Here we explore some of the most common mistakes businesses make in Google Search campaign setup and implementation, and exactly what to look for to generate the greatest paid results for your company.

Google Search Campaign Setup

1. Unorganised Campaigns & Ad Groups

The first thing to do before setting up a search campaign is to understand what you’re advertising. It might sound simple, but advertising a business usually involves advertising the brand/business, as well as specific products/services related to your organisation. However, it is important to differentiate between both within your search campaigns or this could lead to two big issues:

• Cannibalisation: multiple campaigns competing against each other for the same target audience.
• Poor audience leads: rather than providing specific, highly targeted ads, the ads will be too broad, leading to poor quality traffic through to your website.

It is important to split key products/services into different and distinct ad groups. This will then also allow for keyword research and selection to be more targeted and drive higher quality traffic to your equally as targeted landing pages.

2. Poor Keyword Research

Keywords are a crucial part of setting up an effective search campaign. They are the specific phrases that a user will type in a search engine, which will trigger your ad.

The first step for maximising keyword performance is through research. There are a number of tools that can be used to find the right keywords for a campaign, but to ensure optimal performance, it is recommended multiple tools are used. Another way to also find effective keywords is to conduct your own searches and noting which keywords appear most frequently for other businesses in your industry, as well as checking Google Search Console to see which search terms are mostly used to access your website.

While your keyword list might be quite long to begin with, this will allow for more choices when it comes to culling and linking specific keywords to ad groups. With keyword selection, it’s important to include a mix. General keywords are perfect for driving traffic, but too many can also be highly ineffective at reaching your highly qualified target market. Whereas, too many specific keywords can lead to poor performance, as there can be little to no search volume around the keywords. The optimal strategy is to include a few of each across each ad group, while being sure to minimise any crossover between the ad groups themselves.

3. Ineffective Ads & Extensions

Google offers a few different ad options within a search campaign, but the main two are expanded text ads (ETAs) and responsive search ads (RSAs). ETAs are made up of three headlines, which usually include the key selling points to a user. This is then followed by two descriptions, which provide further information on the company, product/service as well as added benefits. RSAs on the other hand involve a user inputting multiple headlines and description options and then Google swapping them around to provide optimal combinations based on someone’s search keywords. One of the most common errors involves having too many ads running or ads with the exact same ad copy. To ensure the best performance, look at including 3-4 ETAs with varying descriptions and headlines and 1 RSA. This will allow for an organisation to effectively test which parts of ads resonate the best with potential customers, while also utilizing Google’s RSAs.

Extensions are also important to have and provide extra information about the business such as location (Location Extension), phone number (Call Extension) or links to other specific parts of a website (Sitelinks). Not only does this information help to increase the visibility of the ad, they have also been linked with more clicks on ads.

4. Non-Existent Conversion Tracking

There is no point running a Google search campaign if it cannot be effectively measured. Not only will the data collected dictate any changes made to the campaign, but it will also play an integral role in determining future campaigns and marketing strategies. It is therefore vital that your Google Ads are linked to the websites Google Analytics account and Google Search Console account to extract useful insights into overall campaign performance.

Google Search Ads Campaign Maintenance

Once a campaign has been enabled, the next most important step is ad campaign maintenance. There are a number of aspects that need to be observed and updated which include:

1. Data Tracking

It is important to make sure that the data from campaigns is consistently monitored. Be sure to routinely check that the campaign is performing at its optimal throughout, so any abnormalities can be recognised and quickly rectified.

2. Google Ads Efficiency

Ads will need to be monitored to ensure that under-performing ads are optimised, in relation to headlines, ad descriptions and even the display path to offer the best possible chance of conversions being achieved.

3. Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are key phrases or words you can input, which will stop your ad from running when they are searched. This list will be determined by routinely checking the search terms linked to your ads and adding any that are not related to your business, product or service. Be careful when doing this however, as it is important to not exclude keywords which could actually be useful to the campaign.

An effective Google search campaign requires a great deal of work in both setting up and monitoring. To make sure you have the best possible search campaign for your business, talk to the Google Ads experts at Redline Digital today.