Digital Marketing Mistakes That Leave Money on the Table

Drive traffic to your website, increase conversions, and make the most out of your ad spend by avoiding these common mistakes

Digital Marketing can have a huge impact for your business and your bottom line, but when managed improperly can be risky business. Google Analytics and Google Ads are great tools that provide in-depth insights into your business’s audience and therefore allow you to craft a digital marketing strategy based on that specific data. When used correctly, it can increase revenue by improving brand awareness and creating conversions. When used incorrectly, or not used to its fullest capabilities, it can leave valuable money on the table. Here are a few common digital marketing mistakes:

1. Not optimizing location settings to your advantage

Something as small as location settings can be a significant pitfall in your campaign’s success if not set up properly. Google Ads’ automated location settings target potential customers that are not only physically located in the desired geographic area, but also those searching for the desired geographic area even if they are physically located in a different part of the world. For example, if your business is located in Atlanta, GA and is using the recommended location settings, your business’s ad will also be shown to those that are located in Germany searching for subjects like “Best shopping in Atlanta.”

By ensuring and adjusting these location settings to only market to those physically located in your target location, your ad will only show to customers whose IP address matches that location, and thus provide a more effective ROI. It should, however, be noted in some circumstances, it may be more beneficial for your particular business to target people located physically outside your perimeters – such as if your business or location is highly trafficked by tourists.

2. Failing to utilize remarketing

Google Ads allows you to connect with people who have previously interacted with your website through remarketing lists. Marketers often overlook this tactic as it requires a small amount of manual set up within the platform, but you can drastically improve your ROI if you take these extra steps. Remarketing works great for targeting warm leads, such as customers who have already been on your website but abandoned their cart when second-guessing a purchase, or it’s perfect for businesses that sell a costly product, reminding customers why they should be purchasing your product instead of a competitor’s. Setting up remarketing lists and adding in the users that have visited your website in the past is a no-brainer to boosting website traffic, increasing brand awareness, and improving conversion rates.

3. Not utilizing data from Google Analytics to maximize your ad spend

Google Analytics is a great tool to use to acquire data to help you understand your site, audience, and brand perception in order to create a solid and successful digital marketing strategy. Tools like Google Analytics and Google Ads were built to work together. Google Analytics provides the necessary data to build your strategy, while Google Ads allows you to act on that strategy. By linking the two, you not only allow Google Ads the ability to use the audience demographic and behavior data to fuel your remarketing and targeting strategies but also its website conversion and ad click data in order to optimize your ad bids. This is where you utilize Smart Bidding.

Smart Bidding is an automated system of bid strategies that allows you to set your bids to autopilot with information that Google has stored from previous campaigns, as well as Analytics tracking. By adding this data, Smart Bidding has more insight into your audience and their behaviors through machine-learned algorithms that will in turn help you achieve your marketing goals faster and more efficiently.

Google Analytics serves a great purpose on its own, but as you can see adding that extra layer of information into your Ads campaigns can help you save money and increase your conversions.

In order to make the most of out your ad spends, increase website traffic and improve conversion rates, your business should not be making the common digital marketing mistakes mentioned above. It’s time to check your digital marketing strategy to ensure that it isn’t costing your business money instead of bringing in revenue.