3 More Ways To Sabotage Your AdWords Campaign (Part 2)

One of the most powerful aspects of search engine marketing is that you’re reaching people who are actively looking for you.

These people have a need, a desire or a problem they need solved. When they type that search query into Google, it represents the single most pressing issue going on in their heads and they want a solution to it…right NOW!

That’s a highly valuable lead.

But in AdWords if you’re not careful, your ads may not just be reaching those actively searching for you which brings us to another way advertisers sabotage their AdWords campaigns…

Combining Search and Display Networks in the Same Campaign

There are two main networks where your ads can be displayed through AdWords. The Search Network and the Display Network.

Through the Search Network your ads can appear on Google.com, which is what most people think of when it comes to AdWords.

The Search Network also includes Search Partner sites. These are search engines like AOL and Ask.com that don’t have their own PPC program so they run Google ads to make money.

Then there’s the Display Network. This is a very different beast from search.

The Display Network is a network of websites ranging from small blogs up to highly popular sites like the New York Times that run Google ads on them (it’s a source of revenue for these sites…if you own a website and choose to put Google ads on it, you get a percentage of the revenue generated whenever a visitor to your site clicks on an ad).

Google estimates these sites reach about 80{a950ddf0e7a23367a7e0f17377d3737fa8b8b1820bab9af7071f88951eb5d84e} of people using the Internet.

On the Display Network, your ads can appear on web pages that are related to your keywords. So if you’re a jeweler in Des Moines, you can potentially have your ads appear on the New York Times website for an article related to jewelry (geo-targeting applies here which means you can configure things so your Display Network ads are only displayed to those in your local area).

The important thing to understand here is that, in contrast to Search, people on the Display Network are not actively looking for you. They are reading/surfing/gathering information and are generally not in buying mode.

This means the ads you write, the bids you set, the keywords you pick are VERY different on the Display Network than for the Search Network.

Because of this, you want to keep Search Network and Display Network campaigns separate.

The default setting in AdWords is to combine the two. A lot of AdWords advertisers, not realizing this, run up high tabs consisting of mainly Display Network clicks that have little chance of converting.

If you’re first starting out with AdWords, I’d highly recommend just sticking with the Search Network. Then, if you want to expand into the Display Network at some point, by all means do it. Just set it up in a separate campaign.

In our next post, we’ll cover the last of our 3 more ways to sabotage your AdWords campaign. And it’s the most important one of all.

In fact, in most cases if you’re ignoring this, you shouldn’t even be running an AdWords campaign.