The Four Worst Mistakes In Google AdWords and How To Avoid Them

1) Having single words as keywords

This is a very bad mistake to make in your AdGroups and even Google itself has warned users not to use single words in their selection, however many advertisers have chosen to ignore this.

The major problem with using single words is that the search becomes too broad. For example if you are selling sport cars and you select one of your keywords to be "cars" this will make your advert show if the customer searches on any of the following queries:

"antique cars"
"cars magazine"
"cars mechanic"
"sports cars suck"
"green peace fight against pollution from cars"
"cars news"
"auction for old cars"
"second hand cars"

As you can see, advertisers that use single word keywords are appearing on searches that their companies or products are not associated with.

The problem with this is that some people are bound to click on your advert and waste your money because they have no intention of buying sports cars. This is why you have to come up with different key phrases and keywords that not only provide sufficient search volume but also allow you to target your products at the right consumers.

2) Not having negative keywords

Negative matching keywords are a special kind of keyword that allows the user to choose keywords for which they don't want their adverts to shown on. Let's give you a quick example. If you are advertising for the keyword "buy computer" and you don't want your adverts to show if user types a search query "buy computer parts" than you will insert a negative keywords "-parts".

Having no negative keywords is a mistake that we have seen in many user accounts and it has caused them serious problems.

First of all when you adverts shows on searches for products that you do not sell, some users will again click on your ad, wasting you valuable money from your advertising budget.

Secondly your Click-Through-Rate (CTR) will suffer significantly because your ads are not well targeted. This will result in increase of an advertiser's cost-per-click and a decrease in their quality score.

This is why you need to choose negative keywords using extensive keyword research and specialised search query monitoring.

3) Not tracking statistics

Tracking conversions, web statistics and user actions is one of the most useful tools of a skilled e-marketer. A large number of AdWords advertisers do not use the resources provided to them by Google and their web hosting companies.

In order to be successful in marketing online and take the right decisions, you need to know everything there is to know about the visitors to your site such as how much is each click worth, what you can afford to get a customer and the ROI for each ingredient in your AdWords mix.

This is why conversion tracking, Google Analytics, and your hosting domain statistics should be used religiously when making decisions about your AdWords account and online marketing strategies.

4) Not having click fraud protection

Do you know that a recently conducted survey suggested that as much as 30% of pay-per-click traffic may be fraudulent? No? Well then you could be getting robbed blind. It is vital that you have click fraud protection in place because in today's competitive market your competition may be prepared to do anything, just to be on step ahead of you.

I have heard numerous clients saying that their competition is clicking on their ad to waste their daily budget, but in the end of the day they don't have any hard evidence to prove it and force Google to take action and refund them on their fraudulent clicks.

You should know who is clicking on your ad on each day, hour, minute and second to have solid evidence that you are a victim of click fraud.

Alexander and his colleagues at Advertise PPC have helped numerous companies make their AdWords accounts profitable and cost-effective. If you are a business running Google AdWords and need assistance to improve your accounts performance please do not hesitate to visit our website and have a look at our services http://www.ad-vertise.co.uk/

Copyright 2007 Alexander Georgiev - Google AdWords Professional - Advertise PPC

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