Since in the short time I've been on this site I have seen multiple members struggling to use Google Adwords effectively. I have from good experience compiled ten common mistakes beginners (and sometimes even experienced) marketers make when using Adwords. At a later date I will be compiling a pretty much a whole how-to concerning Adwords but for now this should maybe keep you from making some fatal mistakes that will kill your advertising budget.

Mistake 1 - Non-use of Adgroups or Not Using Them Correctly

When you create a campaign, you use ad groups in order to organize your keywords. When you create an ad group, you need to group the keywords together that are similar, with at least 2 common keywords.

For example:

make money at home
[make money at home]
"make money at home"
make money business
[make money business]
"make money business"
make money from home
[make money from home]
"make money from home"
make money internet
[make money internet]
"make money internet"
make money online
[make money online]
"make money online"
how to make money online
[how to make money online]
"how to make money online"
make money on the internet
[make money on the internet]
"make money on the internet"

Your ad should then contain the same keywords, perhaps like:

Make Money Doing Nothing
Want To Make Extra Money?
Find Out How I make $1000 / Day
mywebsite.com


Mistake 2 - Too Many Keywords in Adgroups

At most each adgroup should contain around 25 total keywords. Of course this would be 75 if using [] and (). Do not put more than 25 unless they highly relevant because this will negatively affect your quality score which means higher CPC.


Mistake 3 - Use of Only Broad Type Keyword Matches

To increase your CTR you need to use more than just broad keyword matches. Other than broad there is exact and phrase keyword match types.
i.e
broad: Affiliate Marketing
exact: "Affiliate Marketing"
phrase: [Affiliate Marketing]


Mistake 4 - Using the Content Network
The content network is Google Adsense, and if you are not experienced you definitely do not want your ads to show on Adsense. Adsense users are many times involved in click fraud and other practices such as made for adsense sites. These site often produce non-targeted traffic and can really cost you. When creating an adsense campaign you should only leave google search and search network clicked.


Mistake 5 - Daily Budget is Too Low
There are many factors that go into how many times your ads get shown, one of them being your daily budget. If your daily budget is set at $5-$10 / day you cannot expect much traffic at all. A good rule of thumb is to set it higher then monitor your costs.


Mistake 6 - Duplicate URL's
Simply put if you are advertising the same url as another advertiser, Google will only show one of the ads. So say, you are advertising earnersforum.com, you would have to have a higher CPC than the other advertiser in order for your ad to be shown. A simple solution is to direct your visitors to a landing page (which by the way if done correctly) will boost conversions, rather than just directing them directly to the main website or sales letter.


Mistake 7 - Bidding Too High
Some beginners simply try to outbid advertisers in hopes of that all important traffic generation. Bidding 4-5 dollars per click is way to high and sometimes (most times) bidding even a dollar/click is too high. Unless you are an experienced marketer and know your metrics, trying to outbid a competitor will just ruin your advertising budget


Mistake 8 - Outrageously Low Ad Positions
You cannot expect loads of traffic if your ads are positioned at #30. In order to be on the first page of Google you need try to position yourself between 1 and 9. That being said it may be expensive to get on that first page but at the very lowest you should be on the second page. Anything lower is a waste of time. On a brighter note, using these techniques correctly you should be able to achieve higher ad positions at lower costs.


Mistake 9 - Non-targeted Keywords
Say you were promoting this forum and in your adwords campain you used the keywords: forum, money, marketing - these would seem to be good keywords to use, right? On the contrary... someone typing in forum could be looking for a magician's forum, someone typing in money could be looking for currency exchange rates, and so on and so fourth. Needless to say these ads would not convert worth a ... so better targeted keywords to use would be something like: "Internet Marketing Forum" or "Monetize My Website".


Mistake 10 - Not Doing Keyword Research Before Starting a Campaign
Keyword research is absolutely necessary for any adwords campaign. Say you were trying to sell psp video downloads and you used "psp video downloads" (which is too competitive for a reasonable CPC) then you use another keyword "videos on psp" which gets 13 searches/month, you are not going to get much traffic. With a little keyword research you may find there are better ones like: "how to download psp videos" or "top five PSP videos" or "unlimited psp video downloads" .. the list goes on and on.

So there you have it. The top 10 Common Adword Mistakes that you should avoid at all cost. Hope ya' learned something.

Good Luck,
Bryan

Thanks for this, I'm sure it will be useful to a lot of people

Oh you forgot #11:

Don't use adwords (overture & MSN adcenter are better)

Great post Bryan!

I would argue that #4 depends greatly upon your niche. Fraud seems to be prevalent in some niches and fairly nonexistant in other niches.

Excellent post Bryan,
regarding the matching options, I've always struggled with this.
Why should you have the same keywords/terms as broad, exact, and phrase match? Wouldn't the broad match match all of them anyway?

Does anyone know what happens if you have two advertisers with the same bid amount, same click through rate, but one has the term that a user search for as broad match, while the other one has it as an exact match? Would the exact match get the better ad position?

Originally Posted by chemoul

Excellent post Bryan,
regarding the matching options, I've always struggled with this.
Why should you have the same keywords/terms as broad, exact, and phrase match? Wouldn't the broad match match all of them anyway?

Does anyone know what happens if you have two advertisers with the same bid amount, same click through rate, but one has the term that a user search for as broad match, while the other one has it as an exact match? Would the exact match get the better ad position?

Sorry Chemoul, I didn't see this.

I dont know Google's formula for calculating quality score, so I don't know exactly how it works, but I know it works..

As far as your second question, I would guess that would be how it works, because an exact match term should have more quality than a broad match term. Again, maybe questions you could address Google with.

I appreciate it. I've had an empty Adwords account just sitting there, and I've recently come into some money I think I'll experiment with

Don't forget negative keywords.

like -free

Kinda hard to sell something to a visitor when then search for "free duck coats".

Michael

Originally Posted by beachbumis

Don't forget negative keywords.

like -free

Kinda hard to sell something to a visitor when then search for "free duck coats".

Michael

Oh absolutely, I don't know how I let that one slip through the cracks.. Very good one.

Bryan

Um yea thats obvious

thank you very much for this post, bmc.

i have question however regarding mistake 2. steven holdaway in google money pro is claiming, that you should max out the number of keywords per adgroup.

why exactly would you think, that it is better to limit the number of keywords to 25 (*3)? i can see that you are referring to the quality score, but can you explain that a bit further or point me to a resource where i can learn more about that? because currently, ubernoob that i am, i am building keywordlists with permutations, that would fit exactly into the 2000 keyword limit. if that is however all wrong, i should better change it

thanks a lot!

Originally Posted by Cyberworkspace

thank you very much for this post, bmc.

i have question however regarding mistake 2. steven holdaway in google money pro is claiming, that you should max out the number of keywords per adgroup.

why exactly would you think, that it is better to limit the number of keywords to 25 (*3)? i can see that you are referring to the quality score, but can you explain that a bit further or point me to a resource where i can learn more about that? because currently, ubernoob that i am, i am building keywordlists with permutations, that would fit exactly into the 2000 keyword limit. if that is however all wrong, i should better change it

thanks a lot!

This is a matter of relevancy.

Using too many non-relevant keywords in adgroups will be considered spamming by Google and therefore lower your quality score (which means higher CPC). IF you do decide to "stuff" keywords in your ad groups you are basically just asking to pay more.

This is how Google works..

Say in your adgroup your common keywords (ck's) are "make money"

You adgroup may be constructed like this:

make money at home
[make money at home] The secondary keywords for this group is "at home"
"make money at home"

make money business
[make money business] The secondary keywords for this group is "business"
"make money business"

make money from home
[make money from home] '' '' "at home"
"make money from home"

make money internet
[make money internet] '' '' "internet"
"make money internet"

make money online
[make money online] '' '' "online"
"make money online"

how to make money online
[how to make money online] '' '' "how to, online"
"how to make money online"

make money on the internet
[make money on the internet] '' '' "internet"
"make money on the internet"

Your quality score is increased when the page that your ad goes to when it is clicked, has first and foremost your common keywords, and secondly your secondary keywords in the content of the page within the recommended keyword density % (which is 2-8% - anything lower is non-relevant, anything higher can be considered spamming and negatively effect your quality score).

So that said, the more keywords you stuff into your adgroups the higher risk you run of them being non-relevant. Non-relevant targeted keywords negatively affect your quality score. Once again: lower q.s. equal higher cpc.

additional note: have the common keywords in your adcopy and also in the advertised url will increase your quality score (besides the point, but nice to know).. Like this:

Make Money Doing Nothing
Want To Make Extra Money?
Find Out How I make $1000 / Day
mywebsite.com/makemoneynow.htm -or- make-money-business.com


I'm guessing this guru you speak of is attempting to achieve as many click as possible.. not regarding CPC, otherwise his theory is simply wrong. Another thing could be that Mr. Holdaway wrote this before the changes made to Google, which really hit even the most seasoned marketers hard (i.e. going from a $.55 cpc to a 5.00 cpc overnight). There are still marketers even today who do not fully understand the changes Google has made regarding quality score.

So too answer you question, in my experience with the new system, 25 targeted, relevant, keywords per adgroup performed the best as well as have a considerably lower cpc. Therefore keyword stuffing is not a good practice.

Hope this helped,
Bryan

this helped very much. thanks a lot, bryan!

thanks for the tips, pretty interesting stuff.

I will definitely keep them in mind.

hey bmc..
thanks for these tips.

thanks for sharing. that help!

What I noticed so far and want to comment on is #4. I think that using Content Network may have a purpose.
First, you are right - it does drain a lot of money - last year they sucked more money than I could afford (caught a little late). Knowing that, I still run it for short periods of time.

When your link shows up on others' sites, some crawlers pick up the page with your link on it. So even after turning off the Content Network you may still get extra hits because of that.

Originally Posted by dealsguy

When your link shows up on others' sites, some crawlers pick up the page with your link on it. So even after turning off the Content Network you may still get extra hits because of that.

With AdSense, your link is inserted client-side by the JavaScript. No crawler will ever see it.

Don't believe me, view the source code of any page with AdSense code on it. You will see the JavaScript code, not the links which the code creates.

Originally Posted by Will.Spencer

With AdSense, your link is inserted client-side by the JavaScript. No crawler will ever see it.

Don't believe me, view the source code of any page with AdSense code on it. You will see the JavaScript code, not the links which the code creates.

I do believe you. I just think we both are correct. I guess it depends on how the bot is designed.

Originally Posted by Will.Spencer

With AdSense, your link is inserted client-side by the JavaScript. No crawler will ever see it.

Don't believe me, view the source code of any page with AdSense code on it. You will see the JavaScript code, not the links which the code creates.

Yes, this is accurate -- I don't believe bots will be able to crawl these links as there is no actual anchor tag in the source code. Perhaps I am wrong but this would be my assumption.

Anyone have any definite answer to this?