Most mistakes people make in their Google AdWords campaign managements are pretty common, and 90 percent of Google campaigns can be greatly improved with less than an hour of effort. You can save yourself hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of euros, depending of course on your adwords spend, in the hour you spend following our instructions in this article.

Want to know what the number-one mistake people make is in Google AdWords campaign management? Improperly organized campaigns. Badly organized ads and keywords cripple your Google campaigns and cost you a ton of money. Properly organized campaigns get results from the beginning and are easy to adjust and optimize. Over time this makes a huge difference.

In a perfect world, you’d serve up a perfect ad for every single keyword someone types in. Since each keyword is different, each ad would be different, too. If you had 2,000 keywords, then you’d have to write 2,000 ads, too.

In the real world, that’s kind of impractical. So you cluster similar keywords together with a single ad. Ad groups are the smallest individual units that contain your keywords and your ads together. You can have multiple ad groups in a single campaign. A campaign is just a handy way to organize ad groups, usually according to broad topic.

In a single Google account, you can have as many campaigns as you want. Some of the campaigns in your account may be on a completely different topic, selling completely different services, and sending traffic to a completely different web site.

How you separate your campaigns is up to you. How you separate ad groups, however, is one of those areas where there’s a right way and a wrong way.

Most beginners set up their campaigns to look something like this:

Murphy Telecommunications
Robust Solutions for
All Your Voice Mail Needs
www.murphytelecom.com

auto attendant
business telephone systems
call management systems
voice mail
voice mail equipment
voice mail service voice mail systems

Then they send all the visitors to the home page, which has a bunch of different links to “Services,” “Equipment,” “Q&A,” “About Us,” “Contact Us,” etc. What’s wrong with this kind of Google AdWords campaign management?

• There are too many different kinds of keywords in the same group. Every one of these keywords needs to be in its own group, along with a list of very similar words and phrases.

• The ad doesn’t match the keywords, and it can’t, because there are too many different kinds of keywords in the group.

• “Murphy Telecommunications,” or the name of almost any business, is a lousy headline. The clickthrough rate (CTR) is going to be very low, and therefore the bid prices will be higher.

• The ad is about Murphy Telecommunications, not what the customer really wants. Your ads need to be about your customer, not about yourself!

• A person who searches for “voice mail service” needs to be taken to a page about voice mail service; a person who searches for equipment needs to be taken to a different web page about voice mail equipment. These are two entirely different topics. If a person has to figure out where to go after they land on your web page, you’re making them work too hard. You need to show them exactly what they were searching for.

If you structure your campaigns properly from the beginning, it’s a lot easier to make this work. To do this, take all of your different keywords and organize them into narrow “silos” of very tightly related terms. They will look like this:

Voice Mail Services
voice mail provider
voice mail service
voice mail service provider
voice mail services

Voice Mail System
voice mail systems
voice mail systems for realtors
telemarketing and voice mail systems
phone systems voice mail
home office voice mail systems
home office telephone voice mail systems

Auto Attendant
answering attendant auto system
auto attendant voice mail services
auto attendant
auto attendant phone system
auto attendant software
auto attendant system
auto attendant voice mail
phone auto attendant

There’s another step we need to take before pasting this into a campaign: Consider negative keywords. Here’s a list of keywords that come from “Voice Mail Software.”

voice mail software
voice mail business software
voice mail software for panasonic
voice mail broadcasting software
voice mail business software
multiple voice mail software
mac voice mail software
multi-line voice mail system software vru
norstar voice mail software
software to record voice mail
free voice mail software

You might not want visitors who want something for free. Your company also has nothing to do with voice broadcasting and you don’t have anything for Macintosh computers. So turn those into negative keywords by putting a minus sign in front of them. The above list now looks like this:

voice mail software
voice mail business software
voice mail software for panasonic
voice mail business software
multiple voice mail software
multi-line voice mail system software vru
norstar voice mail software
software to record voice mail

Negative Keywords:

free
mac
macintosh
broadcast
broadcasting

So when you set up your ad campaigns, each one of these keyword lists is going to go into a different group with its own set of ads.

Follow these tips and you will be well on your way to a more optimised adwords account.

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