by Duane Ortiz

You can get great results with Google AdWords, but it can be tricky for beginners. It’s not uncommon for new AdWords advertisers to make mistakes when starting their campaign. In this article we’ll explore some of these common AdWords mistakes to help you avoid them.

Many people starting out with AdWords simply throw together a campaign without doing much or any market research, and this is a serious mistake. You can’t plan an effective AdWords campaign before you take the time to carefully study your market first. When you have a clear idea about your competition, you know what to expect and also what steps to take to make sure you’re not going wrong. You want to understand what your targeted keywords are worth and how high your bids should be.

Probably one of the worst blunders to commit is blowing your money because your daily budget was set too high. Lacking the necessary preparation and mindset can turn your Adwords adventure in an Adwords nightmare. It’s true that you can lose a ton of money in a day or less depending on how your campaign is set-up. The smart thing to do is be conservative with your daily budget, and then go slow and monitor your campaigns performance. You’ll be able to easily and safely test, get results, and then tweek as required. At some point either you can make it profitable, or you cannot and then you can just shut that campaign down. Set your daily budget to something realistic, and have the right mindset about it – if you lose that money, then it’s ok.

Another mistake to avoid is using the content network of Google to display your ads. This network consists of all those partnering websites that show Google ads through their AdSense program. Since these sites aren’t that targeted, they could prove to be a distraction for the people viewing your ad. Even if you achieve a high click through rate you are likely to see a low conversion rate. So not turning the content network off will lead to large amount of money spend on ads, with a poor return on investment, which is the last thing you want. These content networks make your job harder because it is difficult to track your ads through them. Therefore, it is in your best interest to remember to turn the content network off prior to starting a new campaign. Be sure that your focus is on the Google search results and their partners

People click on your ads because they either are genuinely interested to know more, or they’re just people clicking for no good reason – a lot of people do that. Whatever the reason, your ad made them think that you can help them. You have to be careful that your landing page or home page does “not” have a lot of distracting things that they are “not” looking for. That will only cause confusion and a big disconnect because they were expecting to find something else. Everything must be relevant in your Adwords campaign, and if it isn’t then you will be penalized with high CPC, cost per click, and a bad Quality Score. Just make darn sure all things in each Adword campaign are relevant to each other “within” the same campaign. AdWords allows you to test out various landing pages, which will give you a fair idea about the performance. So then obviously this kind of feedback can help you perform much better.

Another common mistake is using to many keywords in one ad group. It is your responsbility, as an Adwords advertiser, to continually test your keywords for the success rates. Only the best keywords will get the clicks and the less popular won’t get many. A state of confusion will ensue, since you can’t determine which keywords are the successful ones. So the fewer keywords you ahve per ad group, the better you can judge the success of a particualr keyword.

Your keyword research should not be a problem because Google has an excellent and free tool for you to use. Of course, you’ll need to show relevance for your keywords within your campaigns for your ad groups, etc. Just remember Google’s favorite word is relevance. How much your ads cost you per click will be set by your graded Quality Score. Your keywords and phrases need to be as targeted as possible. Remember that when you optimize your landing pages and Adword ads that you’re using the same keywords within a particular campaign and ad group. The keywords you choose to use also make a difference because you do not want to use “just browsing” keywords/phrases.

Given that, the mistakes in the article above make us realize that AdWords is not really that complicated but people make it out to be when they make such mistakes by not preparing properly.