Do you ever wonder if you have big gaps in your Google Ads campaigns that are costing you money?

That’s because Google Ads (previously called Adwords) is the most complicated (and sophisticated) advertising platform in the world.

There are lots of hidden settings and buried features that are wasting your money and keeping you from having the most profitable campaigns.

What are the most common mistakes?

Setting&Forgetting

It takes a lot of effort to get the campaigns set up – from keyword research to ad copy, to landing pages, tracking, and more.

It’s easy to think the job is done after your campaign is up and running, but that’s just the beginning!

Daily checkups are necessary to see if anything strange is going on – you ARE spending money daily after all.

ad copy in google ads

Not using geographic targeting

Geographic targeting (also called “geo-targeting”) lets you refine your ads to a specific geographic area. This is especially helpful for small businesses that only want to attract customers within a certain radius of their brick-and-mortar location.

It’s also handy for worldwide corporations that want to funnel their budget into one particular country.

Forgetting negative keywords

Negative keywords are certain terms that you don’t want to trigger your ads. This helpful for broad and phrase match keywords where certain words could change the entire meaning of a keyword.

For example, if you’re selling men’s running shoes, you can add the negative keyword “women’s running shoes” to make sure those searches don’t trigger your ad.

That way, you don’t show up for an ad that you don’t want, and the user doesn’t get irrelevant results. It’s a win-win!

Using too many keywords per ad group

When you use too many keywords per ad group, your ads can’t be specific enough to get a good click-through rate.

Instead, you would want to break these up into different groups and create new ad copy for each keyword.

By doing this, you can match the searcher intent to the right ad, then get them to the right landing page.

Short conclusion

Even if you’re a PPC machine, PPC is constantly shifting ground, with new trends and tools crowding in and competing for your attention.

Stay focused and follow the guidelines above to avoid the most common PPC and performance marketing traps.

Optimize campaigns separately, but look at the bigger picture.