The 3 biggest mistakes in AdWords

Taking over management of live accounts, or auditing them, I run into all sorts of mistakes that damage campaign performance and the health of the whole account. I have picked the most serious ones, which unfortunately are not remotely unusual and often turn AdWords advertising into a black hole that only burns money and delivers no results.

1. Conversion tracking not set up and Analytics not linked

A conversion can be described as a valuable action on your website. It is the goal the campaign was set up for in the first place. It might be an e-shop order, a form submission, a phone call or a view of the contact page.

Setting up conversion tracking is essential for judging whether campaigns succeed, and whether they have any effect on your business at all. Thanks to conversion tracking it is easy to identify which keywords and which ads bring valuable visitors to the site.

Setting up conversions directly in AdWords

You can check your account's conversion tracking under the Tools tab in the top menu.

If conversion tracking has never been set up in your account, you will see this screen:

If you do see a list of tracked conversions, check whether tracking is actually set up correctly and whether conversions are being recorded:

Should you find that you are not tracking conversions, you can set one up. Detailed information on configuring them is in the clearly written Google AdWords help.

Linking AdWords and Analytics

Google Analytics, as one of the most comprehensive and most accessible measurement tools, should be missing from no website. It lets you measure and analyse traffic on your pages.

Since it is a Google tool, linking is very simple. Google has even put together a short video guide:

When conversions are not set up in AdWords, linking Analytics can at least partly save the situation: there we can see whether a visitor left the site right after clicking the ad, how many pages and which ones they viewed, and how long they stayed.

Those figures also make it possible to analyse and judge the quality of the site's traffic.

Once linked, Analytics also gives us a performance comparison, where you will be able to compare AdWords traffic against traffic from social media or other channels.

2. Poorly configured keywords

Keywords in AdWords can only be described as a setting, not as the search terms your ad actually appears for. Which searches show the ads that get clicked is something you find in the search terms report. Here it is:

AdWords has four keyword settings, called keyword match types: broad match, broad match modifier, phrase match and exact match. The match type you choose determines which different search queries the ad may appear for. More on match types can be found in the Google AdWords help.

A common mistake, though, is having every keyword in the account set to broad match, or spending most of the budget on keywords with that match type. It means the ad appears not only for searches tied to the keyword but also for synonyms, related variants of the word and related searches. In practice, an ad on the broad-match keyword kitchen pots may also appear for queries such as kitchen equipment, kitchen pans, cheap pots classifieds or tescoma. Cases like these are why keywords have to be constrained with different match types, so that the ad shows only for relevant queries.

3. Missing negative keywords

Just as AdWords lets you set the words you want to target, it also lets you set the words you do not want your ad to appear for. Whether you have that in your account is easy to check against this screenshot:

What should not be missing here are words that are unrelated to your business, or that bring no conversions. Frequently used exclusions are things like second-hand, comparison, forum or free collection, which can turn up alongside your keywords in search queries. You can also add words that have nothing to do with your business — if you sell new cars, for example, you would exclude used, pre-owned, car dealership and so on: words related to your industry, or to your keywords, but not to your business.

Did you find any of these mistakes in your account? If you want to be sure your campaigns are set up correctly, just get in touch and we will take a look. We will check not only these most common mistakes but many others too, which could be standing in the way of better AdWords results.