After working for 7-plus years in performance marketing now, today we want to talk about what you should and shouldn't be doing when running your Google PPC ads. After reading this, if you're still unsure how to run or set up Google Ads, please reach out to us for more help. Now let's discuss the top 5 mistakes we have seen in Google ads accounts.
Mistake number 1
Let's talk about search ads, generally, whenever we onboard a new account in our agency and when I look at the audit done for google, one thing just comes to my mind is why advertisers and brands spend a crazy amount of money on search ads without any strategy or proper objectives. So first thing first, if you want to run search ads, you should categorize your campaigns based on the keywords type. I will recommend creating 2 categories,
1. Brand keyword campaign
2. Non-brand keyword campaign.
It is simple, in the brand KW campaign you will put all keywords which contain the brand name as a KW in it, and obviously, for Non-Brand KW, you will have all other keywords there except brand KW. Often I have seen that 95% of the time the accounts we get lack the use of proper audiences, RLSA, the choice of the right type of KW match type, etc. I know, I know, you might say, what the heck, why should we waste our money on bidding on our own keywords? Don't we appear organically there? Yes, you are right, Ideally, our organic listing should appear in SERP when someone is searching for brand KW, but, mostly you will see that competitors and marketplaces are always bidding on your KW with help of search and shopping campaigns if you are a decent size of business.
Mistake number 2
Moving to the next mistake, that is not optimizing the campaigns for the right event. So when you are running any campaign type, like search, display, shopping, PMax, or Discovery you should ideally optimize for one important event. This is most evident with e-commerce businesses where I see that most marketers end up optimizing their campaigns for add-to-cart, phone calls, checkout initiated, etc events along with purchase event. This will end up giving you inflated conversions and you will always be under the wrong impression that PPC campaign ROAS is awesome or its not working for your business.
Mistake number 3
Not enabling servers side integration/tracking. Since apple introduced iOS 14.5 you might have experienced that and listened from fellow marketers that their ROAS has taken a hit, in order to fix that you should enable the server-side integration.
Mistake number 4
Not having a proper google shopping feed…! Incomplete google shopping feed without correct custom columns disapproved products in the feeds, and not using feed rules to enhance the quality of the feed. These are some of the most important things I see, which hamper the performance of standard shopping and PMax campaigns(And earlier smart shopping campaigns).
Mistake number 5
And the fifth one is, spending heavily despite all the above problems. Now we handle very big budgets on channels like Facebook, Google, and Criteo. Every channel acts differently for different categories of the business, for some, Google will work very well and can be scaled instantly, for some it won't be the case and you will have to scale it progressively. Do it patiently and it will yield the right results.
So that's it for this blog, do let us know your thoughts in the comment section.
Stay Happy, Stay Awesome..!
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