In honor of our recent Google Adwords Certification, we thought it would be good to educate our readers on some reasons why most people struggle when setting up their first campaigns with Adwords.  Google makes it so simple to set up that it doesn’t weed out enough people who shouldn’t be having ads online (just yet).  They’ll end up wasting their time and money, with little (or nothing) to show for it.  So if you’re setting up Google Adwords, here is what you should be aware of:

1. Failure to Track - Numero Uno problem in all Internet and Web Site marketing.  People set up programs (and web sites for that matter) and don’t have any effective means to track the results of it.  They just think and hope that visitor and new clients will come to them.
2. Failure to Maintain - This is a very similar problem to the first one - at least the cause of it is the same.  People set up a campaign and never come back to it.  Setting up a campaign is just 10% of it (if even that).  We do most of our work by constantly tweaking everything.
3. Too Few Words - People just put in a few obvious words for their product or service.  The problem is that enough people are on Adwords that they probably thought of the same words, so the prices are very high.  By doing this, the Cost for each visitor makes the program too expensive.  By getting cheaper keywords, you get more visitors for less expenses per visitor
4. Too Much Branding - Branding is important for major, consumer products and services but it almost never matters in small business marketing.  Your goal in Adwords is not to get your name out but to have surfers take a specific action, like clicking on your ad.
5. No Specific Action - Again, very similar to the last point.  These visitors are valuable to you (and expensive if you have to bid a lot to get them).  Have some sort of call-to-action for them on the website, whether that is to purchase something, leave their information, or call you.  Often times, some sort of special offer works for this.
6. Sending People to the Home Page - You have so much control with PPC ads that you are just wasting money if you are not using these ads effectively.  Rarely should you send people to your home page.  Send them to pages with information that they searched for.  Your landing pages should be tailored to match what they user searched for.
7. Grouping all the Keywords Together - People usually just create one campaign and one ad for all the terms that someone might search for.  Therefore, they are not really creating ads that map up directly to what users are searching for.  Separate the keywords into different groups with different ads that are specific to those keywords.
8. No Testing - One of the ways that we constantly maintain our Adwords accounts is by creating and working on new tests.  We are testing the text of the ad, keywords, ad positions, landing pages, call-to-action on those landing pages, etc.  We also do split testing and whatever wins goes up against another variation and we constantly are improving that way.
9. No Long Term Plans - You need to keep up with the Adwords program.  Google gives more credit to those accounts and ads that stay around.  They know that ads which have a short history are more likely to be ads that their visitors aren’t interested in so they give more credit to those that have been around longer.  This means that you shouldn’t blow all your money right away.  Make sure you have some amount of money budgeted over a long period of time each month for the ads.
10. Overhyped Expectations - Adwords can be very profitable and successful for your business.  We have the success stories to prove that.  However, if you are setting it up yourself for the first time, don’t be disappointed if you aren’t getting the same results.  There is a bit of a learning curve that you will have to experience yourself.  This is why there are businesses out there to support Adwords advertisers - they know what works and what doesn’t so you don’t have to have an expensive lesson.

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