Google Ads Mistakes to Avoid - Whiteboard Friday

Key Takeaways

[Music] hey moz readers my name is dana d tomasso and i'm president partner at kickpoint we're a digital marketing agency way up in the frozen wilds of edmonton alberta today i'm going to be talking to you about ppc and i know you're thinking this is an seo blog what are you doing here talking about ppc but one of my resolutions for 2019 is to bring together seo and ppc people because seo can learn a lot from ppc and yes ppc you also can learn a lot from seo i know ppc people are like we just do paid it's so great but trust me both can work together in our agency we do both seo and ppc and we work with a lot of companies who have one person sometimes two and they're doing everything so one of the things we try to do is help them run better ads campaigns so here i have tips on things that we see all the time when we start working with a new ads account that we end up fixing and hopefully i can pass this on to you so you can fix it before you have to call an agency to come and fix it for you so one of the things is this is actually a much longer piece than what i can present on this whiteboard there's only so much room so there is actually a blog post on our website which you can find here kickpoint.ca google dash ads dash mistakes please check that out and that will have the full nine tips but i'm just going to break it down to a few today all right so first thing too many keywords we see this a lot where people in google says you know make sure to put together keywords that have the same sort of theme but your theme could be really specific or it can be kind of vague so this is an example real example that we got where the keyword examples were all lawyer themes so defense lawyer criminal lawyer dui lawyer assault lawyer sexual assault lawyer and technically they all have the same theme of lawyer but that's way too vague for it to be all in one single ad group because what kind of ad are you going to show we our lawyers call us right it's not specific enough so take for example dui lawyer which i know is a really very competitive niche and then you can do dui lawyer dui lawyer seattle and then d by lauren dui lawyer seattle spelled out a little bit differently and i'll talk about that in a second so by taking this one thing and then breaking it down into a much more specific ad group you can really have much more control and this is a consistent theme and all the tips i talk about is much more control over where you're spending your money what keywords you're spending it on what your ads are having a much better landing page to add match which is also really important just makes your ad life so much easier when you've got it in all those ad groups and i know it might seem intimidating it's like well i have three ad groups now and if i follow your tips i'm gonna have 40 but at the same time it's way easier to manage for 40 well organized groups and is the three manage three really badly organized groups so keep that in mind the next thing is picking the right match type and so you can see here i've got this bracket stuff and this phrase stuff and what's these plus signs right and so the three there's really four match types there's broad match which is terrible and don't ever use it and broad match is just you writing out the keyword and then google just displays it for whatever it feels like is relevant to that particular search and so for example we've seen examples where it's like a catering company and they'll have catering in as a keyword and they're showing up for all sorts of phrases where the catering where they can't provide catering so they're searching for a venue that only does in-house catering or they're spending money on a catering conference or just totally irrelevant stuff do not use broad match the upgrade from that is what's called broad match modifier or bmm and that's where these plus signs come in so this is really the words dui lawyer and seattle in any order but they all have to exist and that other things can exist around that so it could be i need a dui lawyer in seattle i live in seattle i need a dui lawyer that would also work for that particular keyword the next type is phrase and that's the in the quotes and this is dui lawyers the example here and then you can have anything before it you can have anything after it but you can't have something in between it so it couldn't be dui who is really great at being a lawyer for example you know weak example but you get the idea you can't just shove stuff in the middle of a phrase match and then exact match is what's in the brackets here and that is just those words and nothing else so if i have dui lawyer this keyword if i didn't have dui lawyer seattle this keyword would not trigger if somebody searched a dui lawyer seattle so that's as specific as possible and you really want to try that for your most competitive keywords this is the really expensive stuff because you do not want to waste one single penny on anything that is irrelevant to that particular search so this is your head-on it's really expensive every click i got to make sure i'm getting the most money possible for those clicks that's where you really want to use exact match so next tips the next thing is what we see is a lot of people who have only one ad per group this is not a tip this is a criticism up here and the thing is is that maybe again you think it's easy for management but it's really hard to see what's going to work because if you're not always testing how are you going to know if you could do better so make sure to have at least three ads per group and then look at your ad copy we see a lot of just generic like we are the best lawyers call us like there's nothing there that says i need to call these people and so really think about how you can add those emotional triggers into your copy talk to your client or your team if you work in house and find out what are the things that people say when they call what are the things that they say wow you really helped me with this or i was feeling like this and then you came in and i just felt so much better you know and and that can really help to spice up your ads and you don't want to make it you know too we don't get too fancy with this but we certainly want to make something that's going to help you stand out so really add those emotional triggers into your ad copy and then the next thing is making sure to have a call to action which seems basic because i think it's an ad if you click it that's the call to action but sometimes people on the internet they're not necessarily thinking you just want to say you know what just call me or email me or we're open 24 hours just be really specific on what you want the person to do when they look at the ad just spell it out for them i know it seems silly just just tell them just tell them what you want them to do that's all you need to do and then make sure you add in all the extensions so in google ads if you're not super familiar with the platform there's a section called extensions and these are things like when the address shows up under an ad or you've got those little links that come up or you've got you know somebody saying we're open 24 hours for example there's all sorts of different extensions that you can use just put in all the extensions that you possibly can for every single one of your groups and then they won't all trigger all the same time but at least they're there and it's possible that they could trigger and if they do that gives your ad more real estate versus your competition which is really great on mobile because ads take up a lot of space at the top of a mobile search so you want to make sure to shove your competition as far as you possibly can down that search so you own as much of that property as you possibly can one thing that i do see people doing incorrectly with extensions though is setting extensions at say the campaign level and then you have different ad groups that cover different themes so going back to this example over here with the different types of lawyers let's say you had an extension that talks specifically about dui law but then it was triggering on say sexual assault law right you don't want that to happen so make sure you have really fine-tuned control over your different extensions you're showing the right extension with the right type of keyword and the right type of ad the other thing that we see a lot is where people have location extensions and they're showing all the location extensions where they should not be showing all the location extensions so you've got an ad group for say seattle and it's talking about this new home development that you have and because you just loaded in all your location extensions suddenly you're showing extensions for something in say san francisco right and and it's just because you haven't filtered properly really double check to make sure that you've got your filter set up properly for your location extensions you're showing the right location extension for the right ad and i know the google says we'll pick the locations closest to the client but you don't know where that person is searching right there they could be in san francisco at that moment and searching for new home builds in seattle because maybe they're thinking about moving from san francisco to seattle you don't want them to see the stuff that's there you want them to see the stuff that's at the place where they're intending to be and so really make sure you control that all right so last but not least uh keep display and search separate by default google so helpfully says we'll just show your ads everywhere it's totally cool this is what we want everyone to do don't do that this is this is what makes google money it does not make you money and the reason why is because display network which is where you're going through your website then you see an ad and search network when you type in the stuff and you see an ad are two totally different beasts it's really a different type of experience and to be honest if you take your search campaigns with your text-based ads and now you're showing them on websites you're showing a boring text ad on a website that already has like 50 blinky things and click here and right and i mean they're probably not seeing because maybe they have an ad blocker installed but if they are certainly your text ad which is kind of boring and not intended for that medium is not going to be the thing that stands out so really you're just wasting your money because you'll end up with lower relevancy less clicks and then google thinks that your group is bad and then you'll end up paying more because google thinks your group is bad so it really gives you that extra control by saying this is a search campaign it's only on search this is a display campaign it's only on display keep the two of them totally separate and then you have lots of control over the search ads being for search and display ads being for display don't mix those two up so make sure to uncheck that by default so definitely there's more tips on our blog here but i hope that this will help you get started and seos if you've never done a ppc campaign in your life i recommend just setting one up put 50 bucks behind that thing just try it out because i think what will really help you is understanding more of how people search because as we get less and less keyword data from the different tools that we use to figure out what the heck are people googling when they try to search for a business ads give you some of that data back and that's where ads can be a really great ally in trying to get better seo results so i hope you found this enjoyable thanks so much