Common Google AdWords Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)

Google AdWords had been self-serve for two years by 2004, and a growing number of small businesses were setting up their first campaigns without an agency in the room. That do-it-yourself access was the whole appeal, and it also meant a predictable set of mistakes kept showing up in account after account. Here’s what tends to go wrong, and the fix for each.

Relying on broad match for everything

Broad match was (and still is) the default when you type in a keyword, and it quietly expands your ad to show for loosely related searches you never chose. A campaign built entirely on broad match terms burns through budget on traffic that has nothing to do with what you sell. The fix is to build out phrase match, using quotation marks, and exact match, using brackets, for your core terms, and reserve broad match for a small, separate budget dedicated to discovering new keyword ideas.

Never adding negative keywords

If you sell custom furniture and bid on “furniture,” your ad will show for people searching “furniture repair,” “cheap furniture,” and “furniture jobs” unless you tell Google not to. Negative keywords are the tool for that, and most first-time advertisers don’t know the feature exists until they’ve already spent a few hundred dollars finding out the hard way. Pull your search terms report weekly in the early weeks and add anything irrelevant as a negative.

Sending every click to the homepage

A homepage is built to serve everyone; an ad click comes from someone with a specific intent. Sending that click to a general homepage forces the visitor to hunt for what brought them there in the first place, and most won’t bother. A dedicated landing page that matches the ad’s promise, even a simple one, converts noticeably better than routing all traffic to the front door.

Running one ad forever

Google lets you run multiple ad variations against the same keywords, and comparing which one earns more clicks and conversions is one of the few free improvements available in AdWords. Advertisers who write one ad and never revisit it are leaving a straightforward lift on the table for no reason beyond not knowing to look.

Not tracking what happens after the click

It’s possible to run an AdWords account for months, watch clicks accumulate and have no idea whether any of them turned into a sale. Google’s conversion tracking tools existed by 2004 specifically to close that gap, yet plenty of accounts never install them. Without conversion data you’re optimizing for clicks, which cost money, instead of results, which make money.

Bidding the same on every keyword regardless of intent

Not every keyword is worth the same price. A search for your exact product name usually converts far better than a generic category term, and bids should reflect that. Advertisers who set one flat bid across an account either overpay for weak intent or underbid on the terms that would have converted best.

The pattern behind all six

Every mistake here comes down to treating AdWords as something you set up once. The accounts that performed well in 2004 were the ones getting reviewed weekly: search terms checked, negatives added, ad copy tested, bids adjusted. None of that is complicated. It just has to happen.

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More strategy guides are here, along with everything published in 2004 and the Digital Business Marketing Awards.