Are you running or looking to start a Google Ads PPC campaign? Read this article to make sure you aren’t making these 7 common mistakes with your PPC campaigns.

1. Contactless Ads

Google Ads without your contact information listed will take up less space in search results than ones that do. Not only that Google like you to make use of all their features and will reward you for using them, make sure you have setup all your Google Ad Extensions. This will make your adverts more noticeable and informative.

2. Websites Lacking Quick Links & A Favicon

Make sure your website is informative and gives the user all the information they need, have easy to use navigation and links to other important areas of the site is critical. Don’t forget to make sure your website has a Favicon too, it gives your website a finished look and in our testing we have found that this error can lead to a decrease in traffic, Click Through Rates, and an increase in ad budgets.

3. Lack of Variety In Adverts

We have found that it’s important to have a range of adverts for each of your adverts. This allows you to test which adverts work best and allow you to get the most from your budgets. Make sure your adverts aren’t too similar when starting out, try different wording and call to actions. Once you find what works for your business you can try more similar adverts to fine tune your Ad campaigns but to start with variety is important.

4. Lack Of Multiple Campaigns For Different Regions

It’s important that if your are targetting different areas of the country that you split out your campaigns. Without this separation, you can waste the budget by not knowing which areas of the country convert and which don’t. Dividing the campaign, you’ll identify which counties or areas are more effective, from this you can adjust your budgets and bidding strategies.

5. Improper PPC Ad Campaign Structure

It’s common for new Google Ads users to just create a single campaign with one set of keywords and ads. It’s important that you really think about what you are doing and add structure to your campaigns. You need not only make sure that the keywords match the adverts you create and the landing pages are relevant, you need to make sure that the keywords match where the potential customer is in the buying process. Is the keyword a buying keyword or an informational keyword?

Some other PPC campaign structures you can think about include: brand, general keywords, counties, each product, each service and special promotions.

6. The Website Doesn’t Load

This is a massive one and as issue we see more than you would think. It’s important that your landing page loads when clicked. Google will charge you for the click regardless of the page loading, so make sure your website is working.

7. Conversion Tracking

This is a massive one! If you aren’t tracking results how do you know if your ads are working. Some people like to guess their campaigns work and say things like “well we get more calls when the ads are running”, well this is fine but if this is your strategy you are most likely throwing money away. You need to be tracking our online sales and telephone calls, so not only do you know that your campaigns are working but what in your campaign is working. You need to know which keywords and which adverts convert and which don’t. Google Analytics is your friend for online conversions, but it you are running lead generation campaigns and want to generate telephone calls, you need to use call tracking software like Call Conversions to capture this important data. By doing this you can improve your conversion rates and really grow your business.

Conclusion

We hope that this article has helped you improve your Google Ads campaigns. If you would like more help with your Google Ads campaigns, why not hire us to optimise your campaigns for you? The first stage in any PPC campaign optimisation is an audit so we provid a FREE PPC Audit for all our customers and make all the changes for you, we then monitor and optimise your campaigns to make sure you are getting the most from your marketing budgets.