Common Google Ads Mistakes and How To Avoid Them

In no particular order, consider the following mistakes you might be making or could risk making. For your convenience, a dedicated solution section will follow each entry.

#1 Starting With Poor Audience Insights

A prevalent blunder across virtually all marketing strategies is starting with poor audience insights. Indeed, every marketing plan must begin with three main questions:

• Which are my exact audiences, what do they like, and where do they typically reside online? 
• What makes my offering appealing, and how can I best stress this to audiences?
• What does my campaign intend to achieve, and how can I monitor its effectiveness?

The third question hinges on creating SMART goals, and the second relies on deep introspection. But the first is vital, rooted in audience analytics, which should inform every campaign. Without knowing who you’re targeting, you’re starting with a notable handicap compared to the competition.

Avoiding this mistake

The solution is pretty simple but hinges entirely on your analytics tools and options. Convertmore.com suggests employing all audience data you can gather, including your CRM, social media campaigns, SEO insights, PPC ads, etc. With these insights, you can better refine your ideal audiences and use this knowledge to fine-tune your campaigns.   

#2 Targeting Wrong Demographics

Adjacent to the above comes targeting the wrong demographics from within Google Ads. These two combined may be the most substantive Google Ads mistakes to avoid at all costs. That’s because, in the simplest of terms, targeting audiences that aren’t interested in your offerings will only waste your time. They will most likely not convert, as they were not invested in your offerings, to begin with.  

Avoiding this mistake

This mistake is rather simple to avoid, as long as you have proper audience insights. First, you will need to pick audiences wisely from the Audiences section, including:

• Google’s demographics data, including “affinity” (e.g., general interests) and “detailed demographics” (i.e., long-term life facts like marital status)
• “In-market” segments, based on recent purchase intent
• Your audiences, including ones who engaged with your brand, website, or app before and existing customers

Then, you may target relevant audiences among the above through Google Ads’ “Targeting” setting. If you’re on a tighter budget and want to be conservative, you may start by enabling Targeting for Display campaigns. It can also help with Search campaigns, but it isn’t as universally valuable in comparison.

#3 Misusing Keyword Options

Third come keyword mistakes, of which admittedly there are plenty. As any digital marketing agency will tell you, keywords are the proverbial lifeblood of digital advertising – and PPC doesn’t differ. This section bundles the two main keyword-based Google Ads mistakes to avoid. The first lies in overreliance on a specific keyword match, as Google defines them:

• Broad match, tying ads to searches related to your keyword
• Phrase match, tying ads to searches that include the meaning of your keyword
• Exact match, only showing ads to searches with the same meaning as your keyword

The second lies in neglecting to use negative keywords, which quite a few Google Ads campaigns still do. As the name implies, this option defines keywords to exclude from your campaigns, allowing you to refine your placements further.  

Avoiding this mistake

The latter has a simple enough solution; remember to use negative keywords. You may choose the proper ones by filtering through your offerings and excluding relevant keywords you don’t cater to. Using Google’s example, “if you’re a hat company that doesn’t sell baseball hats, you could add a negative keyword for baseball hats.” The former has a more complex solution, depending on which keyword match type you use most. Typically, advertisers lean more on the broad match, hoping for more clicks with less competition. However, this limits your reach for more invested audiences with higher purchase intent. Tap into your audience insights and historical ad performance data, and cautiously experiment with phrase match and exact match.  

#4 Tracking the Wrong Metrics 

On the subject of tracking success metrics, few Google Ads mistakes are as prominent as flimsy tracking. This is an understandable error if, for instance, you’re just now starting your own business and are learning the ropes. However, it’s a grave mistake that can significantly derail your marketing efforts, especially if you’re not receiving professional help. You may needlessly change robust ad strategies with wrong data points for the worse, chasing improvements they hardly need. Your budget will then see the entirely avoidable strain.  

Avoiding this mistake

The solution to this mistake is also quite simple and hinges on understanding Google’s conversion tracking tool. In brief, Google Ads will track “specific customer activity that is valuable to your business,” as you’ve defined it. You can define conversion actions in your Google Ads account, including website actions, phone calls, and even manually imported offline actions like completed in-person purchases. So first, you must carefully define what you deem valuable, revisit your campaign goals, and align conversion actions with them. Second, remember to split Google Ads campaigns, have different ones focus on different goals, and track them individually for accuracy. And third, explore your conversion metrics frequently and adjust accordingly; if ads produce website actions but not final sales, for example, you may need to fine-tune your website through CRO practices.  

#5 Underfunding Your Google Ads Campaigns

Finally, the least objectionable among Google Ads mistakes, but still an avoidable one, is underfunding your campaigns. For clarity, this does not mean you should throw more money into your campaigns until they work. For one, there are specific funding mistakes you can avoid, such as:

• Stretching your budget too thin across multiple campaigns
• Targeting needlessly expensive keywords
• Making any of the above errors, causing your campaigns to underperform

And second, especially for tighter budgets, come prioritization mistakes. Leaning on conversion-minded ads when you may need lead generation more is an excellent example of this mistake.  

Avoiding this mistake

The solution can boil down to remaining cost-aware in all such cases. While this is a highly subjective manner with multiple variables in place, there are some universal ways to fund wisely. To do so across the board, consider the following:

• Are you running multiple campaigns when you could focus your budget on fewer more effectively?
• Do your SMART goals align with the results you’re trying to achieve with your keyword choices?
• Do your campaign goal priorities make sense for your business and its market position?
• Are you acquiring valuable insights from your existing campaigns that you can use in the future?
• Are your campaigns producing a satisfactory ROI?

While only rudimentary, such questions should help you allocate your budget where it matters most. The solution to advertising on a tight budget is not to fund harder but to fund smarter.  

Conclusion

In summary, Google Ads mistakes abound. There are many ways to go wrong, from the fundamental first steps of audience identification to the ongoing effort of funding campaigns wisely. Still, most such mistakes are avoidable, as this article hopefully helped demonstrate. That said, we understand this is quite a vast and complex subject. As such, if you have additional questions on Google Ads or want to know about our professional advertising services, please feel free to contact us today. We will be more than happy to assist you and help elevate your business to the next level.