By Mary O’Brien, PPC Summit Founder
Part One. This is a two part article. Part Two will appear in our next Pay Per Click Insiders newsletter.Small businesses face a unique set of challenges when it comes to Search Engine Marketing. They don’t have a lot of time to constantly monitor campaigns while juggling their other business responsibilities and they typically can’t afford to hire a full time marketing person to run them. They also don’t have the dollars to invest to test huge campaigns and every dollar they spend needs to return an immediate and significant investment, otherwise they tend to just throw up their hands and bail on the process assuming it just doesn’t work for their type of business .
In some cases that may be true, but more frequently they simply haven’t set up the campaign correctly to start with, or have set it up and forgotten about it until at some point they review their credit card statement and realize it’s providing diminishing ROI. With a little education you can avoid most of the common things that kill small business AdWords campaigns and make them perform more effectively for you.
Here are the top ten mistakes many small businesses make that cause their AdWords Campaigns to fail:
1. Not turning off the content network.
When first setting up a campaign in AdWords turn off the content network. Google sets this option as “on” by default, but it typically only works for certain products/industries and those advertisers with a lot of experience and the ability to perform frequent testing. The content network doesn’t deliver relevant enough results to make it worthwhile on a small budget. It’s difficult to manage where your ad shows up and what queries it will show for unless you know what you are doing. Ads on the content network can show up on hundreds of Web sites and generate thousands of clicks. While this can be a good thing if you are looking for cheap traffic and know what you are doing, you can also run through dollars very quickly. These aren’t focused searchers, specifically looking for your product or service; they are typically impulse buyers at a very early phase of the buying cycle. Nurtured properly these leads can turn into sales, but if you are just starting out or have limited dollars to spend that’s not where you want to get hung up.
2. Using too many or too few keywords.
Some small businesses assume they can get all the sales they need with twenty keywords, others go to the other extreme and add thousands before they really know how to properly set up a campaign. The folks with the twenty keyword campaigns bail out fast as they typically blow through their budgets in less than a month, wondering why they used the main keywords their competitors are on, but didn’t get many sales. That’s why. They spent too much on obvious keywords that everyone else has been bidding on for ages. Some of their larger competitors have already tested their ads, landing pages and bids to see what works, tweaked them and moved on. This strategy does not create a level playing field for a smaller business or give them any type of advantage, as you are playing a high risk game with high dollar keywords and there are always going to be competitors who have more money to spend than you do.
The folks who start off with thousands of keywords basically forget one simple thing. There is no point in having that many keywords unless you have the ability to test them and see which ones perform for you. With this strategy you’re just throwing mud against the wall and hoping something sticks.
Start off with 200 – 300 targeted keywords and that will allow you to test appropriately. You can use free tools like those from WordStream to determine which keywords to begin with. Then, when you have a list together, work on organizing your Ad Groups, and creating relevant ads.
3. Not structuring Campaigns correctly
In a perfect world your campaigns would be set up like this:
Campaign One:
Keyword One = One Ad Group = Three unique Titles & Descriptions to test
Keyword Two = One Ad Group = Three unique Titles & Descriptions to test
But seriously, very few small businesses have time to become a full time copywriter and marketing analyst, so wait to try this approach on your top performing keywords after you get some results. At the start, you need to set up your campaigns in a user friendly fashion that allows you to test easily and frequently and see at a glance what’s working and more importantly what’s not.
Creating ad groups with sets of tightly matched keywords is critical but most small businesses don’t do it. Add a few (maximum 10) relevant keywords to each ad group and add more groups as necessary to accommodate new “themed” keywords. Google maxes out at 100 ad groups per campaign, so you have plenty of room to move things around until you see what makes the most sense.
4. Using broad match unilaterally.
When you initially set up a Google AdWords campaign and input your keywords, the default type is broad match. While broad match can work effectively, it’s better to start off using phrase and exact match types, track the performance and adjust from there. Examples of match types and their functions are:
• Broad: tennis shoes (any order, any word, not as targeted, more clicks)
• Phrase: “tennis shoes” (exact order, words before and/or after, more targeted, less clicks)
• Exact: [tennis shoes] (exact order, no other words, highly targeted, least clicks)
• Negative: – white (this would not show ads for “white tennis shoes”)
By setting all your keywords to broad match initially you allow Google to control which keywords it deems “relevant” for your campaigns rather than deciding for yourself. Broad Match can provide great targeted traffic, but ONLY when you have a large list of negative keywords attached to the campaign and ad groups. Don’t even think about trying broad match without determining which negative keywords you want to use first. Otherwise you run the risk of Google’s algorithm running your campaign for you without a true understanding of your product or service offering. Really? You’d allow a robot to run your business? I would never suggest using broad match on a small budget campaign. You will just blow through money before you can test and determine the appropriate keywords for your business.
5. Not tracking ads and keywords.
Many businesses both large and small set up their ad campaigns assuming that they will just be able to measure results by the amount of sales or leads that come rolling in. They forget this simple fact: If your campaigns aren’t performing, you’re wasting money from the very start. There is no excuse for this given the fact that the Google Analytics tool is available for free to help you track exactly which keywords aren’t performing. Set it up and use from the very start to adjust your results.
All of this may sound a little intimidating at first and as a small business owner you’re probably wondering where on earth you can find the time to work on all of this. Setting up the campaigns properly is a good first step. The next is to learn as much as you can about AdWords. That’s what will give you a true competitive advantage in the long term, and with a little bit of knowledge you can tweak your campaigns to truly perform better.
For additional information we’d like to invite you to attend our upcoming AdWords Advantage Online Summit where a team of 13 experts will go into much greater depth on strategies that you can use right now to make your AdWords Campaigns produce more dollars.
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Mary O’Brien is the Founder and Chairman of Pay Per Click (PPC) Summit and AdWords Advantage Online Summit, premier Search Engine Marketing training events held in person and online to offer laser-focused education to help internet marketers make more money with Pay Per Click advertising. These training events bring together an expert pool of Search Marketing’s most respected leaders during hands-on workshops, how-to sessions, power labs, personal consulting and much more.
