Google Ads are known for being one of the most popular, effective online marketing strategies because they offer a cost-effective way for a business of any size to utilize the latest technology and get in front of audiences who are actively searching.

Although Google Ads can quickly produce brand awareness and lead generation from quality traffic, many businesses are not optimizing the potential of their Google Ads budgets. In fact, it’s easy and quite common for businesses to waste valuable ad spend – let’s make sure your business won’t be one of them!

The truth is there are a variety of ways you could be losing money with your Google ads strategy, so it’s best to consult with an expert on your individual situation. That said, here are 3 common mistakes brands make that you should definitely try to avoid:

1. Not offering a quality website experience

Why bother spending money trying to bring traffic to your website if the experience once people arrive doesn’t produce engagement and conversions. All the Google ad spend in the world can’t fix a poorly functioning website.

With pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, you’re paying every time someone clicks to follow through to your designated landing page, so you need to make sure those clicks will generate enough profit to justify your ad spend.

Did you know that your visitors’ landing page experience is one of the three components Google uses consider to determine your ads’ quality score? (The other two components are ad relevance and expected click-thru-rate). 

You want to make sure your landing page will be both useful and relevant when people click-through as compared with other advertisers using the same keyword. To improve your website quality, make sure you’re giving people what they’re looking for. It also helps for your website to be mobile friendly with a quick loading speed.

2. Not tracking your conversions (and their) attributions

In order to know how your ads and campaigns are performing, you need to be tracking your conversions and determining which ads, campaigns, and keywords are driving your performance.

Google offers a free tool called conversion tracking that can show you what happens after a customer interacts with one of your Google ads. You determine a conversion action (such as purchasing a product, signing up for an email list, downloading your app, or calling your business) and Google will automatically track and provide you with data that can help you optimize your ad campaigns.

Once you’ve set up conversion tracking, you can even then utilize Google’s Smart Bidding automations to help you meet your business goals.

3. Not optimizing your keywords and audience targeting

Keywords make it possible to target your ads, but you need to make sure you’re optimizing your keyword strategy. Also, there are additional audience targeting tools you can use to get your ads in front of the right people.

One of the most basic keyword strategies that many businesses surprisingly ignore is negative keywords.  Negative keywords allow you to exclude search terms from your campaigns. There are actually three different types of negative keywords, and you should be using all three: negative broad match, negative phrase match, and negative exact match.  Google even provides a guide on how to add negative keywords to your campaigns.

Another useful audience targeting tool is Google’s new audience reporting which gives you a way to segment your audiences based on demographic information or specific interests and intents. You can use this data from Google to improve your bidding strategies on different ad campaigns.

Are you ready to improve your Google campaigns? Here at JXT Group, we’re proud to be among the top 3% of recognized Google Premier Partners. We’ve earned this distinction by developing ourselves into world-class experts in the technology and the strategies that can help your business make the most of your marketing budget on Google. 

If you want to enhance your digital marketing strategy in 2022, find out how our team can help by giving us a call at 718-690-7302 or submit our online contact form.