In an AdWords account, one of the most important factors is quality score.  Quality score makes a difference as to how high your ads appear, and also the Cost Per Click you pay for.  Ideally quality score should be at 7 or above – see the effect on Cost Per Click in the image below, courtesy of Click Equations.

The easiest way to get quality score up is to make sure the exact keywords appear in the advert heading.  This is the way that Google prefers.  It has the added benefit of often increasing conversion rate.  Having the exact keywords in the advert heading is usually impossible if there are a large number of keywords in a single ad group.

Therefore an account will usually be optimised over time to break it in small ad groups.  In each of these ad groups there will be only a handful of keywords, as the adverts for this group need to reflect these keywords extremely closely.

With large accounts, this can result in a very large account with many hundreds of ad groups.  This can appear unwieldy to the client, but it is usually the ideal way to manage a large account.

Questions?  Do ask them here!

1. You’re in a competitive market.
2. You don’t have the time to manage it.
3. You aren’t willing to also work on your website.

Why?

1 – You’re in a competitive market.

If you’re in a competitive market – it’s going to be tough.  Your competitors use agencies – and good ones at that.  I can’t teach you in 1 day what my competitors have learned in several years.  They will have optimised their websites, their conversions and they are making a profit already.  They will have spent time and money getting to where they are – and lots of it.

2 – You don’t have the time to manage it.

AdWords takes time, and dedication.  And Google changes its interface, and the goalposts.  A lot.  If you don’t have the time to dedicate it – don’t bother.  Use a management company instead.

3 – You aren’t willing to also work on your website.

On the basic AdWords course, we look at landing pages, and conversion points.  We look at your competitor’s landing pages and conversion points too and find where you fall down and where they excel.  Be prepared to walk away with a list of action points, and expect to have to pay money to fix them.

Still interested? I run AdWords courses monthly or on a private basis.

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I am often asked on my AdWords Courses whether Click Fraud is something they need to worry about.  It’s often spoken about and quoted as the main reason people fail when creating their own AdWords accounts – when actually the problem is due to the poor set up of their campaign!

Click Fraud worries small business advertisers, particularly due to the often small monthly budgets involved. They often worry that their competitors will click their sponsored listings repeatedly until the daily budget expires. This DOESN’T usually happen, and Google has tools to filter out most of these clicks.  I would recommend that to watch out for Click Fraud, keep an eye on your web logs and look for repeated visits from the same IP address or range of IP addresses.

it is possible to exclude IP addresses and ranges by going into the Tools option in AdWords (In the Opportunities Tab), and then choosing IP exclusion.

There are packages available to track Click Fraud for you automatically, one to try is AdWatcher. This is an excellent tool if you REALLY need a way of tracking Click Fraud, but I find that the disadvantages is the amount of time taken to set it up!  Each destination URL for every advert, must be entered to the AdWatcher to their system, and they will give you an alternative URL that must be entered to your Google AdWords ad.   Note this adding in their URL instead of your own, does NOT affect your quality score, or Google’s ability to detect the landing page.

Having fully tested AdWatcher, it can be noted that for one client’s campaigns, one particular competitor seemed to have nothing better to do than sit for hours each night typing in difficult keyword permutations and clicking the adverts. What is excellent news is that Google did not charge for a single one of these clicks. Their automated systems had in fact ALREADY identified this was a fraudulent IP address, and filtered every single click out.

Another advantage of using AdWatcher is the ability to redirect those who click more than a set number of times (try choosing 3 times in 48 hours) to a fraud tracking page. This explains that they are costing you money and if they are a genuine customer, could they please bookmark the page instead.  Be careful with your settings though,  to avoid alienating genuine potential customers who see a warning message!

Have questions about Click Fraud?  Post them on here!

1.    Using just one advert to match to lots of unrelated keywords
Here’s an example advert that is suffering from this mistake:

Virtual Office
temporary staffing, virtual office
registered office, mail forwarding
www.freelanceofficestaff.co.uk

In this example, the advertiser is attempting to use one advert to advertise many of their products and services (temporary staffing, virtual offices, registered offices and mail forwarding).  To overcome this mistake, set up multiple ad groups, one for each product or service.  Here is a correct advert:

Temporary Staffing
Need Temporary Staff Quickly?
Call Today For A Fast Response!
www.FreelanceOfficeStaff.co.uk

2.    Sending people to the homepage of the website
A common mistake is to send all visitors direct to the homepage of your website.  You have just a few seconds to get and keep someone’s attention on the web!  Don’t risk them leaving immediately as they cannot find what they are looking for – send them directly to the page about that particular product or service.

In some cases, this may mean adding in new landing pages for each service, rather than having one page about all your products and services together.

3.    Incorrect capitalisation
Capitalise the first letter of each word in your advert (see the example in point 4 below) – this works by making your advert stand out more and increases the likelihood it will get clicked. In turn this will bring your costs down as it affects a vital factor called Quality Score.

4.    Using your company name as the heading for the adverts
This mistake is often replicated by many web marketing agencies as well as individual advertisers.  Here’s an example:

Bristol Party Hire
Bouncy Castles in Bristol
Great Prices From £45
www.BristolPartyHire.co.uk

Your advert is NOT about you – it’s about closely matching what the potential visitor is searching for.  So don’t be vain!

The advert heading should match the keywords the visitor has used as closely as possible e.g.

Bristol Bouncy Castles
Bouncy Castles in Bristol
Great Prices From £45
www.BristolPartyHire.co.uk

5.    Not tracking your results
Make sure you track the results from your AdWords campaigns so you can test which keywords work best to generate leads or sales.  You can do this by using Google’s conversion tracking (which can be found in the Opportunities tab).  Conversions are exceedingly simple to set up.  So set up conversion tracking today!

6.    Leaving the content network on
The content network is a large number of unrelated websites, all running advertising on their website.  Visitors to their websites have the opportunity to click on your ad, costing you money.  Turn the content network off to avoid these unnecessary clicks.

I am NOT saying the content network is always bad – in fact I have clients who make a lot of sales via the content network.  However it needs very careful monitoring!

7.    Leaving ads running 24 hours per day
For many products and services, it makes sense to only run adverts at certain times of day.  For example, Business to Business advertisers will benefit from running adverts only during work hours, and pause the adverts outside of these hours as well as weekends.

8.    Not using negative keywords
Negative keywords will prevent irrelevant searches.  For example, you will probably want to cut out people that are seeking “free” things.  So ideally build a large negative keyword list to save yourself money.

9.    Failing to use broad, phrase and exact match keywords
These are the three different keyword types which all need to be included in your ad groups to cut down on costs.  So make sure you include them all. On some occasions, you may wish to add in only exact match keywords to prevent Google matching you against obscure queries.  More on these match types another time!

10.    Underutilising the display URL
The display URL can be manipulated to increase Click Through Rate.  For example if advertising bouncy castles – instead of www.bristolpartyhire.co.uk use www.BristolPartyHire.co.uk/BouncyCastles.  Another example is with a subdomain such as AdWordsTrainer.ClaireJarrett.com

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So here’s a list of potential reasons it might not be showing:

• Your account is new, and you have not entered payment details. When you have entered payment details, they take a short while to be authorised. This can be up to a day or two.
• You have set up a new campaign with new ad groups and keywords, that need to be reviewed. This can take a short while.
  
• Your daily budget has run out. Even though it might not appear to have run out, Google AdWords sometimes takes a short while (around half an hour) to catch up with very busy markets.
• You are in a different geographical area than the area your adverts are set to run in. If you have set your adverts to run in England, and you’re in Wales – you will not be able to see them! Likewise if you have used geographical targetting to target specific cities, if you are not in the city in question you will not be able to see the adverts.
• Your Campaign Settings are set to divide the budget up throughout the day. This is known as Delivery Method. This means your campaign is under-funded and Google chooses to show the adverts during part of the day only to avoid the budget expiring too soon.
• You have scheduled your adverts to run at certain times of day only – and you are not searching within those hours.
• You have chosen Position Preferences that cannot be accommodated at the moment. For example if you have chosen Position Preference 1 to 3, and your bid is not high enough, the advert will not show at all, as it cannot be shown in your preferred position.
• Your Quality Score is too low, and your bid too low to result in the advert showing. If your QS is low, this is likely to be due to poor advert/keyword matching along with a poor quality landing page. You need to increase your QS (you will likely need the services of an AdWords Specialist) and increase the bid prices in the short term until QS improves.
• You have entered negative keywords that conflict with the keywords you have chosen. For example, if you have a negative keyword of free and a keyword phrase in your campaign of “free AdWords ebook”, your advert will not show.

Having said all this, you should NOT actually be searching Google to view your ads, as this drives impressions up and Click Through rate down. Instead, use the Ad Preview Tool in Google.

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