Paid Search is effective, useful, and scary all at the same time.  It can also make you broke if you don’t know how to effectively use it.

I was once a Paid Search Noobie and I can admit that I, how should I put this, donated a pretty big chunk of my money over to the search engines when I first started.   I am now a full-time Search Engine Marketing Manager that spends 9+ hours in Adwords, Yahoo Sponsored Search, and Adcenter accounts daily.

There are hundreds of mistakes that you can make that will lose you money, I decided to take wealthy affiliates top 10 mistakes and put my own spin on them, a bit more information if you will.

1. Content Network: The content network is great, don’t get me wrong, but if your new to Adwords turn it off!!!  Google has it turned on by default when you start a new campaign, so make sure to go into your campaign settings and turn it off until you have a firm grasp on search advertising and you are ready to expand.

2. To Many Keywords Per AdGroup:

Over the years I have taken over accounts that have one Campaign, one Adgroup, and thousands of keywords… Bad Idea!  You want to separate like keywords into tightly knit adgroups, I would suggest no more than 20 keywords per adgroup.  This will help you write more compelling Ads for each of the specific keyword groups and in turn have a better Click Through Rate and a better user experience for each searcher.

3. Group Keywords:

Like I talked about in the last paragraph grouping keywords is very important.  Instead of trying to explain I will just give a simple example.

Situation: You sell dog toys, you just started using Pay Per Click and you are setting up your account to start advertising.

Wrong Way:

Campaign - Dog Toys
AdGroup - Dog Toys
Keywords - dog toys, dog frisbees, dog bones, dog tennis balls

Ad:
Dog Toys for Sale
We have all kinds of dog
toys to choose from!
DogToys.com

Correct Way:

Campaign - Dog Balls
AdGroup 1: Tennis Balls
Keywords: dog tennis balls, dog tennis ball, squeeky dog tennis balls

See the difference?  The first way gets the point across but it is very broad.  The second way is very specific and lets the reader know that you are selling dog tennis balls, not just dog toys.

4. Using only Broad Match Type

When adding keywords to a paid search account you have 3 match type options:

Broad: Your Ad will show for any search variation that contains your keyword.  Ex. keyword: dog toys - your Ad would show for searches like; red dog toys, dog toys for small dogs, dog training toys

Phrase: Like broad match but a little bit safer.  Your ads will only show for your keyword “dog toys” with other words at the beginning or end. Ex. blue dog toys, or dog toys for big dogs

Exact: This is a safer method and makes sure that your Ads are only showing for your exact keyword “dog toys” with nothing else added to it.

You can see how broad match can end up showing your Ads for some things that you may not want it to like “dog action figure toy” which would bring up your Ad that shows that you sell dog toys, and if someone clicks on it you are wasting that money on someone that was looking for dog action figure toys, and not just dog toys.

5. Low Daily Budget

If you are going to start paid advertising I would suggest waiting until you have a decent amount of money to use.  Although you can set your daily budget to as low as $5, it really isn’t going to do much for you as you can’t get much traffic for $5.  Also the stronger you come out with higher daily budgets the more you are going to get awarded by Google with better Quality Scores on your Keywords.

6. Duplicate URLs

Sometimes when you are doing affiliate marketing for a product or service you will sometimes use their website to drive traffic to.  If the website you are advertising for already has someone using that website to advertise you are not going to be allowed to use that domain.  Duplicate URLs for any specific search phrase is not allowed.  The Search Engines will end up picking the more authoritative site, which will be the original advertiser and they will completely ignore your Ads and not show them.

7. Keyword Bids too High

Especially when starting out you will need to be very careful with how much you bid on a keyword.  Bidding $1 per click can become a disaster if you have a high volume keyword and you don’t know what your doing.  Start low and work you bids up until you are comfortable and you are profitable.

8. Ad Positions are too Low

Any position over 10 isn’t showing on the first page of the results.  Always try and stay below position 10 as this is going to be the most successful.  But remember, being in position #1 isn’t always best, test out other positions and see what works and go with it.

9. Non-Targeted Keywords

Be very careful when choosing keywords to bid on.  You want to choose highly relevant keywords to the product your are promoting.

For example if you are running Ads for Wealthy Affiliate you may be inclined to bid on keywords like “google adwords” or “affiliate marketing”.  These keywords are rather broad and get a lot of search volume and are not very targeted.  If someone is search these keywords they can be searching for a broad range of things, so be careful and make sure to double check your keyword list.

10.  To Many Ads when Split Testing

Split testing allows you to test 2 or more Ads against each other and then after a certain amount of traffic you can determine which Ad performs the best, get rid of the bad one and create another one to test against.  I recommend only using 2 Ads per Adgroup at a time.  If you have too many Ads it requires more data to determine the winner and it really isn’t as effective as using only 2 Ads.

Wealthy Affiliate offers all the training you will need to learn the tricks of the trade in paid search, and if you join now through this link you can get the infamous “Beating Adwords” ebook for free.