Google Adwords can be very confusing for a small business owner.  I just wanted to share some quick basics for businesses setting up their adwords campaigns to avoid some common mistakes that I see even large budget companies doing.  These basics are important no matter how much you are spending, but can be even more important when trying to spread out a small budget.

BE SPECIFIC

Keyword Matching: One of the most common issues I see from business owners is that they want to show up for everything.  With Adwords, you can do that, but it gets very expensive and not very targeted.  Also, Google  uses their standard and default broad match settings to not only have you target the specific term or word you select, but also anything they deem to be similar to that concept. For example, I’ve seen mold companies target mold and show up for “cake molds”, and “concrete molds”, etc.  You must be very specific with your targeting and actually may want to avoid broad matches and be creative with the different Google match types.  At least be aware that they are out there and what they mean.

Concept Targeting: If you are a landscaping company that does seeding, landscaping, tree work, hardscaping, and more, you don’t want to just throw them all in a campaign with an ad and send it to your home page.  Advanced companies actually create landing pages for every specific concept they target.  Small businesses may not have this option as available to them, but you should at least separate your advertising by service area and send users searching for hardscaping to a page about hardscaping and landscaping to landscaping.  You will waste a lot of money not sending searchers to something that talks to exactly what they are searching for.  If you didn’t consider it important enough to create a page about it on your site, you probably shouldn’t be spending money advertising on it. Stick to what you have content for and be very specific about it.  I’ve even seen campaigns for mortgages fail because the landing page said home loans.  Searchers like to see what they searched for.  Don’t just send them to a home page for everything in your campaign. You want to create a new adgroup for each concept.

Ad Copy: Staying on the same theme,  you need to target your ads to the specific concept you are targeting.  Just as searchers like to see what they are searching for in the landing page they show up on, they also like to see it in the ad copy.  If they are searching for mortgages, they are going to be more drawn to an ad talking about mortgages, rather than home loans, or best bank, etc. It is good to have multiple ads for each concept and rotate to see which selling point works best.

In future posts we will get more in to budgeting, mobile responsiveness, remarketing, ad extensions and targeting techniques.  Just want to give you a little bit at a time to absorb. If you want someone to manage all of this for you, we have great and flexible programs to help you best manage your budget and we are Google Certified.

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