Paid search or PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising on Google AdWords can achieve great results for SMEs (small to medium enterprises) because there’s no minimum spend. You can also set constraints such as a persons location so that your adverts show to people local to your business.
However, it is a complicated system that takes a lot of effort to setup, even though once setup it can reap great rewards and result in increased turnover. Many businesses however, fail to implement a Google Adwords campaign successfully because they make mistakes when setting up their campaign resulting in inefficiencies and a wasted monthly budget.many small businesses fail as despite the flexibility of the advertising platform it’s easy to make mistakes when setting up your campaign which lead to wasted budget.
So here are the most common mistakes that people make so you can avoid doing the same:
- Failing to generate a keyword list properly – This is at the heart of how search engines work and it is vital that you understand it. Google even provides a keyword search tool *** to help you. This will help give you ideas of which keywords are appropriate for your business.
- Not doing keyword analysis – Google will of course tell you how much a click is going to cost you per keyword, that’s their pricing list, but how many times a month is that keyword or search term used every month, and how many strong results are there that you will be competing with? Teach yourself how to do keyword analysis and apply it.
- Using all keywords in one ad – this may sound like a good idea but the optimum way to advertise on Google is to create many variations of the same advert using separate keywords so that you can test and improve your results
- Not testing results – too many people set up a campaign and they might look at the results table but they probably don’t understand what it is telling them, or how to use that information to make changes to their campaign to get even better results.
- Sending all traffic to homepage – make the destination of your ad appropriate to the search term. That way the person clicking on your ad gets straight to what they were looking for and is more inclined to have a look around than just click back and find another listing.
Whilst it can appear to be a complicated process and much more involved (to the untrained eye) than just putting a listing in a local newspaper, it is worth the effort when its done correctly and you see the results.
If you’re interested in Essex Internet Marketing Solutions setting up or managing your Google Adwords account, you can find more information here.
*** Please note that Google’s Keyword Tool has been killed off and replaced by Keyword Planner. New Article coming soon.
