7 Google Ad Mistakes Painting Businesses Must Avoid In 2023

70% of Google users say that they use paid search ads to find information more easily.

As a painting contractor, you can take advantage of this to help your future customers find you.

There are some key mistakes you can make that will hurt how well your ads are doing – and they are to be avoided.

Let’s have a look at 7 Google ad mistakes painting businesses must avoid in 2023.

1. Using Broad Match

One mistake that you can easily find yourself making is using the broad match setting for your Google ads.

When a person is searching for something on Google, they will typically use a few words to find it.

For example, they may want to find information on “kitchen cabinet painting professionals.”

If you make an ad for your business using that term, but have broad match turned on, a lot more than that will make your ad show up.

Some of the terms will be quite unrelated to what you are trying to advertise.

When the person doing that search sees your ad, they will have no interest since it’s of no interest to them.

It’s usually better to use phrase match, which includes searches that mean the same as your keyword.

For some it’s even better to use exact match, which in our example means only those exact words in that order would bring up your ad.

Doing this will help show your ad to people who are more likely to be interested in hiring you.

2. Using Display Network

When you are running ads with Google, you are going to have the choice to make use of the Search Network as well as the Display Network.

The search network you likely know already – it’s the ads that come up on the side of a Google search.

The display network, on the other hand, are ads that pop up on other websites – sounds okay, right?

The problem with display network ads is that they will show ads on the seemingly most random websites.

So a person could be looking on a website about their favorite country musician and your ad for kitchen cabinet painting shows up.

You can just imagine how little a person reading about their favorite musician wants to get their cabinets painted.

It’s possible that they do – but it’s a bit of a needle in a football field of hay situation and not worth the money.

Make sure you only run ads on the search network and not the display network.

3. Skipping Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are words that if a person searches them, you don’t want them to see your ad.

For example if you paint but do not stain bathroom cabinets, you might want to add stain as a negative keyword.

That way if people search for “staining bathroom cabinet professionals” they aren’t going to find you.

This makes sense as you don’t want them to click on an ad for you and go to your site only to be disappointed.

The person might even get upset and feel like your ad misled them if they click on it and don’t find what they want.

The better thing to do is to work on using the right positive and negative keywords so the right people find you.

4. Not Testing Your Ads

An important part of running ads is that you should do a few different versions of the same ad.

By doing this you’re going to be able to see which of the versions gets the most traffic and then putting more money into the better ads.

If you see an ad variety is doing pretty poorly, on the other hand, you know that you’ll be able to get rid of that ad.

Doing this kind of testing is going to help you to find the better ads that will perform best for your company and find you customers.

5. Using The Wrong Keywords

One of the biggest expenses from making use of Google Ads is in the use of keywords, but if you use the wrong ones it’s a huge waste of money.

The problem is that often you aren’t going to know if you are using the wrong keyword until you use them.

It’s important to monitor the performance of your keywords and then act accordingly.

If you see people aren’t clicking or are clicking and then not doing anything, they may not be the right keywords for you.

6. Not Correcting Rejected Ads

There are a few things that can cause Google to reject your ads – it could be something as simple as spelling a word wrong.

On top of that, there are certain rules about what you can and can’t put in an ad – breaking the rules means your ad gets rejected.

Some of these mistakes can be as simple as using the words “click here” – and the ad will be rejected!

If you have rejected ads, they’re not being seen by people and you’re losing chances to find customers.

Make the time to see if any of your ads have been rejected so that you can fix them and have them posted.

7. Not Properly Funding Your Campaign

Lastly, there is the issue of money — the money that you have available to pay for your Google Ads.

You can have the best ads with the most well researched keywords but they need money to run.

In running Google Ads, you can set a daily budget for how much you are going to spend on the ads.

If this amount is too low or the amount you spend per ad run is too much, your ad will be seen very few times.

The best thing to do is to look at your budget and try to best make a schedule for ads based on it so your ad gets shown a good number of times.

Here is a tutorial given by Google about how to better budget your Google Ads: