Getting to grips with Google Ads is vital if you want your new company to be found online. Unfortunately, this can take a bit of trial and error. To help your nail your campaigns, Rapid Formations highlight the big mistakes new businesses make when starting up with Google Ads.
Keywords lack focus
Everyone has a basic knowledge of how Google works. You enter a search term, and you’re presented with content and adverts that match your query. The more nuanced your search term, the more specific – and hopefully useful – your results will be.
Despite knowing this, it’s incredible how many people start up with Google Ads by bidding on too broad keywords. This can result in clicks, but these will be clicks from the wrong audience, who you are unlikely to convert into customers.
For example, if you own a salon in Brighton that specializes in cutting children’s hair, you shouldn’t bid on ‘Hair salon’ or ‘Hairdresser.’ Instead, you should look at terms such as ‘Children’s haircut Brighton’ or ‘Sussex children’s hairdresser.’
The ads are bad
When beginning with Google Ads, it’s easy to fall into the trap of spending the majority of your time in the initial start-up phase of setting your budget, picking your keywords, and neglecting to spend the required time writing compelling ads.
Coming up with a catchy headline and thorough (but, dare we say it, entertaining) description requires effort on your part. It’s not something that should be knocked out in a matter of minutes.
Research what your competition is doing using Google Ads’ Transparency Tool. What works? What doesn’t? What sets your business apart? How can you get this across in as few words as possible? Take the necessary time and get it right.
Failing to use negative keywords
Negative keywords are words that would generally be associated with your actual keywords but ones that you don’t want to rank for.
Think of it like running a shop, and every so often, you have visitors looking for a product you don’t sell. Sometimes you’ll understand why the person has visited your shop, but you just don’t sell that specific product. At other times, their visit was based on a complete misunderstanding.
For example, if you run an online store selling musical instruments, you should create a negative keyword list of the types of instruments you don’t stock. However, as well as specifying that you sell musical instruments, you may want to add ‘medical instrument’ to your negative keyword list to ensure you don’t get a wholly wrong type of customer.
If you fail to use negative keywords, you will appear on searches that aren’t relevant to your business, ultimately costing you money.
Sending customers to the wrong place
The location you’re sending someone to after clicking your ad must match up with the ad itself.
There will be campaigns where your homepage is the most appropriate place to direct a click; however, there will also be instances where this will be jarring for the user and leave them wondering how the ad they saw syncs up with the page they’re now on.
Consider the story your ad is telling. If it doesn’t, can you use a new landing page? If you have resources to develop a dedicated new landing page? If a campaign has a solid click-through rate, this is worth considering.
Lack of analysis
Once a campaign is completed, it can be tempting to confine it to the archives and forget about it. However, to succeed with Google Ads, you need to take the time to analyze what went well and what didn’t.
Clicks, click-through rate, impressions, cost per click, and conversations are all metrics you need to dig into to ascertain whether a campaign worked. Then, you need to use your findings to inform your next campaign.
It takes patience, but it’s a fundamental step to achieving success with Google Ads.
Thanks for reading
So there you have it, common Google Ads mistakes your new business needs to avoid. We hope you have found this article helpful.
Rapid Formations have helped incorporate thousands of UK-limited companies for business owners worldwide. With company formation packages priced from only £12.99, they’re the perfect starting point for anyone wanting to take their first steps in business. Take a look at their range of company formation packages now.
