Getting Google Ads right – avoiding missed opportunities

Posted by Aaron WeinerGoogle Ads

Do you ever wonder why Google Ads appears to be working for so many other businesses and not yours?

Ever wonder what you’re doing differently from everyone else?

This post will help you understand the big issues holding you back from Google Ads success, and show you how to solve them in your own account.

The problem with missed opportunities.

Missing out on Google Ads opportunities is almost as bad as wasting your budget.

In fact, in some ways it’s worse.

Why? Because you’ll miss out on connecting with people that are looking for your products or services.

I’m going to show you the three main missed opportunities within Google Ads , and how overcoming them will give you a serious advantage.

Missed opportunity #1: Too-narrow a focus.

Every time I’ve been asked to check how an Ads account is performing, one of the most common things that catches my attention is how narrowly focused the keywords are.

The problem with being too focused is that you could be missing out on keywords that will cost you less money and produce better results.

So here’s a question for you: How often are you doing keyword research for your ads? Be honest!

If you answered, “back when I set up the campaign” or “not as often as I should”, then you need to do something about this.

And if your first thought is to open the Google Ads Keyword Planner, think again!

You need to dig much deeper than that, and the Google Ads Keyword Planner isn’t as good as it once was.

Also, your keyword research shouldn’t be a thirty second task. Everything else in your Ads campaigns is built on top of them!

Good keyword research is a process that’s worth spending time on.

Hint: you can currently sign up for a 7 day trial of ahrefs for just $7. And you can do a lot of keyword research in an hour or two, never mind 7 days.

Missed opportunity #2: Not addressing their needs.

This issue can be difficult to even realise, mainly because we all think we know what our customers want and need.

Maybe you’ve created personas where you try to get into the heads of your potential customers. Or perhaps you’ve sent out customer surveys for feedback.

These approaches can be useful to some extent, but ultimately the personas are based on guesswork and customer feedback can be dangerously misleading.

You could be missing out on groups of people that are interested in your products or services.

This is where you need some outside help. Someone that’s not caught up in the details of how you do things or the day-to-day practicalities of your business.

Someone who can see beyond the keywords you’ve chosen to target within Google Ads or your messaging within your ads and landing pages.

We’ve taken advantage of outside help for our marketing endeavours and it’s been extremely useful.

Sometimes that fresh set of eyes is exactly what you need.

Missed opportunity #3: Bad themes.

Google Ads works best when you give people what they want.

When someone searches for something on Google and your ad is exactly what they are looking for, it’s a win-win situation.

Google set up the Google Ads system to help facilitate this approach. You set up a campaign and within it, you have your ad groups, and within each ad group, you have your keywords and ads. Then each of the ads can point to a specific landing page.

Google ads account structure - account to campaign to ad groups

If your campaigns don’t contain distinct ad group themes, you’re missing out.

When your keywords make a connection with your ads, and your ads then make a connection with the landing pages, it’s the ideal situation. You’re giving people exactly what they want, at the precise moment that they’re looking for it.

This is what you should aim for when people click on your ads

Cramming all your keywords into a few ad groups will increase your Ads costs, and you’ll miss out on making a good connection with new customers.

If you’ve been stuffing your ad groups with too many loosely-related keywords, I would recommend to gradually start breaking them down into smaller more tightly focused ad group themes.

It’s slow and tedious work but can have an enormous impact on the success of your Google Ads account.

Solving these three missed opportunities will definitely help you produce better results within Google Ads.

More importantly, you should also start to see an increase in revenue, as Google Ads will finally be working correctly.

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