You are spending hundreds of dollars on the Adwords campaign yet the outcome is far from being impressive, if not outrightly disappointing. Don’t blame the platform for the underperformancebecause probably your marketing decisions have something to do with this lackluster performance of your ads on adwords. Since you will be paying for every single click, you need to make sure that not a single marketing dollar is getting wasted. To help you out, here we are going to give a roundupof top 6 reasons that are throwing a spanner in your adwords marketing effort.
1# You are Targeting too Many Keywords
Not all keywords are good for your adwords campaign. For example, if you have framed an ad copy for a life coaching center, you should be very particular before adding keywords like – ‘life coaching benefits’, ‘life coaching article’, ‘free life coaching’ etc because these keywords are not related to your advertisement campaign and are definitely not going to help you achieve your advertising goal.
2# You Are Using Content Network and You Are Not Even Aware of It
The Content Network option gets activated by default and therefore, when you are setting up adwords account for a website, you need to make sure that you have turned it off. Featuring ads on Content Network is not ideal for all websites and marketing campaigns. Content Network consists of sites like Food Network, The New York Time, About.com etc. So, if you feel that your marketing campaign has nothing to do this type of advertising campaign, you need to deactivate this option.
3# You Do not Have a Landing Page
Say you are an owner of an ecommerce store and at the same time you are running an ad copy of some refurbished Laptops. The rule of thumb is you should create a separate landing page for this purpose or at least, you should be sending the visitors to a page that contains some refurbished Laptops. Now, some people think otherwise; they don’t invest money and time to create a separate landing page for their adwords rather they tend to send all the visitors to the home page of the website. This is the worst thing that can happen to an adwords campaign. As an example, a popular form of landing page is the Feature bar, which displays your product prominently at the top of your homepage.
4# You Are Not Using Negative Keywords
By adding negative keywords, you can stop your ads from appearingin irrelevant terms. For example, if you are selling ‘The Hobbit Paperback’, you should be adding the following words / phrases as negative keywords – ‘free’, ‘download’, ‘pdf’, ‘read online’, ‘notes’ etc. By specifying these terms as negative keywords, you will be able to stop your ads from showing when searched with the following phrases –‘free download The Hobbit’, ‘read The Hobbit online’ etc. So, if you are not concentrating on Negative Keywords, you are going to pay for the clicks that will never contribute to the total number of sales.
5# Your Ad Copy Is Worthless
Some people are of the belief that writing ad copy is the easiest thing on earth. But the truth is entirely different. To make people click on your ads and to get higher Quality Score, you need to make sure that you have done enough research before writing the ad copy. It has to be well crafted, should include the keywords and also should contain some Call to Action Texts.
6# You Are not Tracking Anything
Just making an ad live on Adwords is not enough, you need to track things like – Search Terms, CTR, First Page Bid Amount, Number of conversion etc to be able to make the most of your adwords campaign. Adwords account needs to be linked with Analytics also, otherwise how on earth you are going to track which keywords are driving the most traffic to your website and which keywords are converting most visitors.
