How to Avoid the Main Mistakes When Optimizing Advertising Campaigns in 2022-2023

Beginner marketers and entrepreneurs who are just starting to promote their business on the Internet, often make mistakes in advertising that lead to draining their budget. It's okay to learn from your own mistakes, but, let's agree, it is much more efficient and economical to learn from other people's failures. To avoid the pitfalls that most beginners make, just remember the most common mistakes.

What Affects the Effectiveness of Contextual Advertising

Search engines encourage effective advertising. Thanks to this, the business gets customers cheaper. Therefore, diligent work on each element of the announcement is currently necessary. Efficiency is influenced by many indicators, including:

• Ad relevance
• Site relevance
• Ad clickability
• Technical settings of the ad

You're making big mistakes if you don't work with these options. Let's analyze in detail:

Key Mistakes When Setting up Contextual Advertising

1. Negative Words Are Not Taken Into Account

There are keywords that are very similar to yours, but are completely unsuitable for promoting your business. For example, you sell leather sofas. In this case, you should add ‘buy a pallet sofa’ to the list of negative words. The keyword fits a general category, but people are looking for a specific product that you don't have. By creating a list of minus words, you can significantly reduce the cost of advertising, simply by avoiding showing ads to a non-target audience. Think about what requests you can add to this list, but be careful not to turn off ads for real leads.

Carefully study the relevance of the keys. Each phrase should match the potential query as accurately as possible. Regularly analyze the campaign and update the list of negative keywords.

Before promotion, it is necessary to collect a semantic core. This is the entire list of keywords that are suitable for your business. Start collecting keywords from a competitor analysis, so that you will definitely understand their number and hierarchy.

2. No Structured Data Is Used

This is the markup of data on the site, which helps the search engine to better recognize the information. The tool is universal and recognized by all search engines.

Different types of resources and pages have their own principles of markup optimization. For example, in the product card in the online store you need to mark:

• Product name
• Description
• Photo and video
• Price
• Reviews

Thanks to this, the bot ‘understands’ what is posted on the page faster and more accurately, and makes it more relevant.

3. The Clickability of Ads Does Not Increase

Simply creating a series of ads, launching and getting customers automatically will not work. There is currently a lot of competition in contextual advertising. Therefore, it is necessary to optimize each ad. There are no unimportant little things in advertising. Use the following recommendations:

Simplify your ad text as much as possible. Some of the most important words can influence the client's decision.

Use a clear CTA (Call-to-action). A person must clearly understand what you offer and most importantly, what he will receive.

Test different header options. It is not always possible to hit the target the first time. Check the effectiveness of different options.

4. Not Optimized Landing Page

This is an error when the content of the site, that a person lands on from an ad, does not match the offer in the ad itself. This is exactly the case when a person who is looking for pallet sofas, sees in the ad, an offer to buy ‘Quality sofa with a 50% discount.’ However, when he gets to the online store, he sees only a catalog of leather furniture. The main task is for the potential client to see the same offer, both in the advertisement and on the website.

5. Incorrect Time Targeting

Ads with incorrect timing can lead to buyers switching to your listings during non-business hours. For example, if the call center that processes applications works only from 09:00 to 18:00, there is no point in ‘running’ advertising at other times.

Of course, you can also accept applications at night, just process them during working hours, warning the client about this on the website. But, why? If you can spend the entire budget during working hours and process applications instantly, increasing the conversion to sales.

6. Google Analytics Is Not Connected

Analytics and optimization is the most important stage of setting up an advertising campaign. This can improve your ads and make them more relevant. It is optimization that allows you to reduce the cost of an engaged client. Google Analytics is a tool that will allow you to qualitatively analyze contextual advertising and strengthen it. Be sure to connect it to Google Ads.

7. Lack of an Adaptive Version of the Site

If a person clicks on a link and sees the desktop version of the site from a mobile device, they will most likely leave. This is one of the relevance indicators, which is also taken into account by the search engine. As a result, if you do not add a responsive version of the site for different mobile devices, the effectiveness of your advertising is significantly reduced.

Key Mistakes When Setting up Advertising in Social Networks

Targeted advertising in social networks is a deeper topic. Here you can make a huge number of mistakes, even if you are an experienced targetologist. At the same time, there are also a number of standard failures that are relevant in 2022-2023. These are universal mistakes that ‘kill’ advertising campaigns in any social network. Let's analyze the most relevant example. Read the top 10 mistakes marketers make when setting up Instagram ads.

Conclusion

These 7 points are a must-have in 2022-2023. Businesses that ignore the need for such actions, either do not get any profit from contextual advertising at all, or spend much more money than they could. Follow these 7 rules to get new customers from search engines every day. Let's agree, it's better to Google the banal phrase ‘How to set up Instagram ads’ for 3 days in a row, than to drain the budget for 3 weeks trying to figure out on your own what's wrong.