Throughout my time consulting with small business owners I’ve come across several recurring issues that prop up time and time again.
I wanted to address these issues here for the benefit of other small business owners, in order to allow you to avoid these mistakes for your own campaigns.
1. Website not designed/formatted correctly to capture leads or make sales. This is common, often when I first do a consultation this will stick out to me, typically the ordering process is too complicated and sometimes it’s not even apparent where the order form/checkout button is. The sales copy may not speak to the customer. Remember marketing lesson 101, state the benefits and not the features. The body text should jump out to your prospects and solve their needs.
2. Inappropriate landing pages. Often many Adwords novices will divert traffic straight onto their homepage, leaving the visitor to fend for themselves and locate the products/services themselves. Each ad should link to the specific page of the product/service the ad was promoting. This is because the homepage is too crowded and trying to serve too many purposes, so it’s not the right place to land visitors to.
3. Keywords are too broad. There are 3 match types in Adwords, broad match is the default and it will display your ad to search queries that are vaguely similar to your keyword list. In most cases the traffic will be a mish-mash of everything. Using phrase match in “” and exact match in [] to narrow down on your keyword selection in order to get traffic from qualified sources.
4. Keyword groups are not themed in categories/product lines. This is crucial, keywords need to be themed into a tightly clustered group which in most cases is the same product but written in different forms represented by each keyword. The secret lies in being highly specific. Creating ads for very specific products with keywords that match the ad perfectly. Often first time Adwords users will just lump hundreds of keywords onto one ad group with one ad all pointing to the homepage.
5. Poorly constructed ads. There’s a format to writing adwords ad that is optimal for receiving clicks. The title must describe your product/service in 2-3 words which closely matches the search query submitted by the end user. The second line of the ad tells the end user how your product or service can solve their problem. The 3rd line gives them a compelling offer like 10% off or free bonus gifts along with a call to action like “call today”, “enquire now” etc.
There you have it, 5 common Adwords mistakes made by small business owners, chances are if you have these in order you are well on your way to a semi successful adwords campaign and you can probably save yourself a consulting fee 😉