Using “pay per click” paid search, specifically Google Adwords, is a great way to drive traffic to your website, generate leads, and spread the word about your brand. If you’re not careful, however, you could end up spending a lot of money without getting much in return for your PPC investment. Here are some common errors I see that could end up quickly depleting your paid search advertising budget:

1. Incorrect Use of Keyword Match Type

You can set up your keywords by match type in several different ways – broad match, modified broad match, phrase and exact match. Each one has its own specifications and criteria for how it determines the ways search queries match with your keywords. I do not think there are any “bad” match types, but I do think there are bad ways to use them.

The main culprit in this case is the broad match. Google will apply a wide, general relationship between search queries and broad match keywords, resulting in a lot of clicks from people who may not be your targeted audience.

How to prevent this? Negative keywords. These will eliminate words or phrases from search queries, narrowing down that broad, generalized match type into more targeted, related searches. You can even apply the different match types to negative keywords to further limit unrelated search queries from costing you.

 2. Too Many Keywords

It is important to make sure your ad text is closely related to your keywords, and is helpful and relevant to people who are searching using those keywords. The best way is to keep the keywords in your ad groups tightly focused. A good guideline here is to limit the number of keywords in an ad group to no more than 20. This will ensure that you keep the focus of that group on the search phrase, and that the ad is highly relevant to people who are searching using those related keyword variations. Ideally this means that you will have targeted a relevant search phrase and interested those people with your ad text. It is difficult to have one ad relate to a variety of vaguely grouped keywords, and it will cause your click-through rate and cost per click to suffer.

 3. Not Having An Appropriate Budget

This might seem counter-intuitive to avoid spending money, but it is not. For example, if the average cost per click for your keywords is $25, and your budget is $50 per day, that means you can afford two clicks per day. Google also will limit the times your ads are shown so you don’t go over this budget, meaning that your ads may not run as frequently as they should, so you will miss valuable conversion opportunities. Everything would have to line up perfectly for those two clicks to turn into conversions, and that does not happen frequently enough to justify spending $50 a day on such slim chances. Making sure your budget is appropriate to allow your ads to run without cost-related restrictions will allow you to increase the number of times your ads appear, and being able to pay for more clicks will get more potential conversions to your site.

 4. Irrelevant Or Ineffective Landing Page

Where users go after they click your ad is the final piece of a puzzle that, if assembled correctly, will lead to a conversion. If your landing page is designed properly, it will be easy for visitors to understand your message, respond to a call to action and finish the conversion process. If done wrong, it will not relate to the search query that got them there and they’ll leave. In fact, if one item on this list is the most critical, it would be this one. You can get all the people in the world to click your ads, but if they do not follow through with the desired action on the page they land on, then you spent all that money on clicks for nothing.

These are just some of the ways running non-optimized campaigns in Google Adwords can end up depleting your advertising budget without getting the returns you want. Unfortunately, there are many more. The days of “set it and forget it” are long gone – these days, it really takes not only a monetary investment, but also a time commitment in order to maximize your investment. Account maintenance, data analysis and keeping up to date on all the latest Adwords information is mandatory, and without these components you will end up spending more than you need and getting less than you want.