5 Great Mistakes To Avoid When Creating A Google Ad Campaign

Now Google on one hand likes the inexperienced person because they make more money per click but they also like to make sure that the people who are searching are finding what they are looking for. So, Google has almost a contradictory position. They like people who don’t know what they are doing because they can charge more and they like people who know what they are doing because those who are searching will ultimately find what they are searching for. So, you’ll find with Google often that one ad is great and one ad is stinks, so on and so on. This actually balances out their revenues. This is an overview of Google, now here are the 5 costly mistakes.

Mistake #1. This is the biggest mistake people make and Google makes a ton of money because of people’s lack of knowledge when placing their ads. There are three places your ads can be shown with Google.

1. The first place is on the Google results page. Which is the best place for your ad to be shown?

2. The second place is, Google will ship out the ads of their advertisers to other search engines, like Ask.com. Now a search engine partner like Ask.com is pretty good but not as good as Google in terms as results.

3. The third place where Google sends ads kills companies or the individual advertiser. Let’s take a look at one of these places. This is an actual company that I want you to look up. Go ahead and go to Eaglestar.net. This is a website that is on Google’s Content Network. Basically, all this is, is a site where Google ads are show. So here you can see on this site that there are some Google ads. These are terrible ads! For one, they are very small and hard to see. But more importantly, there is only a title and nothing describing the ad. This is a huge problem for the advertiser! Remember the whole thing we discussed about click through rate and how Google rewards companies who have a high click through rate.

If you go to some property site to search for something you’ll see “Hot new Properties”. Are you going to look for Google ads that have nothing to do with your search? Heck no! You’re going there to look for hot new properties at eagle star. So what happens is, you’ll have lots of people seeing these ads or having the opportunity to see these ads but almost no one clicks on them. Why? Because, nobody intends to click on them. People are going to eagle star which is on the content network of Google, not to do searches but to look at the information there, “featured properties”. They are not there to search and to click on ads. So what ends up happening is that your click through rate goes way down when you are on the content network. Why? Because, no one is clicking on these ads. On the rare occasion when someone does click on these ads you get almost no conversion. Why? Because, they are not your target market and that’s sole purpose for advertising, isn’t it! To get in front of the thousands of people each day who are searching for what you are marketing!

There are people who advertise on the content network of Google and they’ll get a million impressions and maybe they’ll get 1000 clicks. This is a horrible and deadly click through rate. And guess what? Google will penalize you for having such a bad click through rate. Now why would Google even have the content network the first place? Why does Google even have ads on the content network? Because, they make a 90% commission on these ads! If someone is paying a $2.00 click on Eagle star, Eagle star keeps 20 cents and Google keeps the rest.

Now you may be saying to your self, “ok, but there aren’t that many clicks on Google’s ads featured on eagle star.” So, they aren’t making that much, right? Wrong! Google is making a kings ransom on them because there are literally millions of pages of Google ads on the content network. So even if they are only getting 10-20 click on those pages a day there making a fortune.  

Also, 90% of click fraud comes from the content network. There are companies that will set up pages just to get Google ads on their sites. They put one article on the page, then they hire “click robots” to click away on these ads and this is how they make money and the advertiser makes nothing. They are completely worthless clicks.

Here is some shocking news! When you set up a campaign initially with Google, Google automatically turns on the content network no matter what you do! So when you set up an ad on Google your ads are automatically going to show up on Google and on the content network unless you know better.

So when I come across someone who can’t get any results and who is paying too much, the first thing I tell them is to go to the campaign settings on their Google account. This is a section that almost nobody knows. You should unclick the content network and turn it off! That is the first thing I do with every campaign that I ever run. 90 out of 100 people will have the same mistake of having their content network on. The minute it is turned off, the click through rates and the rates they ship the ads to like Ask.com start going through the roof automatically. All of a sudden they start paying less per click. This is a secret that Google doesn’t what anyone to know about because they make so much money. They are able to justify charging people more per click because of their click through rates are in the bottom of the tank. This is the number one don’t when you set up a Google Campaign. You must turn off the content network.

Mistake #2. The words you place in your ad are too general. What happens is, many people will run an ad campaign, for example in the mortgage industry and let’s say the key word they choose to advertise on is the word Mortgage. That’s an extremely general keyword. It costs a fortune to get that keyword to be on the first results page. So you pay much more.  
 

Mistake #3. When you set up a campaign you don’t use what are called “quotes” or [brackets]. These help you be very specific. So when you use quotes with your keywords, you are telling Google you only want your ad to be shown when people type, “making money on the internet”. If you don’t put these quotes, your ad will show up in the search results with any sentence that has those five words in it. Even worse, let’s say somebody uses the keyword money and doesn’t put any quotes around it. Guess what happens. Anytime someone puts any keyword phrase in there with the word money your ad is gong to show up. So if you put quotes around your keywords, you’ll narrow down the search and your marketing will be targeted. 

Mistake #4. Let’s say someone types in the search bar, a real home business. Now which of the ads on the right hand side of the results page are going to be the most effective? The ad with, a real home business in the title, right? Of course it is! This is exactly what they are searching for. What about the ad below it, I was scammed 37 times. Is this going to be an effective ad? What about, top affiliate program? No, because it says nothing regarding, a real home business. So the mistake people make when they do their copywriting is, they fail to put the keywords that they are using either in the title or the body of the ad. If not, your ad doesn’t show to the individual as being relevant in what they are specifically looking for.

Mistake #5 Remember we discussed that there are three places that Google advertises their ads on. The Google results page, ads they ship out to other search engines and last but not least, they post their ads to companies who have set up their own websites and who become Google advertisers, the Content Network. Again, these ads are virtually, in fact they are not just worthless they destroy a campaign.

So let’s talk about the second place and that’s when Google ships out the ad to other search engines like Ask.com. If you have a campaign with Google you can actually see how many of the clicks are being shown on their network of ads that they are shipping out to other search engines. On many campaigns you can see about 40% of the clicks that happen on any Google campaign, are clicks that are shipped out to one to three other search engines. Do you realize you can actually cut a deal with those other search engines to have your campaigns running on their sites and pay a lot less! You can also turn off Google’s ability to ship your ads to other search engines. So, if the click cost is $2.00 and they ship the ad to Ask.com and someone clicks on that shipped ad, Ask.com may keep 30 or 40 cents as Google keeps $1.60-$1.70!

If you look at your Google campaign and find out that 40% of your clicks are occurring on other search engines, you can then use some very simple analytics to figure out where all these clicks are coming from. And the clicks that are coming from the other search engines you’ll see on the anilities. Then all you have to do is turn off the search network and tell Google, that you only want your ads to be shown on Google and no where else.

Here are your costly 5 mistakes one more time.

1. When starting your ad campaign turn off the Content Network.

2. Don’t use overly generalized keywords. For example, if you are selling reverse mortgages, don’t use the keyword, mortgage. Use the keyword, reverse mortgage. If you are selling an internet business opportunity, don’t just use the word, opportunity. The more specific you get, the less you will pay per click. The better the click through rate, the better your conversion to leads and customers will be.

3. Use quotes and brackets around your keywords to be more specific. If you have a campaign that is set up and you don’t have any of the keywords in quotes or brackets you’ll pay twice as much and you’ll get half the results. You’ll have a poor conversion rate from visitors to leads.

4. Make sure that the keywords that you are using are some where in the ad. If you are going to use the keyword top mlm, make sure it is in your ad. Why? That is specifically what that individual is looking for! Plus, Google will knock your quality score down. If the searcher doesn’t see the words top mlm in the ad, they will be less likely to click on your ad. The people who get the best results with Google put keywords either in the title or in the body.

5. If you are getting a lot of clicks from some other search engines that Google has shipped out, you can turn off Google’s ability to ship your ads out to other search engines. You can then cut direct deals with them and save a ton of money.

If you incorporate these five strategies into any campaign, it will reduce the click cost by a factor of at least 50%. You will increase the number of relevant clicks you get and your conversion rate form visitors to leads will triple or quadruple.