The majority of mistakes made in Google AdWords campaigns are of the common variety. In fact nearly all campaigns can see greater effectiveness with as little as an hours labor. With this small investment of time you can save hundreds and thousands of dollars, by following the guidelines set forth in this article.



Want to know what the number-one mistake people make is in Google AdWords campaign management? Improperly organized campaigns. Badly organized ads and keywords cripple your Google campaigns and cost you a ton of money.

With campaigns put together in the proper way will have good results from the start. At that point optimizing them and making adjustments is a simple task. As time goes on this can make a big difference.

In your optimum campaign, you would have 1 perfect ad for each keyword that is searched for. With each different keyword you would have a different add. With 2,200 keywords you would then need to write 2,200 ads.

However we don't live in an optimum world. We can get a good result by clustering keywords that are alike with an appropriate ad.

Ad groups are the smallest individual units that contain your keywords and your ads together. You can have multiple ad groups in a single campaign. A campaign is just a handy way to organize ad groups, usually according to broad topic.

In a single Google account, you can have as many campaigns as you want. Some of the campaigns in your account may be on a completely different topic, selling completely different services, and sending traffic to a completely different web site.

The way you divide up your campaigns is your choice, but the in which you divide up your ad groups is not. There is the right way and the wrong way to do it.

Someone starting out might put their campaign together this way:

Smith's Telecommunications

Vital Solutions for

Your Total Voice Mail Needs

www.smithtelecoms.com

So goes their ad, and then their keywords looking something like this:

auto attendant

business telephone systems

call management systems

voice mail

voice mail equipment

voice mail service

voice mail systems

When the prospective clients click, they are all directed to the same homepage. This page has a variety of links to pages with titles from Contact Us to Equipment. What is the problem with this type of AdWords management?

Number one is the variety in the keyword list is too wide. Each of those words should be put into its own adgroup adding in a shortlist of similar keywords/phrases.

The ad doesn't match the keywords, and it can't, because there are too many different kinds of keywords in the group.

Using the name of the business, Smith Telecommunications, in the headline is a no-no in this case and for almost all businesses. Your click-through-rate is going to be lousy, which will drive up your bid price.

The ad is about Smith Telecommunications, not what the customer really wants. Your ads need to be about your customer, not about yourself!

If a prospective client is looking for 'voicemail systems' he wants to land on a page about voicemail systems. Similarly if someone is looking for 'voicemail equipment' he wants to land on one with info on voicemail equipment. These are separate topics. Prospective clients don't want to hunt all over your page looking for what they want. It is more likely they will leave to go elsewhere.

If you structure your campaigns properly from the beginning, it's a lot easier to make this work. To do this, take all of your different keywords and use Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.info) or Overture (http://inventory.overture.com) to organize them into narrow "silos" of very tightly related terms. They will look like this:

Voice Mail Services (adgroup)

voice mail provider

voice mail service

voice mail service provider

voice mail services

Voice Mail System (adgroup)

voice mail systems

voice mail systems for realtors

telemarketing and voice mail systems

phone systems voice mail

home office voice mail systems

home office telephone voice mail systems

Auto Attendant (adgroup)

answering attendant auto system

auto attendant voice mail services

auto attendant

auto attendant phone system

auto attendant software

auto attendant system

auto attendant voice mail

phone auto attendant

There's another step we need to take before pasting this into a campaign: Consider negative keywords. Here's a list of keywords that come from "Voice Mail Software."

voice mail software

voice mail business software

voice mail software for panasonic

voice mail broadcasting software

voice mail business software

multiple voice mail software

mac voice mail software

multi-line voice mail system software vru

norstar voice mail software

software to record voice mail

free voice mail software

You really aren't wanting to have visitors looking for free stuff. You also don't have anything to do with voice broadcasting or even Macintosh computers. This is a good start on your negative keyword list. You do this by putting a minus sign in front of each of the words on your negative keyword list. This is how your list will now look:

voice mail software

voice mail business software

voice mail software for panasonic

voice mail business software

multiple voice mail software

multi-line voice mail system software vru

norstar voice mail software

software to record voice mail

Negative Keywords:

free

mac

macintosh

broadcast

broadcasting

So when you set up your ad campaigns, each one of these keyword lists is going to go into a different group with its own set of ads.