For all marketers – novices and experts alike – successfully launching a search campaign can be challenging. There are so many factors that can influence your costs, position and conversion rate.  As a result, it is difficult to build the ideal search marketing campaign. But if you avoid these five beginner mistakes, you will be off to a great start.

Keyword Selection – Choose Your Weapons Wisely
First, if you are a beginner, you need to know about the different keyword match types: Broad, Phrase, and Exact.  You must be sure to include Exact and Phrase match types in your campaigns.

We’ve written about match types, but to summarize: Exact match and Phrase match keywords usually result in higher clickthrough and conversion rates than Broad match keywords. So you want to make sure that you do not forget to add Phrase match keywords (modified terms with quotation marks) and Exact match keywords (modified terms with brackets) in order to improve your campaign’s performance. You may even want to start with just Exact and Phrase match keywords at first and introduce Broad match terms to your campaigns at a later date.

If you are new to search, you will be relieved to know that there are many tools out there (some of them free), that will help you build keywords for your search-marketing campaigns. Some great free tools can be accessed via Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN adCenter, and SEObook.com.

When building your keyword sets, take a conservative approach to keyword selection. For example, if your Web site’s focus and monetization revolves around credit card applications, stay away from the temptation to bid on high-volume, generic terms, such as “money” or “financial services.” Although related to your offering, terms like these are simply not relevant enough.  They will increase your costs and erode your marketing budget. Stay focused on specific, related terms, and be careful when evaluating high-volume, generic terms that are not tightly related to your offering. If you would like to test high-volume terms that you are unsure of, start by isolating those terms, include them in a separate campaign, and apply a conservative daily spend cap.

Grouping Keywords In Ad Groups – Divide And Conquer
Another common mistake that new search marketers make is adding too many keywords to one ad group. When you begin building your ad groups, you will want to identify emerging themes, and group your keywords into ad groups accordingly.

The goal is to achieve high clickthrough rates by creating tight ad groups with keywords that will show up in your ad copy. Since ad copy is assigned on the ad group level and not the keyword level, you will need to pay attention to where you place your keywords.

Get into the habit of building and planning your campaigns and ad groups in a spreadsheet. While it can be tempting to add keywords directly into your AdWords account by using the Google Suggest feature, resist the temptation to build your account on the fly!  Use the Google Suggest feature, but bring those keywords into Excel where you can fine-tune your keyword strategy.

Negative Keyword Expansion – The Negative Effect
Negative keywords are terms that you do not want your ads to receive impressions for. If you are a retailer of iPods, for example, you probably do not want to attract searchers who are looking for 'Free iPods' as it will result in non-converting traffic. Many advertisers are so focused on building targeted keywords that they forget about reserving enough time to build strong negative keyword sets. In fact, there is a good chance that you are using the same keyword-generation tools that your competitors are. 

Investing time in creating a better negative keyword list can give you better clickthrough rates and ad positions than your competition. So think about the keywords you are using, check them twice and re-run queries in your keyword-generation tools, but this time focus on the negative keywords that you do NOT wish to include in your campaigns.

Negative keywords can be applied at the campaign level or by adding the negative keyword to your ad group with a minus sign in front of it.
 
Content Relevancy – Apples-to-Apples
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about content, content and more content, as well as attracting links from other sites. However, content also is playing a larger role in the paid-search game. Similar to how search-engine spiders crawl sites to assess and rank pages for organic search listings, spiders also crawl your pages to determine your relevancy for paid-search listings.

Unlike with SEO, you need not be concerned with the quantity of content on your site (having a huge Web site or having a high word count on your landing pages) but rather, focus on the qualitative aspects of your site. Hopefully you created tight campaigns and ad groups and if so, you should map these specific themes of your ad group to dedicated landing pages. Those landing pages should have relevant content that includes synonyms and phrases similar to your campaign’s keywords. Make sure that your ad groups’ most common phrases and best keywords are present in your landing pages’ titles and heading tags as well.

Go Deep!
Some beginners still send all paid-search traffic to their Web site’s home page, perhaps because more attention has been paid to the design and usability of this page. This is perhaps the most common mistake made by novice search marketers.

If your Web site offers just one or two products or services, this approach may work. However, if you are using a broad range of keywords, your home page may not have much correlation to your keywords.  As a result, you may be running a high risk of developing a bad account history, which can lead to limited impressions, higher minimum CPCs, lower clickthrough rates and lower positions.

This can be a tricky hole to crawl out of, so whenever possible, find deeper pages in your Web site to use as landing pages.  Use pages that have both, targeted content and strong calls-to-action. If you do not have too many deep pages, or they do not include a very strong call-to-action, your site is probably overdue for a tune-up and there is no time like the present to get this done!

Andrew Bernero, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.