09.08.2018 · 2 min read

The 5 most common SEA mistakes

Search Engine Advertising (SEA), paid search advertising, is a very broad field with a great many options. But in principle the biggest mistakes can be defined quickly here too, and hopefully fixed just as quickly. These mistakes are usually the reason your costs (CPC) become far too expensive.

An unstructured account!

Campaigns should always be set up to be very topic-specific. Always create ad groups whose keywords also match the ads: ads and texts should have one main keyword.

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Messy keywords!

Also always use the keyword variants “broad match” (relevant variants of your keyword), “phrase match” (the phrase matches or very similar variants) or “exact match” (exact term), so that you only choose the keywords for which ads should be shown. Only in this way do you prevent clicks on keywords that do not match them at all, and therefore unnecessary costs.

No extensions or sitelinks!

For an optimal ad, more matters than just the title, URL and description. Above all, further sitelinks, but also reviews and your contact details, are important extra information that a text ad should contain and that have to be set up separately.

Missing relevance!

A mistake that is made particularly often: the ad does not match the page the ad forwards to. So a missing connection between the keyword ad and the landing page. In this case the searcher naturally does not feel properly understood, their search intent is disregarded, and Google penalizes that with higher click prices. The searcher should find on your website exactly what they were looking for!

No conversion tracking!

If you do not set up conversion tracking, success naturally cannot be measured either. If the algorithm does not know what it should count as a conversion (e.g. a sale in the online shop, a call in the store or signing up for the mailing list), you also do not know which ads were profitable, which increased revenue and which did not pay off.

Takeaway

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