Are you looking for the best ways to boost your return on investment while lowering your cost per acquisition on AdWords? Then make sure you avoid the common pitfalls marketers constantly fall into using this route to market.

Selecting The Wrong Keyword Match Types

Keeping non-performing keywords and using the wrong match type. If you have a large number of non-performing keywords as part of your campaign, they will bring down the overall quality score of your entire promotion. Don't keep keywords the generate clicks but not conversions and use modified broad match rather than broad match. Using broad matched keywords may be profitable for Google but will kill your return on Ad spend.

Failing To Use the Best Bid Strategy and Making Use of All Campaign Options

It’s easy to set up a basic campaign on Google AdWords, but that’s not where you should stop. This won’t guarantee that you get the maximum return on investment which is always going to be your ultimate goal. 

Setting an automated bidding strategy like maximise conversions or setting a cost per acquisition for your campaigns will allow Google to use AI to learn which keywords and Ads are more likely to generate conversions and maximise your Ad spend.

In addition, there a many additional features that are not part of the basic campaign set up and which tell Google which conditions of a search query are right to serve your particular ad. Target Ads by geography, content, mobile users, days of the week and times of day. Check which devices, days and times generate the best ROI for your campaigns. Spending money on click to call Ads at a weekend for example is pointless unless you have the resources to handle these calls.

Make full use of Ad Extensions which increase CTR and conversions. Ad extensions  increase the size and visibility of your Ads  and are a great way to direct users to a particular page on your site which matches their search query.

Over-Paying For Positioning 

If you’re using AdWords, you probably know that it's an auction of keywords that are running all the time. 

The CPC you pay is not just determined by what other advertisers want to pay. The good news is that there’s no need to capture the first ad position if you have correctly and successfully optimised your campaign and the quality score of your campaign will influence your CPC as much as the competition for a keyword.

To do this, you need to understand the different metrics that impact ad optimisation. This does include Google’s own Quality Score. 

Overlooking A/B Testing and Experiments.

A/B testing or split testing will ensure that you look at two variations of the same ad. You run them both and find out which details lead to greater conversions to build the ultimate ad. 

Alternatively, it can be used to test two unique landing pages. This helps you improve the performance of your campaign and increase your level of return. 

Don't forget checking the baseline performance metrics so there’s something to compare the ads to. 

Setting up campaign experiments and splitting your traffic between the live campaign and experiment is a great way to test different landing pages and bid strategies over time before committing all your campaign budget  to the changes.

Checking Search Queries and Updating Negative Keyword Lists.

Search keywords and search queries are not the same thing. Checking the search query report at least weekly will almost always reveal a whole bunch of clicks generated by queries which are not relevant to your keywords. Adding these to your negative keyword list will ensure your not overspending on wasted clicks.

Use negative keywords to utilise phrase match keywords so as not to kill your budget. This ensures that your ad doesn’t show up for keywords that aren’t connected to your target audience and burn your budget.

The trick here is to avoid queries that have a low buyer’s intent. Exact keywords usually aren’t enough to avoid this issue, so use negative keywords to maximise conversion rate and quality score. One research study showed you can decrease CPC by nearly 25% with this step. 

As of July 13 (2016) Google "will no longer allow ads for loans where repayment is due within 60 days of the date of issue" nor will they show ads for "loans with an APR of 36% or higher." They cite user protection as the reason for this update, specifically that "research has shown that these loans can result in unaffordable payment and high default rates for users." This is a noble cause, but is this really the reason?


​There are 3 possible reasons why Google would be invested in the same industry they have been actively imposing tighter and tighter restrictions on:

1) Because they own competitive companies
2) To actually make a difference in the world, and clean up what they see as a problem industry
3)Both of the above