10 common Google Ads mistakes to avoid (Part two)

Do the results from your Google Ads campaigns match the ambitions you set? Here are ten Google Ads mistakes to avoid so that you can achieve the results you are hoping for. 

Recently, I sat down with our two longest-serving paid media specialists, Laura and Maria, to discuss some of the Google Ads mistakes to avoid when running paid media campaigns. However, they were keen not just to highlight mistakes but also to earmark a few areas of the platform that are hidden away or less known.  

We had to split the blog into two parts, because Laura and Maria overwhelmed me with tips and advice. You can read the first five mistakes to avoid here. Now, let’s take a look at the final five. 

Google ads mistake 6: Forgetting about Search or Display is an easy mistake to make 

A nice easy one to kick off the second part of our list. But, as Laura and Maria both suggest, it’s one that is all too easy to forget about. When setting up a campaign, you need to remember to tell Google what kind of campaign you are running and which kind of network it is targeted at. 

Laura’s advice: “When you are setting up a campaign, you have different steps you need to go through. These are: 

• The type of campaign 
• The name of the campaign 
• The networks you are targeting 

“You need to go through these and set up the right ones for your campaign. The mistake here concerns the last of these, networks. 

“Google works with many partners across the internet. These are divided into Search and Display. Search ads are those you see at the top or bottom of the Search Engine Results Page. Display ads are graphic ads that appear on web pages, usually at the top or on the side of web pages – think of the banners at the top of a news article or a pop-up video that might appear midway through reading. If you leave both boxes ticked, your ad will be targeted at all of these partners. 

 “If you are setting up a Search campaign, you don’t want it to be targeted at the Display partners. It doesn’t make sense to do this, but it is all too easy to forget to untick the Display box. This is a mistake that is easy to make when you are new to the platform.” 

Google ads mistake 7: If you don’t use a benchmark, you won’t know what to expect 

When starting any Google Ads campaign, it is important to have a good idea of what to expect. This way you can plan accordingly. By looking at previous campaigns with similar budgets you can get an accurate forecast of what is achievable. 

Maria’s advice: “Not analysing the data is a huge mistake. Everyone needs to analyse the data. 

“You need to compare a new campaign with previous campaigns that had similar objectives and budgets. We always look to see how many clicks those previous campaigns achieved for the budget that was spent. This gives us a benchmark, which we can use to plan the strategy for the next campaign. This way we can show our clients that if they invest a certain amount of money, they will get a certain level of results. 

“This is incredibly useful. Imagine a client wants to spend £500 on a three-month campaign. We can look at the benchmark, and it shows just what the impact will be. For instance, £500 might be used up in a week; it’s not enough for the results the client is hoping for – and we’ll suggest another strategy.” 

Google Ads mistake 8: Not making use of ad extensions is a missed opportunity 

Ad extensions are the small additions you see directly underneath an ad, usually consisting of side links or extra information. Google lets you add all sorts of useful information here and making best use of these is an important part of running a successful Google Ads campaign. 

Laura’s advice: “Using ad extensions is one of the many things that Google puts forwards as an example of best practice. They highly recommend it, because it drives traffic to your ads and results in a good click-through-rate (CTR) for your campaign. What’s more, it’s tactical. You can take up as much room as possible from the search rank, to push you up and competitors down.” 

“You can add as many ad extensions as you want. You can include an address or contact details or links to other pages on the web site. You can connect to Google Maps, which will provide directions on how to get to your business. You can even add a phone number as a link (a “call side link”), so that when it is clicked it automatically begins a phone call.” 

“These are all tools which simplify how the user can get in touch with you. It’s important to use these, especially if you are a local business offering services for local people. If a campaign is local to a city, or even on a national level, this can be really useful. 46% of all Google searches are linked to something local. So, it is a big mistake not to take advantage of this.” 

Google Ad mistake nine: You should optimise your ads every day or you’ll miss out 

It’s really important to keep monitoring the performance of your ads. By looking at the data you can find ways to optimise them. Laura and Maria recommend doing this every day. Here, Laura gives an example of one area you can exploit. 

Maria’s advice: “In general a lot of the work on a Google Ads campaign is done up front. You need to plan ahead for keywords and ad copy. But there are many opportunities to improve your ads once the campaign has begun. So, you need to keep an eye on how the campaign is developing, so that you can optimise it daily.”  

Laura’s advice: “The campaign overview offers a glimpse of how the campaign is performing, providing the main highlights. One thing it tells you is the difference between devices – i.e. how your ad is performing on desktop computers or on mobile phones.” 

“If it performs well on mobile, there are things you can do to tweak your ad to reach mobile users even better. You could start by including ad extensions that work well with mobile users, for instance adding contact details or call side links. As people are looking at the ads on the go, why not make sure the address is there, so they can get in contact if they are in the area. It’s important to take advantage of things like that.” 

Google Ads mistake ten – If you don’t use rules, you risk unnecessary errors 

If used correctly, Google’s Rules can give you greater control over your campaigns. As Maria says, it’s a lifesaver and can prevent all sorts of difficult situations developing. 

Maria’s advice: “This was a big discovery for us. It’s really useful because it gives you more control over your ads – effectively, it prevents you from making mistakes.” 

“Usually we will use it for spending, but it can be used for anything. Sometimes, as we mentioned in mistake five in part one of this blog series, even if you set up spending for the day, it can go over, or even double. With rules you can tell Google when you want the campaign to stop, for instance at a certain time or under certain conditions. For instance, once you reach the budget, stop.” 

“Google doesn’t let you pick a total budget, just the number of days the campaign will run and the daily budget. If you don’t check that daily, Google can easily spend that budget in two days. So, if you set up rules, you can tell Google to stop the campaign if a certain amount of money is spent. It’s a lifesaver.” 

“This is an important tool, yet many marketers don’t know it exists. It’s a hidden one. Unless you went through a certain certification where you are shown the whole platform and how it works, you won’t know to use it.” 

Realise your ambitions with Google Ads 

At Fifty Five and Five, our purpose is to help our clients realise their ambitions. We plan, execute and manage a wide variety of paid media campaigns of all sizes and budgets. Over the years our PPC team has grown in experience and expertise – and some of the biggest organisations around the world trust us to run Google Ads campaigns for them. 

by Alex Carnegie

10 common Google Ads mistakes to avoid (Part one)

Google Ads is a popular and highly effective way to drive traffic to your website or campaign landing pages and content assets. Not convinced? Well, approximately 75% of the world’s desktop and laptop searches come through Google search. Apparently, that works out at around 70,000 searches every second (stats courtesy of, you guessed it, a quick Google search). If you want to get your campaigns in front of your target audience, avoiding the most common Google Ads mistakes is essential.

Recently, I sat down with Fifty Five and Five’s two longest-serving PPC specialists, Laura and Maria, to pick their brains and – a quick confession from me: although I write a lot of copy for Google Ads, I know little about what actually goes into setting up and running the campaigns. So, this proved a great opportunity to learn more about what Laura, Maria and the rest of our busy paid media team do to make sure our clients’ campaigns are a success.

We had a long discussion, and I learned a lot about common Google Ads mistakes. To share our knowledge, we’ve compiled a list of ten to avoid. Here they are:

Google ads mistake 1: Ignore negative keywords at your peril

Negative keywords are the search terms you don’t want people to have used to get to your ads. If you set up a campaign to promote your managed services, you don’t want people who are looking for jobs in managed services to click on your ads.

To make sure this doesn’t happen, set the right negative keywords. Choosing ‘managed services specialist salary’ or ‘managed services job roles’ as a negative keyword would ensure you don’t attract the wrong attention.

Laura’s advice: “We recommend putting your negative keyword list together at the start of the campaign. But, during the campaign, you may become aware of certain keywords you want to add to this. When you are in Google Ads looking at a campaign, you can go to ‘Search terms’. Here you have a list of all the keywords, including both negative keywords and search terms, that are associated with your ads. We suggest checking these on a regular basis during the campaign – sometimes every day, maybe three times a week.”

Google ads mistake 2: Poor keyword research and unsuitable keywords will derail your campaign

According to Laura and Maria, poor keyword research is one of the most common mistakes that marketers make.

Laura’s advice: “This is a tricky one because sometimes a short tail keyword, for instance ‘digital transformation’, might at first seem like the right choice. But on closer analysis, it’s simply too broad. You would get a lot of impressions, probably a lot of clicks, and end up spending a lot of money. It’s highly likely that users won’t be interested in what you’re offering or will not stay on your site for long. That’s because this keyword could draw in people who are just searching for ‘what is digital transformation?’.

A short tail keyword, for instance ‘digital transformation’, might at first seem like the right choice. But on closer analysis, it’s simply too broad.

“A better option would be to use ‘digital transformation solutions for HR’, for instance. Or, if you are promoting a whitepaper, use that in the keyword.”

Maria’s advice: “It’s more sensible to use a mix of short tail and long tail keywords – and then to monitor the results to see which keywords are working and which aren’t. You might have a broad keyword, but if it’s driving clicks, and the clickthrough-rate (CTR) is high and the cost per click is good, then it could be worth keeping. But normally broad keywords are expensive.

“You should also look at the bounce rate and the average session duration. For instance, a keyword might be producing a great CTR, but the average session duration is zero or ten seconds. This strongly indicates that whoever is clicking on your ad is not engaged with what they find when they get there. In that case, it’s worth pausing the campaign. Time to try a different approach.”

Google ads mistake 3: Keyword Planner is a fantastic tool and not using it is a crime.

Google Ads is full of useful tools to help you run your campaigns and set them up to be effective. Keyword Planner is one of the most relied upon – and there’s a reason for that.

Laura’s advice: “It’s a good idea to use Keyword Planner, which provides insights for PPC and also helps you discover new keywords. It provides lots of useful data, such as the competition and the average monthly searches. Most importantly, it gives you keyword suggestions. You can define the location, the language, the search network, the time your ad will run and much more.

“What’s more, Google keeps improving Keyword Planner. Now you can include the URL of the page you want to promote, so Google can scan that page and tell you exactly how the keywords you have chosen are working for you – a huge help. It’s a big mistake not to take advantage of these features when researching keywords.”

Google ads mistake 4: If you don’t test different variations of ad copy, results will suffer

You can set up your ads like a pro and do everything right, but if your ad copy doesn’t speak to your target audience in language that grabs their attention, your ads will fail. Therefore, you need to test your ad copy. The mistake here is to fail to write enough ads to test.

If your ad copy doesn’t speak to your target audience in language that grabs their attention, your ads will fail.

Laura’s advice: “Some marketers have two versions of their ad copy and think that is enough; some only have one, which is not good for testing. We normally try to have three different versions at least, normally four or five. This provides the room to test different descriptions and headlines.

“A/B testing is essential, as it helps you see what’s working best and what isn’t.”

Maria’s advice: “It’s also good to make use of Google’s responsive ads. When you use responsive ads, you can implement all the headlines and descriptions you have, and then Google uses machine learning to organise them so that they have a greater impact. We find that responsive ads usually perform better – at least that’s what we see most of the time.

“This automation seems to be part of a wider trend. And it is a mistake not to embrace it. Google and Facebook are trying to bring users towards an approach where they take greater control of how your ads perform on their platforms. The thinking goes that if they can help customers improve their results and ROI with paid media, then these customers will keep coming back with more business – a win-win scenario.

“With responsive ads, you don’t have control over which ad will be shown or the specific structure (i.e. the combination of headlines and descriptions). But you have full control over the headlines and descriptions submitted in the first place, before Google’s machine learning works its magic. I think this is something some marketers are against. But if the results are better, why would you not go for automated optimisation?”

Google ads mistake 5: Neglecting to take daily budget in consideration can be costly

As Google optimises your ads for your target audience, it will change certain aspects of your campaign, based on what is performing and what you are trying to achieve. If your daily budget changes, it can have expensive consequences.

Maria’s advice: “When you create a campaign, you set up certain parameters (e.g. daily budget, audience, keywords etc.). Google then goes into a phase called Learning where it ‘learns’ your settings. This can last 48 hours, so it’s always good to set up early and schedule in advance, to let Google perform its magic before your campaign goes live.

I’s always good to set up early and schedule in advance, to let Google perform its magic before your campaign goes live.

“But it is important to check this daily. Because in the process, Google can do some strange things sometimes. For instance, it can double your daily budget.

“For example, if you have a daily budget of £20, optimised for clicks (the bidding strategy that is), and if your campaign is doing well, Google may take your daily budget and spend up to twice as much. Suddenly you have £40 of daily spend. In that example, it’s not too much of a worry because the spend is small. But when the campaign has a big budget, in which the daily spend might be £200 or £300, then waking up in the morning and seeing that your campaign has spent £600 instead of £300, it can give you a heart attack. So, you need to be aware that this is a possibility and keep checking daily.”

Laura’s advice: “It depends on the bidding strategy. If it is being optimised for clicks, then Google has a limit. It will only raise the budget by double. If it’s for conversions, there is no limit. It can be 3 or 4 times more. So that’s something else to be wary of.”

… to be continued.

We can help you avoid these Google Ads mistakes

That’s end of the first half of our list of ten common Google Ads mistakes. To learn more, make sure you check back for the second part, published soon. If you can’t wait till then, you can go to our services page to learn more about the paid media services we offer.

by Alex Carnegie