To Google's eternal credit (and great financial benefit), setting up and launching a paid search campaign is now incredibly simple for even the most inexperienced marketer. Just enter your credit card, choose some keywords and maximum bids, and you're off and running.

As many marketers discover, however, setting up a search campaign and actually making paid search work effectively are two very different propositions.

When we're hired to manage paid search for our clients, we rarely do so from scratch. Rather, we're usually resuscitating an existing campaign, often one managed by in-house staff. As such, we're in a unique position to report on common search mistakes. Here's a quick list of the top pitfalls most companies make when attempting to run their own paid search campaign:

1. No conversion tracking.

Google offers a free tool for tracking the conversion rate of clicks from Adwords to actual registrations or leads. It's marginally more complicated than setting up a search account in the first place, and as a result many companies don't bother. However, without conversion tracking, it's impossible to know, in any meaningful way, how a search campaign is performing as a whole, and more importantly, which terms and phrases are generating the lowest CPA (Cost Per Acquisition). Without conversion tracking, marketers are relegated to measuring CPC (Cost Per Click), which is only a small part of the story. It's a frequent occurrence, in our experience, that terms generating the lowest CPA are not the terms generating the lowest CPC.

2. Poor landing page (or none at all).

If you accept the argument that CPA is the true measure of paid search success, then conversion rate (click to lead) is critical to that success. And the key ingredient in a high conversion rate is an effective microsite or landing page. Many companies are reluctant to invest in a microsite solely for paid search, so instead they drive prospects to a recycled landing page from another campaign or worse yet to the company Website. Either way, they're wasting a high percentage of clicks and the money paid for them by not creating a destination site that delivers a compelling offer and motivates prospects to fill out a registration form. (For a prior discussion on the topic of microsites, click here.)

3. Too few terms.

If you're running a search campaign in-house, the amount of time required for set-up and ongoing management is often proportionate to the number of terms that make up the program. As such, companies tend to economize on the number of terms they register with Google. When we take over a search campaign, we typically increase the number of search terms by a factor of 3-4, sometimes more. Many of these new terms aren't entirely new words, however - more often, they're variations of existing terms, new match types (broad, exact, phrase), abbreviations, even common misspellings. By testing multiple variations, we can quickly establish the precise terms that achieve the lowest CPA and generate the highest return on the client's keyword budget.