Display Advertising – Top 9 ways how Advertisers waste money on Google Ads

Ways To Stop Wasting Your Google Ads Budget

$100+ million a DAY. – That is how much Google makes from Google Ads in a day. And if it wasn’t for mistakes small and medium businesses make, Google wouldn’t be raking in so much money. This post highlights the top 6 ways how Dubai Advertisers waste money on Display Advertising ( Display advertising means showing your image, and banner ads on different websites )

“Default Setting is your enemy”

#1 Mobile Display Advertising – The evil

Display advertising needs to be used carefully on mobile devices. Give some money to charity, but do not waste your hard-earned money on mobile display advertising unless you know what you are doing.

Google owns the Android operating system and many apps use AdSense. Hence, when you opt-in for a display advertising campaign, by default your ads show up in apps and sites you didn’t intend to show up on. These apps can be for games, jobs, and more.

You will be surprised that close to 75% of your clicks are from mobile devices and over 50% of them are from apps! If you running display advertising, pause right now (I’ll wait for you to come back).

Go to your Google Ads campaign –> click the display advertising campaign –> on the menu bar, click display advertising tab –> click placement sub-tab –> you will see all placements, sort by impressions high to low, and there you will see where your ads are showing!

You keep deleting them and they keep coming back. Imagine how much money you wasted on these wrong clicks and what kind of traffic you have been receiving. Talk to us about a special tip that will help you get rid of these wrong placements.

#2 Wrong Campaign Structure

Somewhere I read the saying, ” If you start well, half the job is done“. This is true for Google Ads campaign structure too.

There are many default settings, like enhanced CPC ( cost per click ) bid (with this setting you give the Google Ads algorithm a free pass to bid high to get conversions) Initially this is a bad strategy unless you have enough conversions.

There are some other default settings that you need to look at like, device bid adjustment, targeting settings, exclusions, and more. Talk to us if you think you losing money on display advertising and not getting returns.

#3 Not setting up Conversion Tracking

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”. – John Wanamaker (1838-1922)

We want to tell John and other businesses that there is something called conversion tracking which solves the measurement problem.

Many advertisers haven’t set up their basic conversion tracking. Due to this mistake, people keep sending paid display or search traffic to their website without knowing which clicks are converting. Imagine throwing coins on the wall without knowing which one sticks.

Google ads give you a conversion tracking code ( from the Tools menu ) – which you can insert on a thank you page of the website form. If you don’t have a thank you page, ask your developers to create one after the form is submitted. Then on the thank you page, insert the tracking code.

With this setup, you can easily know, which keywords, ads, or campaigns are giving you results. This is one of the best ways to optimize the campaign.

#4 Site Category Exclusions

With display advertising, you need to exclude certain website placements that will otherwise blow your budget. Many times your ads show up next to insensitive content which can be damaging to your brand. It is important to remove them and get quality clicks

#5 Frequency Capping 

Nowadays, we see so many ads and sometimes the same ads many times. It’s annoying, isn’t it? Blame it on ignorance. This problem can easily be solved by Frequency capping.

Let me take a step back and explain what it is first. Frequency Capping means, how many times you want a user to see your ad. Studies have shown that around 5 – 7 times if you show your ads to users they buy.

If not, they are not interested and you can stop showing ads to the same user multiple times. This is achieved through frequency capping and you don’t have to waste money showing the same ad to the same person multiple times.

#6 Ad Scheduling

So you’re running your ads 24/7. As we know, the new day starts at 12 am, and by the time you wake up in the morning, half the display advertising budget is already finished.

It is advisable, that if you want to show your ads to people at the right time, you can put ad scheduling to show your ads let’s say, all weekdays between 8 am – 10 pm and not on Fridays or midnights.

This way you can use your advertising budgets at the right time when it matters. We have seen many advertisers running ads all the time and wasting advertising budgets at nonfruitful hours.

#7 Not using negative keywords

Negative keywords are those on which you don’t want to show your ads. It does not work as effectively as a search campaign. But still, we have noticed many advertiser ads show up on job sites or irrelevant sites where they didn’t want to show up and end up burning budgets with irrelevant clicks.

If you count the number of wrong clicks over the months and years it is sizable. We have seen advertisers who could have owned a villa in Dubai with the amount spent on wrong clicks!

#8 Common Ad creative mistakes

Display advertising benefits are that you can have text and image ad formats. Earlier, many advertisers used only one text or image ad. As a result, the campaigns were not effective and you were not getting enough clicks.

Poor quality ads and color combinations are also a result of the high cost per click. These are campaigns without a strategy. Increasing the budget is the easiest thing to do but it costs and hurts.

A little bit of optimization of the campaign could make all the difference. Many advertisers run the same ads throughout the year. It is important to test which ads are working and optimize them accordingly. There are many poorly written ads that don’t benefit anyone in society.

#9 Targeting settings

There are many display advertising targeting options like – Keyword targeting, Topic targeting, interest targeting, Affinity and in-market audience, similar audience, and much more. The theme and structure of some accounts we have seen can leverage these targeting options to get low-cost conversions.

Bonus Google Ads tip:
Ok, so you are doing the display campaign well. More and more people are seeing and reacting to your ads. Well, my friend, now is the time to capitalize on the wave. Are you bidding on your own brand terms on search ads?

The last thing you want is someone else or your competitor bidding on your company name and showing their ads on search results first position, while you are busy focusing on other keywords or lost in the sea of display advertising.

If you like what you read, check out our other blogs

Top 5 ways how Dubai Advertisers waste money on google ads

Cost per click rate on Google Ads is the highest in UAE

Leads Dubai is a Google Adwords Certified Company in Dubai, UAE, we deal with the above scenarios every day and might have a solution for you. Contact us to learn more.

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Display Advertising - 9 ways how Dubai Advertisers waste money on Ads

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"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half”. - John Wanamaker (1838-1922) - Read Display Advertising mistakes

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Mukesh Pandey

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Leads Dubai

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