To be honest, every digital marketer makes mistakes at work, but the key is to keep trying to find effective strategies and improve or remove unsuitable measures. What you need to do is to learn from the mistakes of yourself or others and avoid repeating the same mistakes.

1, too many keywords used at once

The advertiser made this mistake in a startup that used to work in the past. Their Facebook marketing campaign was extremely hot, and the results were much better than expected, and the investment was far below the industry benchmark. However, as the company's user acquisition supervisor, he wants to capture more performance, but he can't achieve this goal through more product display advertising.

So, at the same time, he puts a lot of energy into search advertising. He knows that Google will eventually achieve the results they expect, but achieving this goal will take time to accumulate. But in contrast to this, he tried to use multiple keywords at once and tried everything he could to find all the keywords that fit the search series, which in turn countered his search activity.

So why is this strategy wrong?

Using too many keywords also means creating too many ad groups, writing too many ad copy, and optimizing too many landing pages. This is not only time consuming, it also distracts you from the core keywords. .

In fact, some marketing campaigns with specific types of keywords are not worth your effort at all. Some keywords that seem to be related to the products you are marketing are not as effective as you might expect, and no matter how hard you try to optimize them, you can’t Give back to the ROI you want (return on investment).

And once you choose to focus on the keywords that really fit your marketing campaign, you can devote all your time and attention to these keywords and achieve true optimization. Plus, you can cut your CPA (cost per action) on Google by half and allow you to allocate the entire budget to the right marketing campaigns and keywords.

So, you should choose the keywords, try to focus on those keywords that are highly relevant to the product, and try to achieve more ROI.

2, too much attention to Google Display Network (GDN)

Digital marketers have countless ways to use and optimize GDN. GDN has many different targeting methods, ad sizes and types to create. You can make your ads appear anywhere on the web and reach millions of internet users. But to be honest, it's extremely difficult to use GDN to effectively impress a cold audience, especially compared to other display channels like Facebook or LinkedIn.

So, what did the advertiser do wrong on GDN?

He tried to target the target audience in a variety of ways, including keywords, interests, similar audiences, and Affinity Audiences. He even got the full support of a dedicated Google representative team to handle the huge budget he managed at the time, but even if they worked together, they couldn't impress the cold audience and expand their audience base.

In fact, what he did wrong was that over-trusting GDN would eventually yield results, even if its CPA was much higher than all other marketing channels, and the quality of the users he received was still very low. In fact, GDN is not for everyone, and it is not suitable for his advertising campaign at the time.

How did he remedy it?

At some point, he realized that he should give up using GDN to reach his audience, but only use it for remarketing audiences. The results are immediate, he has more time and budget to invest in other marketing channels, and this remedy has helped him improve the overall user acquisition.

3. Use SKAG (single keyword ad group) from the beginning

Using SKAG can help you create very accurate ads and landing pages that perfectly match your search terms. As you know, as long as the product is more relevant, the CTR (ad click rate) and conversion rate will be higher, and the quality score is the same, which means that you pay less for each click on the user. CPA will also be reduced, so using SKAG can be no small benefit.

However, he used SKAG too early without any previous data.

Usually people start using SKAG after getting a lot of data, which allows marketers to choose the most important keywords and divide them into SKAG. This is the right approach, because using SKAG requires a lot of effort to write many accurate ad copy and create a specific landing page to match, which is one of the reasons why SKAG is not absolutely suitable for all businesses or accounts. .

The advertiser used SKAG from the beginning and thought it would get a warm response. He did related keyword research, established marketing campaigns and ad groups. Everything looks perfect: he has a lot of ad groups, highly relevant ads, and an exact match landing page. He seems to have built a perfect search activity.

So where is the problem?

The result of using SKAG from the beginning was that his account was messed up. He has too many ad groups, too many types of keywords, and too many landing pages. It's almost impossible to optimize, and he lost his clue about which keywords to use, how to write an ad copy, and design a landing page.

The point is that he doesn't have any data, so he wastes his budget and a lot of time on the wrong keywords, causing a lot of work to get no return.

Using SKAG is a good marketing strategy, but not for everyone. It depends on your budget and the size of the team that manages your account. When the advertiser made this mistake, he was the only marketing person in the company he worked for, and everything needed to be done personally. Responsible for a SKAG activity was too difficult for him with only a little time and no data, and he did choose the wrong strategy.

What can be different?

In fact, you can start with a simpler campaign structure that lets your ad group contain a set of keywords with the same intent, as shown in the following example:

Google-ads-mistakes-keywords

(Google - Advertising - Error - Keywords)

Once you have enough data, you can distinguish the most important keywords based on traffic size and effectiveness, and create ad groups that contain only three match types, highly relevant ads, and landing pages.

4, did not create enough landing pages

This error is exactly the opposite of the previous one. The advertiser has focused on the correct keyword classification, writing the best advertising copy to improve CTR, obsessing with optimizing his bids bid, and sorting out his search terms by adding negative keywords for a period of time. report. But all of this doesn't really matter because he doesn't realize the importance of the landing page.

He didn't send all the traffic to his website's homepage (a huge mistake that any digital marketer could have!), but he didn't create enough landing pages to respond to the user's search.

So how can this be improved?

Without doing too much, you can be sure to create a specific landing page for each set of keywords in your account that respond to the same user intent.

Take the event planning platform Wekudo as an example. The platform will provide users with a simple and automated solution to help plan office activities, such as group building activities. Therefore, if the user searches for "office team building activity", he will jump to a matching landing page.

But what happens if you search for "office team building"? Still the same landing page!

Creating a specific landing page for keywords with the same intent is not a hassle, and it will give you better quality scores and conversion rates.

6, not always use the full function of ad extensions (ad extension)

Google ad extensions are very powerful. It allows you to get more space on the Google search results page, add more valuable data to your ad copy, let people call you directly, let users navigate to different pages of your site, and display user comments. and many more.

There are many reasons to use ad extensions in your search activity and make the most of it. Google allows us to use ad extensions in a variety of ways, analyze the results they bring and help us optimize them, so why not use them? This is also the question that the advertiser has been asking "the past."

The mistake he made was that the ad extensions function was not fully utilized.

This is not to say that he did not use ad extensions, but that he did not make full use of it. You can use this feature in marketing campaigns or ad groups and match them to your ad group content.

In the past, the advertiser used only four or five common sitelink extensions and added them at the account level. Obviously, this is wrong. He should use more types of ad extensions and make them more accurate.

So what should I do?

Obviously, you should add more ad extensions. If you already have sitelink extensions, you can add more and test them. If your marketing campaign is mobile-accessible, you can add a call extension that allows users to click and call you directly from the ad, and then you can take advantage of all the benefits you offer. All in all, you should use all the features of ad extensions whenever possible.

to sum up

As mentioned earlier, every digital marketer makes some mistakes. However, you can quickly learn from your mistakes and refer to other people's experiences to understand which marketing strategies are feasible and which are not. I hope this article will have some reference value for you to help you avoid making mistakes from the beginning.