Even the best PPC Account Managers are bound to make mistakes from time to time. It is also a bonus that paid search is forgiving and allows you to correct those mistakes before you spend a whole lot of money without any return.

I will discuss 3 mistakes that some of us make while setting up paid search accounts and how to correct them. These corrections could potentially save you huge advertising costs.

1. Ad and Keywords Mismatch

Sometimes you have an idea for a great ad copy that you think would generate a high CTR and make you a hero, but the truth of the matter is, you cannot reach a high CTR with a low quality score. What I mean is, if you decide to write ads and omit keywords in your ad groups, your quality score suffers adversely and so does your ad rank. Google makes it a point to read your ads and compare them to your keywords, if they match, you are rewarded, if not, then you are punished. This might seem like an “over-preached” point, but implementing this produces some very impressive results. Always make sure your keywords are somewhere in the ad copy.

2. Using Broad Match keywords

AdWords has come a long way and today we know that dependent on your budget and the health of your account, you could decide to go after some risky keywords in order to maximize your reach. However, it would be wrong for you to think that using broad match keywords could increase your reach and CTR even with the risks involved. Most often times, broad match keywords produce the worst clicks (clicks that are not related to your target market) and high amount of impressions that lead to no conversions. My advice? Use broad modified match. It is simple add a ‘+’ to whatever keyword you want the user to include. This disallows google from showing your ad for variations of that keyword that might not relate to your keyword.

3. Too many keywords in one ad group

Sometimes, we cannot help it and Google does not frown upon it, so this one is technically not a mistake, but it is a bad practice. More than 100 keywords in one ad group often leads to low quality scores. It is always better to have a 1000 ad groups with 10 keywords in each than the other way round. The most keywords you should have in one ad group is 100.

If you are a new account manager, you should really watch and make sure that you are not making any of these mistakes. It is very advisable to perform tests and analyze results, and I can give you my word that if you test these bad practices side by side with their accompanied suggested method, you would see a big difference in your account.

By: Kwasi