Businesses invest billions of dollars in Google AdWords campaigns. They have a huge promise of generating a 2:1 return on investment.

Yes, you can double your money with an AdWords campaign.

That’s not guaranteed, though. Advertisers make plenty of Google AdWords mistakes that cost them dearly. If you’re getting ready to launch your own campaign, you want to make sure that you avoid these same mistakes.

Keep reading to discover the top AdWords mistakes and how to avoid them.

1. Ads Direct to Home Page

Novice advertisers assume that the best way to drive traffic to their website is to make the home page the destination for the ad.

They wonder why they’re not getting calls or people to sign up for their newsletter.

You’re asking the visitor to your website to do a lot of work. They want to click on an ad and know that they landed in the right place.

That’s what a landing page does. It’s a page that sells your product or service to the visitor. It’s set up to make it easier for the person to book an appointment, enroll in a program, or download a case study.

2. No Bidding Strategy

You know how useful a digital marketing strategy is to your business. AdWords campaigns have to have a bidding strategy.

Your bidding strategy should be aligned with your campaign goals. If your goal is to drive traffic, then your bidding strategy should be pay-per-click.

A conversion goal should you a cost-per-action or maximize conversion bidding strategy.

One of the benefits of Google AdWords is that it’s easy to create a bidding strategy. You can set it up and Google automates the bidding. Learn more about that here.

3. Using Old Conversion Tags

Are you a long-time AdWords advertiser? You might be tracking conversions. If you are, you better check your conversion tags.

Google updated the conversion tags from sitewide tags to tags that can track actions on individual pages. The old tags still work, but they’re not as useful.

4. Lack of Testing

Did you know that you can test ad variations? That’s one of the most useful Google AdWords features because you can constantly make improvements.

You can test headlines against each other, ad text, and landing pages. By using this feature wisely, you will raise your conversion rates.

5. No Video Ads

You already know that Google owns the search market. They also own the video content market with YouTube. About one billion hours of content gets watched on YouTube every day.

Don’t miss out on the giant opportunity to run video ads alongside your text ad campaign.

Don’t Make These Google AdWords Mistakes

Google AdWords is the best way to jumpstart your business and get leads and customers. It’s not an ATM, though. You have to do work to attract the right customers.

Avoid the Google AdWords mistakes in this article. You’ll be well on your way towards dominating your market.

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