to increase your daily budget is that sometimes marketers forget they've just done it. They can't check their accounts for a few days and when they do, they realize they've spent a lot of money.

 

Tips for you to control your Google Ads budget

With cost-per-click (CPC) bidding, you're only charged when someone is interested enough to click your ad. You tell Google Ads the maximum amount you're willing to pay per click on your ad (called your maximum cost-per-click bid), but you may be charged less.  You have control over your Google Ads budget. You decide on average how much you want to spend per day.  On days when your ads are more popular, Google Ads will allow up to 20% more of your average daily budget to be spent so you won't miss these valuable clicks. But don't worry, we'll lower your max budget on other days so that, for a month, your average total spend won't exceed the limit you've set, assuming your campaign runs all month.

 

Get Suggestions

Google Ads will show a suggested budget for campaigns that consistently reach their daily budget but have the potential to earn more clicks and impressions.

 

Don't set, then forget

Check your account regularly for campaigns that are limited by budget or have available funds. A limited budget can mean you get fewer clicks and impressions than you can earn. If you're using the Maximize automatic clicks bid strategy, be aware that a wide budget can increase your ad's cost-per-click. You can check the Status column on the Campaigns tab to see if any of your campaigns show a "Limited by budget" status.

 

Bid lower than competitors

If you think bidding low will save you money, you're wrong. When your ad campaign's bids are lower than your competitors', your website will be shown to fewer customers than they are. At some point, your competitors have attracted potential customers in your industry that you haven't. Then you need to spend more money on your ad campaigns to catch up with the competition. The result is that you are wasting time. In every Google Ads campaign, it's best to find the right bids for the keywords.

 

How to Choose the Best Bidding Strategy in Google Ads

When it comes to the principle of the bid formula when participating in the Google Ads advertising strategy, no matter how it is calculated, you must not exceed the pre-defined limit threshold. The simplest way to understand it is to ensure that there is no capital loss while running ads.

 

Having participated in business strategies, you must ensure to bring profits to your business, and ensure profitable business. Here's the formula for figuring out the available bids for your business.

 

Available bids will be calculated using the formula = Max CPC x 0.4 -> 0.7.

In which the maximum CPC is the maximum profit that the business can achieve, then multiply it by the product conversion rate to set the Google Ads bid.

 

Do not bid higher than the max bid

The best performing bid is ½ of the max bid. However, this formula should not be applied mechanically because it will affect and not be completely true to the specific situation during the advertising process. Therefore, you should be flexible to choose a bid between 0.4 and 0.7, note that the bid must be lower than the max bid.

 

Use a Smart bidding strategy

With smart bidding, Google uses machine learning to optimize conversions or conversion value in every auction. This bidding strategy can save you time and improve performance through 4 key benefits:

 

Advanced Machine Learning

When bidding, Google uses data-driven machine learning algorithms at scale to make accurate predictions in the account.

 

Multiple signal types by context

You can include multiple signal types (attributes) in your bid optimizations.

 

Flexible performance control options: depending on your individual business goals, you can set different performance goals. Google will then optimize Search bids for your chosen attribution model and set a device-specific performance target.

 

Transparent performance reporting

You can fix any issues quickly with the reporting tools Smart Bidding offers.

 

Choosing the wrong target audience for an ad campaign

 

You should know that each product, each content is dedicated to a specific audience. If you choose a general customer and can't distinguish which is the target audience, the failure rate of the Google Ads campaign is very high. Products sold to the right people who need them will be welcomed by customers and help businesses thrive. On the contrary, if you try to sell a product without knowing if customers need it or not, business failure is inevitable!  If you do not know or are unsure of the answers to the following questions:

 

Who are we trying to reach?

What are the personalities?

What are they looking for?

Where are they?

How do they behave?

Plus a bunch of questions about your target audience – you're in for a tough spot.

 

Google, Microsoft, and others will take your money whether PPC works or not. It is a fact and there are no refunds for mistakes or poor targeting.

 

Elements that make up the Target Audience

Demographic

What is their gender? Male, female, or another gender?

How old are they?

Where do your customers live? Vietnam, City. Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi or even living abroad.

What language do they use on Facebook? English, Vietnamese, Korean,…

What is their occupation?

What is their average income?

 

Interests

Do they like to travel?

Like to buy branded goods?

Which Fanpages do they like? Which actor?

They need to lose weight, beauty, shopping, ...?

What sport are they interested in/favorite?

Like moto/ auto/ off-road vehicle/…?

 

Behavior

Where do they usually buy your products: Online, in-store, or both?

What devices do they use to get online? Desktop or Mobile? If it's mobile, which phone brand do you use? (iPhone, Samsung,...)

Do they pay directly or buy online?

 

Take advantage of the Optimized Targeting feature in Google Ads

This is an automatically applied branching targeting option that helps advertisers upgrade audience or demographic targeting in Display, Discovery, and Video campaigns.  The benefits of using this feature include:

 

·         Simplify audience targeting and optimization.

·         Works across multiple platforms and different audience types.

·         Create more opportunities to expand your ad's reach.

 

The Optimized Targeting feature is suitable for:

 

o   Display Campaigns

o   Discovery Campaign

o   Video campaign using Revenue, Leads, Website Traffic objective

 

Once this is rolled out, you'll easily see performance metrics showing up in the Totals section at the bottom of the Audience or Keywords view across campaigns.

 

Confusion between “Google Ads” and “SEO”

Many users are first exposed, so they often cannot distinguish between running Google Ads and websites in search results. This causes them to deploy the wrong advertising campaign and leads to ineffectiveness.

 

Comparison between Google Ads and SEO

On the search page, when you use google ads, the page or website will be displayed in the sponsored links section. The websites that appear in the first position are due to many factors, of which the main factor in SEO

 

Google Ads

SEO

For Google sites and sites using Google Adsense

Applies to all search engines

This is a paid advertisement

This is free marketing

Google Ads appear in the upper right of Google Search and under certain conditions (auctions are competitive) you can get one of the ad positions

The content production team needs to work hard to make the website appear on page 1 of search results

 Website will achieve the TOP position immediately and start getting traffic.

Just 5 minutes your ad will appear on the first page of search results.

You need a lot more time (especially for new sites) to get good rankings and steady traffic.

 

Usually, you need 3-6 months to be able to push keywords to the TOP, and this depends on the level of competition of the keyword

When the campaign is stopped, the traffic to the Website also stops

The increase in organic traffic to the website will take place for a long time

Can target multiple keywords at the same time

It is necessary to focus on a few keywords first for the best results, then you can gradually expand more keywords with a shorter time to do expansion keywords first.

 

 

Choose the wrong keyword

 

Whether running Google Ads is successful or not depends a lot on the choice of keywords. However, not everyone has enough experience and the ability to choose keywords that are both related to the products/services you provide but also have to meet the search needs of users.

 

Try to imagine the customer journey to a website. First, the customer will require something. They will then use Google to find a solution. By typing the keywords they think will get the desired results. Then, if your website contains keywords such as customers search, it will appear in the results. If you choose the wrong keywords, then your website cannot reach your customers.

 

How to choose the right keywords for Google Ads campaigns

Choose keywords carefully: the best way to choose Google Ads keywords with descriptions that are close to the product or service description that customers will search for is the best. Keywords containing two or three words tend to work best.

 

Group similar keywords: In addition to the main keywords, add secondary keyword phrases. For example, if your business sells "Non-stick pans", as a sub-keyword you can put "Household appliances" or "Kitchen utensils"…

 

Choose the right number of keywords: About 5-20 keywords for each ad group.

 

Choosing relevant high-quality keywords for your ad campaign can help you reach the customers you desire. After you have a list of quality keywords, you will write ad content and divide ads according to the keyword phrase that has been up.

 

When a visitor searches for a term that matches your keyword. Then your ad will appear, the top position of the ad depends on how you target the audience (have the right audience - needs or not) - the content of the ad - the experience at the landing page (speed, content…), or can you participate in an auction to determine if an ad is shown?

 

The cost per keyword will vary, depending on the quality of the keyword. In addition, Google also evaluates the quality score of the ad, which is based on the expected rate, the relevance of the ad, and the landing page experience. A higher Quality Score usually results in lower costs and higher ad placement.

 

If you want to avoid the case that your ad shows to the wrong audience, you can use "negative keywords" to ensure the cost of advertising and the purpose of showing only to the audience you want.

Create only one ad variation

A common Google Ads mistake is creating only 1 ad per group or only one variation per ad. If you want to increase conversion rates and optimize costs, you need to create several ad variations for each ad group.

 

Whether using the same headline or description, there are many variations, and testing them will help find out which converts better. When you find the best one, stop the others and keep creating another version of what you just found. Then keep trying.

 

There will be a lot of trial and error in the campaign to find what gives the best ROI. Very rarely do you see a campaign that runs well, bringing in leads and orders from day one?

 

To deeply understand about Google Ads- don't skip The Google Ads CookBook

 

Google Ads CookBook is a book that helps marketers new to Google Ads to understand things in a simpler way. After reading this book, you can launch your own Google Ads campaigns and receive the traffic you need.

 

The book will provide detailed step-by-step instructions so that you can set up Google Ads in any format without any errors in the steps inside. The Google Ads CookBook includes 6 chapters:

Free Speech Forever!

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