5 SEA Mistakes You Absolutely Need to Avoid

Are you making these five common SEA mistakes? Hopefully not! Make sure for yourself because these might be the reasons your online ads are costing you more than they should.

In today’s post, we’ll have a look at five common SEA mistakes that could be making your cost-per-click (CPC) spend higher than your competitors’ and how you can optimise your ads.

#1: Unorganised account structure

You should create campaigns that are very topic-specific. Be sure to use ad groups to separate them!

The sooner you focus your ad groups on the ad keywords, the better the keywords will match your ads. The best practice here is to group the ads and the copywriting under one main keyword.

#2: Not using keyword options

A specific keyword option is specified for each keyword that is logged in. This determines how similar the search term can be to the booked keyword.

If you do not select an option, Google Ads automatically selects the most appropriate one.

If the keyword option is selected, your ads will be displayed automatically for relevant variants of your keywords even if these terms are not explicitly included in your keyword list.

This allows you to attract more visitors to your website, spend less time creating keyword lists, and focus your spending on powerful keywords.

But...

Because Google selects the placement of your ads, your ad may also appear for inappropriate terms.

An example:

Although you only want to advertise backpacks with your Google Ads campaign, your ad will also be displayed for the search term “bags”.

The users' search intentions are not satisfied and in the worst case you burn through your advertising budget.

The keyword option Matching phrases is the better option here as well as the use of negative keywords.

#3: Not using ad extensions

Here’s what a Google Ad with extensions looks like:

With ad extensions, your advertisement does not only consist of a headline, URL and info text, but also provides even more information.

In this case, this extra information can be additional sitelinks, but also star ratings and your contact details.

shutterstock/Roman Samborskyi

With ad extensions, your ads take up more space in the search results, which gets your ad even more visibility. And with this increased "real estate", you should get more clicks as well.

An increased number of clicks also sends a positive signal to Google. The quality score increases, which can reduce CPC costs.

#4: No connection between the keyword and the landing page

This is a common mistake made by many Google Ads users. The landing page, just like the ad itself, should be connected to the user’s search.

Many make the mistake of not using dedicated landing pages. They will instead opt to send users to the homepage or another subpage that does not match the search query.

Best practice: Make sure that the user’s search intention is addressed on the landing page and in the ad text. The searcher should find exactly what they were looking for on your website!

#5: Not tracking conversions

At the end of the day you want to know which ads were profitable, which increased sales and which did not pay off.

To get this information, you need to work with conversion tracking.

We recommend that you set up conversion tracking directly in your Google Analytics account and link Analytics to Google Ads. This allows you to see exactly which ads have generated the desired sales and which of the ads you may need to revise again.