Google adwords is the flagship product of Google Inc, and it is the biggest online advertising platform. Google generates more than 20 Billion US dollars via Google adwords. And yet it is probably the easiest advertising tool to use, you can set up an account with $5, choose targeting country and fill credit card information in, then choose your keywords and landing pages, write an ad copy and that’s it. Literally it can be finished with in 10 mins, super simple!

google adwords tax calculator

Today, I read a post on SEObook and found out this tool designed by ppcblog – Google Adwords Tax Calculator. It attracted my attention immediately. With my experience of managing multiple adwords campaigns containing tens of thousands of keywords and thousands of ad groups, I thought I should be pretty good. So I gave this tool a try, and I still waste 15% of my budget. Of course it might be inaccurate, but I think I should write a post to point out where should Adword newbies be careful about their accounts, Google Adword is easy to use and track ROI, and yet it is also very easy to waste money on it. (Otherwise how can Google earn $20,000,000,000 from it annually?)

Where are the easiest parts on Google Adwords you can waste your money?

1. Keywords Selection

Keywords selecting is an art, choose the most suitable keywords for your business to bid can make your adwords campaign become far more profitable. Don’t just pick up the ones with the highest search volume. The best SEO book so far “The Art of SEO” defines search queries into 3 categories, navigational queries, informational queries and transactional queries. Different types of search queries have different values, so choose your keywords wisely. Also bear in mind, users start using longer and longer search queries.

2. Keywords Match type

Can you believe it? About 50% of  adwords income were generated from broad match keywords! That was 10 billion US dollars, how much advertisers’ money were wasted by bidding broad match keywords? I don’t know, but the amount would be huge. Some PPC experts use broad match keywords to find profitable search queries and than bid on them to maximise the return, but if you are not that sophisticated, use phrase match and exact match.

3. Negative keywords

One of the most effective ways to eliminate unnecessary search queries, if you are not offering free stuff, make sure to put “free” into negative keywords list. Here are some tips for finding negative keywords.

4. Ad groups structure

Always keep your keywords as few as possible in one ad group, but it does not necessarily mean you have to put only one keyword per ad group. I would say 5 – 10 really relevant keywords are good to start with. Well-organised ad groups can greatly help achieve high quality score, hence less money you have to pay per click. (Video of how Google calculates quality score is in this post)

5. Bidding strategy

Are you always bidding on first place? Because you think 1st place can bring you the most clicks, hence more profitable. But you are wrong, always bid for #1 can easily get you involved in bidding war, which will cost you a lot of money. Some authoritative researches indicate that bidding on position 5-7 is more profitable, my personal advice would be #4 if you don’t have the money to win bidding war. (Sometimes top 3 sponsor links display on top of the natural search results, and #4 becomes the top one in the sponsors list on the right)

6. Ad copy

Writing an excellent ad copy is the key to increase click through rate, hence save the money, because quality score is highly dependent on CTR. There is an essential role to keep in mind, don’t write you ad copy for the keywords, write it for your potential customers. And remember, even though your keywords in ad copy can be highlighted when visitors search, but if there are too many bolded keywords, that ad copy looks spammy.

7. Search and content network

Never ever bidding in both search network and content network at the same time, because customer behaviors are completely different. Further more, bidding on both networks can easily mess up your data, e.g. CTR on search network is normally higher than CTR on content network. So make sure seperate your search network campaign and content network campaign.

You are very welcome to leave your opinions as comments. Please let me know what you think

Related posts:

1. How to increase CTR to improve Google Adwords Quality Score
2. How To Easy And Fast Create Massive Google Adwords Ad Groups
3. How to find paid search keywords that customers really use
4. SEO Keywords Targeting: Put Synonyms in Your Content
5. 5 things you could mess up Google Analytics data