The keywords you choose to bid on are the foundation of your Google Ads Campaign and the single biggest deciding factor between campaign failure and success! You can work on writing the most clickable and enticing Ads, have a fantastic website and spend massive amounts of money on your Google ads, but if you don’t manage to display your ads to the right people, your efforts will be futile.
Therefore, here are the top 5 Google Ads keyword mistakes to avoid in order to prevent poor results and wasted spend.
Broad Keyword Choice
Your keyword choice largely depends on your industry and budget constraints but it is always important to place the most emphasis on relevancy and buyer intent when creating your keyword lists. Most business owners often make the mistake of choosing keywords that are not specific enough to give any indication of what the searchers intent is. This is because there is a common misconception that in order to achieve success through Google Ads, advertisers need to focus on getting the most impressions and clicks by chasing the number 1 position on Google. However, experienced Google Ads professionals will select their keywords with the goal of getting relevant clicks from qualified customers.
(More on how to do this later on in the article)
For example, if you were a computer repair business in Sandton advertising on Google, you would want to avoid keywords such as “computer” as this would bring in irrelevant traffic and waste your budget. Instead, you would want to refine your keywords to be as relevant to your business as possible by selecting keywords such as “computer repairs Sandton” or “laptop repairs Sandton”.
Grouping Keywords
Your Google Ads campaigns should be broken up into ad groups. There are two approaches to this that are generally accepted to be best practice:
You can create Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAGS) – As the name suggests, these ad groups contain only one keyword but can contain all four keyword match types. This structure gives you maximum control over how every element within your ad group should work. For example, if you were a wardrobe installation company using SKAGs, each Adgroup would contain a specific keyword in a variety of match types:
The second approach would be Ad groups with groupings of keywords that match a common theme – This is the more modern approach to structuring your ad groups and allows you to take maximum advantage of Google’s artificial intelligence as Google will then use the immense amount of data of computing power available to them to automatically optimise your campaigns and display your ads to the most relevant people.
For example, you are a photographer who specialises in 3 different photoshoots: Weddings, Babies and Families. You would separate your Adgroups according to the three different photoshoots that you offer. Each Adgroup would contain multiple keywords related to each different type of photoshoot. This approach can work very well but should be used with care if you have a small budget or little conversion data to work with.
The keywords you choose to bid on should always be relevant to your Ad text and both the keyword and ad text should be relevant to the page on your website visitors will be directed to if they click on your Google Ad. The 3 factors mentioned above (keyword, ad text, landing page) are the most important in determining you Quality Score, therefore, making sure that all 3 factors are highly relevant to what the visitor is looking for is absolutely crucial to the overall success of your campaign.
Keyword Match Types
While it is important to choose the right keywords, you can damage the performance of your campaign if you select the wrong match type. You will need to select a keyword match type that tells Google how aggressively or restrictively you would like to match your advertisements to keyword searches. The various match types are as follows:
Broad Match – This match type is designed to reach the widest possible audience and should almost always be avoided like the plague. Broad match will kill your Google Ads campaigns! When using broad match, your ad is eligible to appear whenever someone searches for that phrase, similar phrases, singular or plural forms, misspellings, synonyms, stemmings (such as floor and flooring), related searches, and other relevant variations
Keyword example: wedding photographer
User Search Example: wedding photo album
Modified Broad Match – This allows you to reach a wide audience but with significantly better control over who sees your ad. This is done by essentially telling Google that the users’ search query must include your stipulated words, otherwise do not display the ad. You force individual words to be included in the users’ search phrase by using the “+” symbol in front of the specific keyword that must be included.
Keyword example: +wedding +photographer
User Search Example: wedding photographer Johannesburg
Phrase Match – This can currently be considered the strictest match type. This match type signals that your ad will only appear when a prospective customer queries your key phrase using your keywords in the exact order that you enter them, but there may be other words either before or after the search phrase.
Keyword example: “wedding photographer”
User Search Example: best wedding photographer Johannesburg
Exact Match – This used to be the most specific keyword match type and in previous years, prospective customers would only see your ad when they typed in your exact keyword phrase by itself. However, recently, Google has made changes to this match type to make allowances for searches containing synonyms, plurals and other variations of your keywords (that indicates similar intent, according to Google’s AI).
Keyword example: [wedding photographer]
User Search Example: wedding photographer(s) / marriage photographer(s)
At Synergy Digital Marketing, the Exact Match and Broad Match Modified keyword types are the cornerstones of Google Ad campaigns that we create. These two match types provide maximum flexibility and reach whilst still keeping irrelevant searches to a minimum.
Negative Keywords:
How do you prevent your ads from showing to an audience that you know is not interested? Negative keywords are the answer!
This type of keyword excludes your ads from showing on searches that include words you don’t want your ads to display for. So if you’re a wedding photographer that doesn’t do engagement photoshoots, you could add a negative keyword that blocks all engagement related searches from displaying your ads, designated with a minus sign (-).
Negative Keyword example: -engagement
User Search Example: engagement and wedding photographer – This would then not display your ads.
Few businesses devote enough time and energy to building a negative keyword list, despite the significant role that negative keywords play in reducing wasted ad spend and maximizing ROI. Unfortunately, negative keywords are less effective if you are using broad keywords. How do you find negative keywords? One of the best ways to find negative keywords is by analyzing your Search Terms Report and identifying search terms that are not related to your products or services.
Keyword Analysis
Keyword analysis is the process of analyzing your keywords and search terms that brought visitors to your website from Google Ads. The search terms report is a list of the actual search terms that people have typed into Google, and that resulted in your ad being shown and clicked. Depending on your keyword matching options, the search terms listed might be vastly different than your keyword list. Many advertisers do not take full advantage of the data that Google Ads provides us with. Analyzing your search terms report to ensure high relevance is one of the most crucial aspects of managing a Google Ads campaign and it will help you to optimize your campaign for efficiency and results. Here are a few examples of how keyword analysis can help your Google Ad campaigns:
Reduce Wasted Spend: Analyze your keywords in order to distribute more budget to successful keywords and eliminate keywords that are costing you money but not producing results.
Increase Conversions: Analyzing the performance of your keywords allows you to identify keywords that are achieving the most conversions and focus on building your keyword list around keywords that are similar. You can also analyze your search terms to customize multiple factors related to how much you are bidding on specific keywords and how much of these keywords’ market share you are acquiring, to ensure that your ads show as often as possible for keywords that generate leads and do not show for keywords that don’t.
Find New Markets: Use keyword analysis to expand your efforts and discover more specific keyword queries that could open your ads up to more relevant searches and lead to high-quality conversions.
Google Ads can be a complex platform to manage and unfortunately, mistakes can lead to frustration and costly campaigns that yield few conversions. That is why it is important to keep up to date with the latest strategies, or alternatively, work with an experienced and dedicated Google Ads Specialist. If you would like expert assistance with your Google Ads strategy and keyword selection you are welcome to apply for Free Google Ads Strategy session with us.