A lesson in the costly consequences of not knowing the rules of Google AdWords is the example of 12-year-old Jose Javier from Spain, who, hoping to profit from ads, not only earned nothing but received a bill from the corporation for a staggering EUR 100,000. Although this is an extreme case, it's worth checking when a campaign can generate unnecessary costs.
The popularity of Google AdWords doesn't come out of nowhere. Several factors are responsible for it. The first is the ability to precisely target advertising to a customer who is specifically searching for a particular product, service, or a competitively priced offer. The second is the option to plan the geographic reach of a campaign, meaning that AdWords will be chosen by both a local business and one that directs its offer to customers across the country or beyond its borders. The third aspect is also significant: the chance for a quick return on investment, which is possible even when a single click on an ad costs not a few cents but several dozen zlotys.
Of course, no advertising campaign will be effective if it is run thoughtlessly and with mistakes. Which of them are the most serious, generating costs in the form of a lack of conversions?
Keywords
- Let's note that the same word can have different meanings. For example, "zamek" means both "zipper" and "castle," and can also be "a lock in a door." Therefore, when choosing key phrases, you need to be careful that they present the promoted services or products in the right context and are not too general – explains Dr. Eng. Artur Pajkert from the hosting company Hekko.pl. Additionally, it's worth using the so-called long tail, combining the word with the name of the promoted or competing brand (if it is known) or the name of the city where the company is located (in the case of local activities).
You should also make sure that keywords, of which there are often hundreds or even thousands, are properly grouped. Otherwise, the ad will be displayed to people not interested in the given message, and the campaign itself will lose quality. To avoid this situation, it's worth getting familiar with Google AdWords Editor, which makes creating the account structure and introducing ad groups and phrases easier.
Exclusions and broad match
Every website owner wants to direct the right traffic to it from people interested in the offer. Therefore, it is a mistake to use keywords exclusively in one matching type – the default broad match.
Why? Because such an action causes the ad to be displayed even for queries containing words close in meaning to the one we provided, and in various contexts. After all, "dog grooming" is not the same as "hedge trimming." By using only broad matches and no exclusions, we expose ourselves to collecting paid traffic that has little to do with our offer.
Ad extensions
Which ad will you click on, which one will you pay attention to? Of course, the one optimally placed high, and at the same time attractive graphically and textually. Therefore, it's worth using extensions, thanks to which you can distinguish your message from others, encouraging the user to take a specific conversion action and choose this offer over a competing one.
Remember that an ad with extensions can contain links to subpages, explanations, call buttons, website information, and location, while the condition for their display is an appropriate ad quality score (Quality Score).
Analysis and conversion data
Every campaign, to be effective, must have clearly defined goals. The desired action can be purchasing a product, signing up for a newsletter, filling out a contact form, a survey, etc. Therefore, it is a mistake to lack conversion data, which allows for analyzing the campaign and optimizing it to achieve the highest number of expected actions.
Directing users to the homepage very rarely favors conversion. Therefore, to give yourself a chance of triggering it, it's best to direct users to precisely selected subpages of your website.
Choosing hosting
No advertising campaign can be left "to itself." In the case of AdWords, it's about systematic optimization and testing – you should check clicks, whether the ad hasn't been disabled due to poor word selection, or whether its budget hasn't run out. The account should be linked with Google Analytics to be able to analyze the effectiveness of paid traffic thanks to access to qualitative data (e.g., average time spent on the site, number of visits, bounce rate).
The previously mentioned quality score, the so-called Quality Score, is important. When it is weak, it will prevent the display of extensions, though that's not the end of the "penalties." The basic consequence is a higher price that will have to be paid for clicks in the Google AdWords auction model (which is correlated with a lower ad position in the results).
Three groups of factors influence the quality score. One of them is the quality of the landing page, including loading speed and server-side compression. It's worth knowing this when choosing hosting, checking whether the hosting company, for example, regularly advises on how to optimize your pages or server settings (for example, on blog.hekko.pl you can find tips and charts showing how the choice of PHP version can affect page loading speed).
- Hosting is an important element in building a website's evaluation by the search engine and its advertising mechanisms, thereby contributing to better effectiveness of activities. Therefore, it must be stable and fast, and preferably also supported by excellent customer service that will advise what settings will be best for a given website – summarizes Jakub Dwernicki, president of Hekko.pl.
