Google AdWords can be a pretty powerful tool to drive customers toward your business, but only if it is managed properly. A wrong setting here, a bad keyword there can easily make your entire pay-per-click (PPC) budget go down the drain. If you are new to campaign management, you may not even realize what is eating into your ROI. This is exactly why we have jotted down here the biggest and most common AdWords mistakes a business can make with its PPC campaign.

#1 Not matching keywords properly

As a campaign manager, you are aware that Google lets you categorize keywords into broad, phrase and exact matches. It is very important to choose the match type very carefully. You may get more impressions with a broad match, but these views may be coming from people not relevant to your product. On the other hand, phrase and exact matches may not give you the kind of reach that broad match guarantees, these keyword groups will make sure that your audience is more targeted. And that could translate into a higher conversion rate!

#2 Ignoring negative keywords

Spend some time on Google Analytics to see what keyword phrases are people using in their searches, and which are the ones not getting converted. This will tell you which phrase or keyword you can eliminate from your campaign or a particular ad group. After all, why spend your budget on unqualified leads, right?

#3 Not bidding on your own brand

We simply cannot stress this one enough. If you want to keep competitors from poaching your customers, don’t let them bid on your brand; do it yourself! OK, so there may be budgetary limitations keeping you from bidding on your own brand or you may be ranking fabulously already, but let’s not forget that people who are directly searching for your company are the ones most likely to convert. Don’t make a mistake that may prove to be too costly to recover from later.

#4 Not having (or optimizing) a dedicated landing page

A paid marketing novice will happily direct the traffic to the business’ homepage, but an experienced campaign manager knows the value of having a dedicated landing page to achieve the set objective and get conversions. It’s equally important to give your visitors an amazing landing page experience because no amount of PPC can make up for a high-friction shopping experience.

#5 Not paying attention to Customer Lifetime Value

You just cannot set a budget for your Google AdWords campaign without first calculating the lifetime value (LTV) of your customer. The simplest method to determine the LTV is this:

Customer Lifetime Value = Average Value of Sale x Number of Repeat Transactions x Average Life Span 

For example, if a customer stays with your business for an average of 2 years, spending $100 every month, your customer’s lifetime value would be 100x12x2 = $2,400. So basically, your CPA should be below $1,200 for your campaign to be worth it.

#6 Not analyzing your competitors

If you don’t even know what are you competing against, how can you prepare for a victory? You already keep a tab on what your competitors are doing on social media, then why ignore them on Google AdWords? You must know what keywords they are trying to rank for, how do their landing pages compare to yours, and how can you improve yours to make sure customers choose you over them.

Though these are the most common mistakes businesses make with Google AdWords, there’s a lot that goes into making a PPC campaign successful. Click here to find out how a highly-experienced campaign manager can make your business soar!