Top 7 Reasons Why Your AdWords PPC Campaigns Fail?

Have you burned money on Adwords PPC Campaigns without seeing much success?

Google AdWords PPC campaigns aren’t the easiest to manage so you may still be looking for a return on investment ROI or looking to further optimize your campaigns. Google AdWords is a platform that’s not as simple as it looks on the surface. It’s incredibly easy to waste money quickly if you don’t know what you’re doing

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The Real Reason Your Google AdWords PPC Campaigns Fail

Google AdWords can do incredible things for your company. Expert digital marketing companies have admistted that it have helped clients grow from 25 employees to 250 employees with AdWords. Done right, AdWords can be unbelievably profitable.

Google AdWords or PPC Campaigns are the key to a successful digital marketing plan, but only if you’re using it correctly..Done wrong…AdWords is an easy way to lose a lot of money.

1.Are Your PPC Campaigns Targeting Only BROAD KEYWORDS?

We want to know whether your Google AdWord PPC campaign is targeting mostly one or two word keywords? Having one word keyword is definitely way too generic and chances are that even two words keywords would attract a lot of irrelevant clicks.

We learn from the example of a leading banking software technology firm looking to generate leads from prospects interested in their software. They wanted to target the following keywords as they thought all of these are relevant to the software they are offering:

“Artificial Intelligence”
“Banking”
“Digital Banking”
“Innovation”
“Technology”

While all of these keywords are relevant to Banking Industry, they are likely to be searched by people with other intentions. The keywords also don’t speak to the intent behind what someone could be looking for.

The campaign will definitely fail with these broad keywords. The keywords are not aligned with banking software. It’s important to think about what people are actually looking for when typing in a certain keyword.

Instead go for a long tail keywords like:

“Artificial Intelligence Software for Banks”
“Blockchain Software for Banks”
“Digital Banking Software Solution”
“Innovations in Banking Softwares”
“Technology Trends in Banking Industry”

2.Not Adding Conversion Tracking?

When you don’t measure your sales effort against its success rate, you’ve got a recipe for marketing failure. And nowhere is that more true than with AdWords, because the conversion data from your ad campaigns is the very core of this marketing channel.

Of course, it’s important to keep in mind that, for brands with longer sales funnels, “value” may not necessarily mean dollars or return on investment (ROI), but may instead result in leads, event registrations, or other non-monetary results.

Even so, the principle remains the same. Be sure to set up conversion tracking from the very beginning, and don’t even think of running an AdWords campaign without it.

3. Does Your PPC Campaigns Track Value Of Conversions?

Imagine you had a lead generation campaign and your PPC agency kept reporting great numbers. You were getting good number of leads at lower than expected cost per lead. Everything looked great until you took a look at your bottom line.

Were those conversions or leads resulting in actual sales? Did you go a step further and assigned a value for each conversion in conversion tracking code?

Once values are assigned for conversions your PPC campaigns could report return on Ad spends. Subsequently the bidding strategy could be revised for bidding on ROAS (return on ad spend) basis instead of target CPA (cost per acquisition) to maximize your ROI (return on investment).

4.Are You Tracking Which Day-of-week / Hour-of-Day Your Campaigns Are Performing Best?

Many advertisers schedule their campaigns based on assumptions. You have the opportunity to take a completely data-driven approach. Once you have some more data on your campaigns, you can find out which days of the week and times of day have the highest costs. If you’ve been running the campaigns for some time, it’s likely you already have access to this data.

A PPC Audit can help you discover the time and hour of the day best for your Ad campaigns. However, the campaigns were running all 24 hours without any ad scheduling or bid adjustment in place. Budget can be reallocated to the hours where the cost per conversion was lower.

5.Does Your Campaigns Make Use of Actual Search Terms?

The search terms report in Adwords is extremely valuable when identifying terms that are actually converting for your campaign. The search terms report shows actual search terms that your visitors typed in Google when they clicked on your ads.

Were the best performing search terms added as keywords? Were the non-performing terms excluded as negatives in your campaign ad groups?

Think of negatives as the blacklist for keywords you should not be bidding on, ultimately, it’s your safeguard against wasted spend on your account.

6. Not Adding Negative Keywords?

Ah yes, another point on keywords. Not only can you bid on keywords you want to target, but you can add negative keywords to prevent your ads from showing up for certain searches.

For example, we take a shoe store example. It’s likely you don’t carry every brand or type of shoe in the world. If you know you don’t carry Adidas shoes, you should add ‘Adidas’ as a negative keyword to your campaigns to order to avoid spending money on people who are looking for something you don’t offer.

7.Your Landing Pages are Terrible

Google AdWords PPC Campaigns can only go as far as bring people to your website. It’s the job of your landing pages to turn visitors into converting customers. Take a hard look at your landing pages and see if you can make improvements to the conversion funnel so that you know you’re paying to send people to quality pages.

There are more issues that may cause poor performance within Google AdWords PPC Campaigns, but these are the most common mistakes we see when evaluating accounts. If you can avoid these mistakes, then you are well on your way to turning around your failing campaigns and making them a success.

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