20 Mistakes Increasing Your Google Ads Cost

Google Ads is an effective way of generating leads and sales because of the myriad of features, customizations, and targeting options it offers. If you’re a business owner who’s not using it to drive targeted traffic to your pages, you’re doing your business a disservice. In Google terms, more clicks translate to more traffic, visitors, leads, and potential customers. It all can happen very quickly if you avoid the same mistakes that leave many advertisers broke.

How to Avoid Poorly Performing Google Ads PPC Campaigns?

While a well-operated Ads account can drive a great deal of traffic to your online business, just one mistake can ruin everything. If a Google account is not managed well, it can soon become an expensive marketing initiative.

Here’s a quick guide to educate you about the most common mistakes that result in poorly performing PPC campaigns:

Unfocused Target Audience

Not targeting the right audience would probably be the first mistake that not only amateur advertisers commit. When setting up campaigns, avoid exceeding your PPC budget and make sure you consider your audience’s purchasing habits.

1. When using Radius Targeting, make sure you carefully select the areas.
2. Display your ads in the geographic location of your target audience.
3. Don’t drain your budget by targeting the wrong age or gender group.
4. Notice which device-type targeting gets you more conversions.
5. Using irrelevant keywords will attract wrong leads and drain your budget.

Duplicating Campaigns

Some advertisers create a duplicate of their existing campaign in the hope of making it a smart campaign. What they forget is innovative campaigns require historical data to perform better. If you don’t have any previous data, don’t expect your campaign to behave the same as before. Duplicating also causes the campaigns to fight against each other in the Ad Auction

Lack of Budget Knowledge

You can avoid budget mishaps by keeping the following guidelines in mind:

1. Do not choose an open budget when setting up display campaigns.
2. Double-check for any decimal in your budget.
3. For a precise monthly budget analysis, multiply the daily budget by 30.4.

Splitting the Budget

Splitting your budget rightly when using Google Ads is highly important. If you’re organising multiple campaigns from a single account, don’t split the budget across all of them, as it will be stretched too thin. The result will be all campaigns spending the same amount of funding.

It is not a good idea because if one campaign contains more popular keywords, the bid should be lower to run throughout the day.

Not Segmenting Keywords

When using keywords, it is essential to categorise them into separate ad groups. Otherwise, your quality score will decrease along with the chance of delivering relevant ads. You can organise the keywords based on Your Business Silos eg. Product collection, Brand names, Demographics & more.

No Branded Campaign

When developing your campaigns, make sure to create one that includes your brand keywords. If you don’t jump on the opportunity, your competitors will, making their ad popup for searchers before yours. Another crucial benefit to create brand campaigns is since it uses your brand name the CTR is high and CPC is low because your brand name gets the best relevance to your business, which improves the overall quality score of your ad account

One Ad Variation for Each Ad Group

Creating multiple variations of each ad boosts your chances of success. Have at least three ad copies to allow split-testing, weeding out low-performing variations, and supporting high-performing aspects. It will let you create a better version of each ad.

Not Adding Negative Keywords & Negative Lists

Negative keywords play a vital role in blocking your ad from displaying in irrelevant searches. If you don’t add such keywords, you are likely to drain money on advertising. So, add a long list of negative keywords before taking the campaign LIVE and updated them daily/weekly based on your ads search query report.

Not Optimising for Conversions

Setting up your campaign to deliver on your conversion goals is a vital part of PPC. With a specific goal in mind, you can optimise your campaign to maximum conversions.

The advice is to tailor your ad copy, landing pages, and calls-to-action so that they all work together to optimise for a specific conversion goal.

Not Linking Ads to a Relevant Landing Page

As an ad plays a crucial role in your customers’ journey, ensure that you provide them with a seamless, cohesive experience until they reach the landing page. Take your time to ensure that your landing page content relates to your ads, keywords, and audience interests.

If not done right, people will bounce off it quickly.

Ignoring Keyword Match Types

If you focus on a broad match type, it will drive a lot of traffic to your website. But since it may also attract irrelevant clicks from uninterested users, use a combination of match types (exact match & phrase match) to balance keyword relevance and audience reach.

Combining Search & Display Campaign

Combining search and display network settings impacts your ability to measure and optimise network performance. You need to manually separate the two campaigns as they get selected by default.

Blindly Using Ads Recommendations

Not every Google suggestion is guaranteed to work towards your conversion rates. So, think thoroughly before accepting a recommendation; otherwise, it will only drain your budget.

Not Using Ad Scheduling

One of the biggest Google Ads mistakes made by the advertisers is ignoring ad scheduling. It helps you let your ad run throughout the day whenever you want, making your budget last longer and giving you better results.

Analyse your Google Ads reports to understand what time of the day or day of the week gets you the most amount of conversion, go back and optimise the schedules based on that and confidently raise bids during those times

Not Using Search Term Reports

Search Terms report allows you to get an insight into the audience search behaviours. It also helps you find relevant search terms that you can add to your campaign and keywords list. Search term reports as discussed above also helps you weed out non-relevant keywords by adding them to negative keywords lists.

Not Using the Right Bid Strategy

You should experiment with different bidding strategies such as Manual and Automated Bidding as they generate positive results. Google ML is powerful once it gathers the data to make the correct decision, until then, its recommended to use Manual Bidding

Not Using Ad Extensions

Ad extensions allow the customers to take quick actions. If your business service allows for customer interaction, make sure the extensions show only when a representative is available. It also gets you more real estate on Google’s Search Results Page

Not Using Combined Audience

The Combined Audience option narrows your audience targeting to a more minor, more focused subject. It helps you save the budget and generate a much better ROI.

Not Knowing Your CLV

CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) lets you know how much future revenue you can gain from each customer. It also includes additional upsells, referrals, and purchases. If you don’t know your CLV, you’re only wasting your time and money on PPC advertising.

Not Having a Targeted CTA

After reading your ad, a well-written CTA (Call-To-Action) can drive a significant response from thousands of prospects. While your ad is a solution, CTA is the hook that keeps them engaged.

So, make sure your ads have a clear, strong CTA that compels the prospects to take action!

Creating Generic Shopping Campaigns

Do not add all products in one shopping campaign with a blanket CPC, separate campaigns, and ad groups. The best way to do this is to follow your category structure or silos on the website.

Conclusion

Making mistakes in PPC is a part of the learning process. So make sure you learn from them with consistent testing, monitoring, and analysis approach to build up your knowledge base. SIMBAA is well-experienced in managing and Scaling Google Ads over 15 years, Our proprietary Google Ads Framework gets consistent & reliable Ads ROI, Want to speak to a Google Ads Specialist in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide or Gosford (Central Coast), Book a Free Strategy Session today.