Who is your target audience? Do you know it? Like many other advertisers, you are quick to answer it “yes,” but many times there are certain blind spots that will trouble in reaching your right audience. When there’re any blind spots in the advertising strategy, money spent in advertising gets wasted.
If your ad campaign is not configured rightly it will be displayed to the wrong buyers. Or, the ad campaign not compelling can get lost among your competition. Irrespective of the mistake, end result will be spending lots of money for getting little ROI. Luckily, mistakes made by the business owners and internet marketers can be prevented easily. In this post we will offer you some common mistakes that online advertisers make when choosing their Google Ads target audience and how to avoid such pitfalls.
- Not Targeting Ads Search & Display
When you are setting up the new ad campaigns, Google requests advertisers to run the ads on the Search & Display networks both. The main reason for this is putting your ad campaign in front of many eyes if possible. Different people interact differently in every network. Ads on a Search Network will be presented to the relevant customers that are looking out for your product, whereas display ads come on the relevant websites and blogs to people who aren’t shopping.
Instead of run single ad campaigns on both the networks, you are much better off in creating the separate search & display campaigns. After that you will optimize every ad campaign for various target audiences.
- Avoid Unfocused Target Audience
Another mistake you can avoid making is not targeting the right audience when you are setting up the ad campaigns. In order, to avoid killing the PPC budget, ensure you know your audience’s buying habits, pain points and interests. Unfocused target audience includes:
Wrong Location-Targeting
If you are not displaying the ads in certain geographic areas can divert your ad campaign goal. For example, if you are selling computer courses in your city, but you target a larger city, then irrelevant clicks from the people that are not interested in the course can drain your budget. So, whenever you choose to use radius ensure that you are rightly choosing the areas. Furthermore, you can change your bids for more demanding areas.
Wrong Age Targeting
Targeting ad audiences in a wrong age group can drain the campaign budget. For example, if you are selling beauty products for youngsters, but you are targeting women above 40, then your budget will get waste.
Wrong Gender-Targeting
The gender-specific audience targeting for wrong gender can drain your budget. For example, targeting mens for women’s clothes creates the loss of budget.
Wrong Device Targeting
Suppose you are getting more conversions from mobile, then targeting desktop users can be a waste. Pay attention to the device-type and know what kind of customers you need to target. The device targeting analysis will help you to better underrate the budget, profit & waste on every device separately.
Wrong Custom Intent Targeting
Making customer intent audiences will drive conversions; but, only if you are selecting the perfect keywords. Any irrelevant keywords will not attract right leads and can result in the drained budget.
- Not Looking After Remarketing Audiences in the Awareness Ad Campaigns
Message you will put across somebody who has interacted with the brand must be very different than message the brand new user must see. With the remarketing, you have to be a bit aggressive with the sales message and encourage your user to perform the specific action. With the top-of-funnel ad display campaign, you will need to pump brakes a little and do not be the used car salesman for the change. It is why I love to segment my audiences in the separate campaigns.
- Not Combining Your Social Audiences
With over 1.5 billion active users, Facebook has got no rival while it comes about enormity of their audience. The key reason Facebook provides lies in its potential granularity in which you may target your Facebook’s users.
Facebook has got information on what your users “Like” and follow unlike Google AdWords, and detailed data from the users’ personal profiles. When you have populated the audience list with sufficient traffic from the Facebook, you can create the search campaign on Google AdWords that includes just the top of funnel keywords like informational queries that are related to product or service that you offer (they have to be on the top of funnel as this audience is not looking for the product or service). The advantages of using the social ads with search campaigns will be huge.
Despite this, still I encounter many brands whose approach for advertising on both the Google and Facebook is unaligned and thus they fail in sharing the insights that are gained from a particular platform to another and maximize success.
- Avoiding Geotargeting
While it comes about internet marketing, geotargeting is one term that describes about creating the separate ad campaigns for every individual city in a targeting area or making the specific ads that have the names of cities in an ad body. When correctly executed, the right geotargeting campaign has an ability of drastically cutting down its cost of a lead and increase overall lead generation. It is useful for the service based businesses and whose advertising efforts will be based on the specific list of the locations that they function in.
- Forgetting to optimize remarketing campaigns
Remarketing is one advertising practice that is used to reach the visitors that have visited your site, but have not been converted in the customer yet. Many digital marketers insist on making use of the remarketing ad campaign, but, only some of them will put in an effort to rightly optimize and relocate an ad to make this very efficient. You may use Google for generating the report detailing where adverts are shown & which locations are effective.
These are some most common mistakes that Google Ads users generally tend to make in their marketing ad campaigns. Some include misspelling of the keyword, broken as well as redirected landing pages and failing to monitor their competition. Ensure you avoid them at any costs, or you risk on losing some of your valuable leads & customers, and spending huge resources on the campaign that was doomed from a get go. Even though the rightly optimized plan will do wonders for marketing campaign, the poorly optimized one will fast turn in the complete waste of resources and time.
- No Conversion Tracking
It is important to create effective ad campaigns and it is the first step for being successful in the Google AdWords. When the campaigns are running, you should optimize it properly, and it needs getting the right performance data.
Activating Google AdWords Conversion Tracking & Analytics is important for determining value delivered by the campaigns. The tracking systems allow you to see where the traffic comes from or how this tends to convert over different pages of the website. With such information, you will know which Google ads are keepers & which ones require rethinking.
- Not using the extensions
The ad extensions are really good. Undoubtedly. They will help your audiences to navigate the website and take proper action without going to the post-click landing web page. However, there is the practical benefit to use the ad extensions – they will make your ad larger! Bigger your ad, more estate it takes on a search page, higher the odds of your ad being noticed & clicked! You need to get familiar with various kinds of ad extensions & add this when it is appropriate for your online business. Whenever in doubt, the callout extensions are always applicable!
- Lack of targeting
Audience targeting is very important in directing the Google ads to your audience that you want or drive the conversions. It ensures you don’t pay unnecessarily for the clicks that will not convert. Location, device and audience targeting are certain ways you may narrow down the audience. Select targeting strategies as per your business goals. Suppose you are searching for the customers to buy your products in the home country, you can use the location targeting, thus you don’t pay for the clicks from your overseas customers, which you can’t reach. Moreover, it can be simple to reach the customers through mobile instead of desktop targeting if the customers are on a move.
- Not creating the ad group for brand
In the Google search, one important step that you will take to ensure that you don’t get eaten – create the ad group with the brand keywords. Why? Reason is if you don’t, then your competitors will do this for you! Thus, if your potential customer was looking for the business, their ad may come up before yours! You need to protect against sneaky competitors as well as create the ad group for the brand.
Summing Up Together
It is quite tempting to create the new campaigns and ads with a goal to attract several visitors; and when you build or grow the campaigns, this pays to cast the wider net and see how you may reach the new and viable customers.
Having said that, one biggest mistake that new marketers make is thinking very big and fast. Majority of the mistakes are avoidable by building the new campaigns that you can focus on internet users who are likely to be the shoppers.
