AdWords is pretty straightforward, but there are some "mistakes" that can cost you a lot of money. 

The 3 BIGGEST mistake Adwords newbies make

1. Without doubt the biggest mistake a newbie to Adwords makes is compiling a long list of less than targeted keywords and whacking (technical term) them into a single ad-group.

2. Using broad match only

3. The unholiest of the trinity – not tracking results.

#1 The Single Adgroup

Although at first it may seem tempting – collecting all your keywords and lumping them into a single ad-group for ‘ease of administration’ is not a good idea for a multitude of reasons.

First off, let’s say you have managed to find 1000 keywords for your campaign and you pop them all into a single ad-group. You get a single point of administration (or more accurately a single point of failure) but look at what you miss:

1. The ability to group tightly cohesive keywords and construct targeted adverts which are more likely to gain a click through to your site.

2. The ability to have specific landing pages on your site for specific customer psychographics. This alone will greatly increase your chances of getting a prospect respond to your call to action – be it an email address capture or a sale.

3. The ability to keep tight control over the budget of your ‘best’ keywords (where best are high traffic/high conversion). Sure you can adjust individual CPC’s within an ad-group, but the granularity and control is not there and the problems inherent with grouping too many loosely assembled keywords will ensure your efforts are thwarted and money wasted.

Active campaign management is required to ensure you have not just a return of your investment but a positive return on your investment.

#2 Using Broad Match

You need to specify your matching options within Adwords
Option 1: Broad Match – This specifies the keyword in an unadorned fashion within your list. For every term relevant to your market there could be 10, 100 or 1000 others which are not (which is why when you utilize broad matching you should use negative keywords exhaustively).

The upshot of this is that your advert will have more untargeted impressions which will result in a lower Click Through Rate and you will receive more clicks from visitors who are not in the least bit interested in your product/service thus increasing your costs.

Option 2: Phrase match – Your advert will show only if the phrase is found within the keywords. This is the next most highly targeted form of search matching and is an ‘improvement’ on broad match – in terms of specialisation.

Option 3: Exact match – In an ideal world, you will know exactly what every keyword is that your prospects are searching for and you could therefore have an exact match for a keyword search. This would serve to both minimise your advertising expenditure and increase your return on investment simultaneously.

It is best to utilize all 3 matching options within your ad-group because:
1. You get to know if there are keywords out there you have missed in your research and can dig further to find out if they should be specified with more targeted matching or added to your negative keyword list.
2. The assignment of your keyword status (on hold, in trial, disabled) is delayed because the impressions are spread between the variants of the keywords.
3. More targeted terms (using exact match) generally have higher conversion rates so you can assign different more cost effect cost per clicks accordingly.

Eventually, as your campaigns mature in time, you will have more and more exact match and less phrase & broad match. As a result your advertising costs will decrease whilst your return on investment will naturally increase.

#3 The Unholiest Error

In the world of Adwords, you need to know what keywords are giving you results and focus your budget and efforts accordingly. If you have an advert that shunts prospects to a generic landing page, which is not tracked and you have no idea as a result whether they signed up or bought a product/service.

Then, you are wasting tens, hundreds, thousands of pounds every year.

Now you can no longer claim ignorance on the biggest mistakes made with Google Adwords.