New Study: Common Adwords Mistakes That Cost Advertisers Money And Lost Clicks

A new study highlights some of the common mistakes that online advertisers should avoid in order optimize their Adwords ads, spend less, and improve results.

The B2B Resource Team, a Sarasota, Florida marketing and advertising firm has just completed a study, evaluating 135 Adwords ads from different business categories, scoring them against fifteen factors that are important in getting best results for the lowest ad spend dollar.

The search ads were randomly selected, included large and small companies advertising in the Bradenton, Sarasota, and Venice Florida markets.  The results were grouped into Medical, Restaurant, Legal, Automotive, Veterinarian, Home Build and Improvement, Services, and Real Estate business categories.  The study also compared ad scores between the different business categories to see if any category was better than others at producing higher scoring ads that could be used as learning opportunities for other categories.

The ad sample size is small compared to the estimated millions of daily local searches that occur each day, but the results serve as reminders of specific things that advertisers should do to get better results.  Most of these things are simple, but can have a big impact on ad performance.  They do however, require the advertiser to pay some attention to their accounts – something that may not be happening as much as it should.

Greg Jordan of the B2B Resource Team said, “To get best results, Adwords is not a set it and forget it kind of deal.  Adwords optimization requires regular attention focused on tweaking ad campaign elements, and watching a few important metrics. If the advertiser does this, they can get very good results.  The downside is that managing Adwords can be complicated, and companies without the staff, experience, or time, often don’t get good results and quit.  This study serves as a reminder of some of the basics for creating and optimizing Adwords ads.  Even those companies who have their campaigns professionally managed will benefit from understanding common Adwords mistakes, particularly if they do not have the best expertise managing their account.”

It is well worth taking stock of these learnings because trends suggest Google Adwords, and other online paid advertising, is likely to have a bigger role in future online advertising and marketing plans.  Every few months, Google seems to shake up the SEO world with major changes that cause some companies to lose rankings, and some to gain.  The most recent example was a reduction of four places in the organic local search results shown on Google’s search engine results page.  This means that the future visibility of a company’s brand, products, and services on the first page of Google will likely be easier to achieve through Adwords.

Done correctly, Adwords ads can help smaller local business as well as national businesses get on the first page of Google and become visible to targeted audiences on mobile or desktop, faster than SEO.  This justifies a bigger role for Adwords in the paid advertising/SEO marketing mix.

The results of the study showed common errors for all business categories that cost money and reduce click through rates.  All business categories had significant opportunity to improve their results, and it was surprising to see the poor ad scores of categories that would be expected to score well, e.g. the Real Estate sector, when compared to the evaluation criteria and other categories. 

The study could not determine the actual ROI of any of the selected ads, since actual spending, alternate keyword options, and conversion data were not available.  Landing pages, an important factor in Ad quality and cost per click, were also not evaluated.

The learnings then are directional and can best be used as an aid to design and continuously optimize ads and ad campaigns with elements that will lower CPC and increase ROI.

The report includes a graphical model of improved Adwords ROI, and a checklist of the basics for setting up the next ad campaign.  It is available here.

The B2B Resource Team LLC is a Sarasota, Florida firm specializing in pay per click management, reputation marketing, content marketing, and Amazon product launch consulting.