How Not To Run An Adwords Campaign

by Jeremy Wilson

About 8 months ago, I tried my hand at Google Adwords.

How hard could it be? You enter a bunch of words and
phrases, set how much you want to pay, and wait for
the traffic and sales to pour in.

Easy as pie, right?

Not exactly, you see I approached adwords completely
wrong from the outset. Instead of researching
keywords, which I had no clue about at the time, I
typed in the keywords I wanted to target in Google and
if the search results came up with no ads I included
it in my list of words.

It's almost embarrassing how out of touch I was. I
figured if a keyword or phrase had a bunch of search
results but no ad then it must be an in demand phrase
that no one had even thought to advertise with.

That's right, only Jeremy and no one else in the
history of the Adwords program had ever thought to use
those words...I thought I was brilliant ...until the
results started to come in.

Out of 77,362 impressions I got only 545 clicks for a
click through rate of .7%

Even worse, I made no sales and spent close to $300!

Looking back on that sad campaign, there are numerous
other mistakes worth noting.

Many of the keywords I used were three to five word
phrases. Unfortunately, not too many people search
using long multi word phrases so many of the words I
thought were winners were complete duds that didn't
generate any impressions.

The words that did generate clicks and impressions
were so general that that the number of clicks was
extremely low.

Imagine if you are selling Honda car parts and you bid
on they keyword "car".

You get thrown in with every query that includes the
word "car". You get people looking for car insurance,
used cars, new cars, car parts, car performance
upgrades, etc. The list is endless.

If you take this approach, your click through rate will be
so low your ad will be suspended by Google.

Next on the list of mistakes is that I put around 50
words in each ad group.

There is no way you can write
an ad that is relevant to that number of terms with
only 95 characters worth of space.

If I tried to put that last sentence in an Adword it
would look like this:

There is no way you can write and ad that is relevant
to that number of different terms wi

Not very informative or relevant to anything is it?

Finally, I got suckered into a bidding war. The
natural tendency is to be #1. If it cost .50 to be
listed at the top for one of my words then I was going
to pay .55 to be and stay #1. All this got me was a hefty
Adwords bill with no profits and poor performance.

Sometimes it is just not worth it to be at the top.

Everyone has to start somewhere. Too often it seems
people want to tell you what you should do but it is
just as important to learn what not to do.

Google Adwords is no different. It can be confusing,
frustrating and time consuming. But once you get
passed the learning curve it is like taking the
blinders off!

Next week's article will cover what you should be
doing to improve your Adwords campaign and the following
week will be an analysis of an Adwords campaign I am
working on with some pretty unbelievable click through
rates.

 

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