A very common Adwords mistake could cost you money

A very common mistake with Google Adwords campaigns can wind up costing you money. Discover what the mistake is and why it’s a problem. Learn what you can do to protect yourself.

Beginners should stay away from the Content Network in Google Adwords. When you are just starting out, disable the content network in your PPC campaigns.

Why? The content network is all the websites that belong to Google’s Adsense program. While Google is trustworthy, not all of it’s Adsense participants are. Some Adsense websites attempt blatant fraud. Just do a search for those who got banned from Adsense. In most all cases folks were banned for cheating Adwords advertisers by clicking ads.

Many other Adsense participants make every attempt to trick visitors into clicking your ad. Google doesn’t ban Adsense participants for just being sneaky, Google really only bans fraud. But, sneaky traffic is not going to get you any return for your Adwords spending. For example, two years ago, the hot thing to do on Adsense was place a graphic over the Adsense ad. The graphic was usually in no way related to ad. But, this made the visitor believe the graphic was related to the ad. When the visitor clicked the ad, he or she wound up on your website which had nothing to do with the graphic. In most cases, the visitor is immediately left your website, wasting your money.

Many website exist where Adsense participants make ads look like navigation, attempt to blend ads with content and other tactics to confuse or trick visitors into clicking ads. Adsense publishers are always looking for the next gimmick to increase their Adsense clicks. How motivated is a consumer going to be if they were tricked to your website? The traffic generated by Adsense publishers is of low value.

A basic level content network traffic is less targeted. Google search traffic consists of a consumer actively searching for keywords. Content network traffic consists of consumer browsing other websites and stumbling across your ads.

Unfortunately, as an Adwords advertiser this is all at your expense. Now you know why the content network traffic is low quality, so go turn it off.

At intermediate and advanced levels you can use the content network. Placement targeting allows you to display ads on specific websites. If you choose respectable website, you can get good quality traffic.

You can also choose use the content network as is. Adwords allows you to separate search network bids and content network bids. When you enable the content network, enable separate bids as well. Never pay more than 10 cents a click for the content network.

Did you know that when Google separated bids for the search and content networks it ended the Adsense gold rush? Back in 2005, Google allowed Adwords advertisers to separate bids. Previously, an Adwords advertiser got only one bid for both. Highly competitive markets forced higher bids. Adsense publishers would target high payout keyword in the hopes of making a dollar or two a click. Since the change, even highly competitive keywords pay much less on the content network.

By Dan Smith

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You know I recommend a strategy of one adgroup per keyword. This strategy allows you to have a landing and ad tailored to your keyword. This creates relevancy between the keyword, the adgroup and the landing page. Relevancy translates into higher quality scores. Higher quality scores mean lower CPC, which saves you money. Higher quality also translates to higher ad positions, thus getting you more traffic.

We’ve gone over what it takes to create relevant landing pages. You optimize a page for Adwords relevance the same way you would optimize for Search Engines (SEO). You use the keyword in the page filename. You use the keyword in the page title and meta tags. You use the keyword in the heading tags. You use the keyword within the content of the page.

But do you know how to create a relevant ad? There is one technique. That technique is to use the keyword in the ad as much as possible. Adwords wants to see the keyword in the ad, plain and simple.

You might be thinking you’ll just use Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) and that will get your keyword in the ad. But it won’t work. First DKI works with the consumers the search term, not your keyword. Unless you are using exact match, this two may not be the same thing. Second, DKI doesn’t count toward quality. Adwords is doing the substitution; they know you are using DKI. Adwords has made it clear that DKI won’t boost the quality of your ad.

On a side note, the beauty of the one ad group per keyword strategy is you know what the consumers search term is without DKI. If you sue phrase and exact matches, you know the search term is your keyword or at the very least contains it.

Regardless of that fact, when you work with one ad group per keyword, you can literally put the keyword in your ad. This is what will signal Adwords that you have highly relevant ad.

For example, imagine your keyword is “Rome Hotels”. Your ad could then look something like this…

headline:       Rome Hotels
description 1:  Planning a trip to Rome?
description 2:  Find hotels now.
display url:    www.MyDomain.com/Rome-Hotels
dest. url:      http://www.MyDomain.com/Rome-Hotels.html

For our purposes here, you can ignore the description 1 and description 2 lines. You’ll need good sales copy there. You refine that copy with split testing. But sales copy is a different topic.

For now, notice how many time the keyword Rome Hotels appears in the ad.

First, you see it in the headline. Were you to use DKI, you’d also put it in the headline. The idea is that the consumer is likely to click the ad when the headline matches the search term. With one adgroup per keyword you get the exact same benefit.

But, the ad above also gets a quality score boost from Adwords. Why? Because the keyword is literally appearing the ad itself. It is not sales copy or DKI.

Second, the keyword is the display url. The display url has to be a valid url, and spaces aren’t valid. Therefore the spaces have been replaced with dashes. Both Adwords and a consumer can still identify the keywords with dashes. That means we again get a quality score boost from Adwords when it sees the keyword. Plus, we display the keyword to the consumer again, further compelling them to click.

Finally, the keyword is in the destination url. The consumer won’t see the destination url but Adwords will. Both the ad and landing page will get a quality score boost for having the landing page filename the same as the keyword.

By Dan Smith

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A very common Adwords mistake could cost you money

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