Paid Ads: Why Yours Are Failing & What to Do About It

You’ve been tweaking and tweaking your ads just to see the needle move, but it’s just not working. Here’s why your paid are failing & what you can do about it.

On average, businesses earn $2 for every $1 they spend on AdWords.

So why is your paid ads campaign failing to see the same results? What went wrong and what can you do to fix this problem?

Even after tweaking your ads multiple times, you still might not see your profits budge. Are paid ads not for your business? Are you approaching Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads the wrong way?

There’s no single answer. It’s always a combination of multiple factors. It’s also likely your PPC campaign makes multiple mistakes, which is why you’re not seeing your conversion rates increase.

Ignoring SEO

Yes, PPC campaigns see a high volume of conversions and this is because people who click those tend to already know what they want. They did the research and click on ads to reach a specific page and purchase something or avail of a particular service.

That doesn’t mean you can ignore Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and focus only on your paid ads.

It’s not about choosing between SEO and paid ads. We live in a world where you can have both. Take your cake and eat it too.

Solution: Implement SEO Alongside PPC Campaign

You will need to conduct a lot more effort to make SEO work. It requires a lot of copywriting, blogging, link-building, and content sharing on multiple platforms like social media and other sites. It requires in-depth analytics and keyword research too.

When you get it right, traffic increases at a steady rate. The other goal of SEO is to boost awareness of your brand.

Checked both of those goals? Shift a little to focus on your paid ads but don’t forget to check back on your SEO efforts. You have to do both at the same time to see profitable results.

Overspending on Too Many Keywords

A recent study shows only 9% of keywords see results. This means 91% of your paid ads don’t do anything for you. That’s a lot of money wasted.

Many businesses make the mistake of allocating their budget on every keyword possible. From exact matches to broad keyword matches, they’ll put in as much money as they can on every phrase available.

This is the shotgun approach. It’s like throwing everything at a wall and hoping some of it sticks.

This is not the right way to approach paid ads.

You’re wasting too much money, time, and effort on keywords that might not benefit the business. It also means you’re not spending enough on the keywords that do see high lead generation and profitable conversions.

It’s time to trim this down.

Solution: Narrow Down Keywords Usage

Don’t spend all your money on every keyword available. Conduct your research and determine the few keywords that see a high Return on Investment (ROI). Don’t confuse your lead generation rates with ROI.

This is where you have to conduct an extensive amount of keyword research.

Look into what keywords your competitors succeed in using tools like SEMrush and SpyFu. Then take time to use analytical tools like Google Keyword Planner and KWFinder to look at which keywords you can use to your advantage.

From there, you will have to do a little bit of trial and error. You will have some keywords that show profitable potential, but you then have to use them and see which ones sell. After a few weeks, eliminate those that don’t work for you and focus your budget on those that do.

Not sure where to start? Use Google’s own tool to check what’s trending. You can spot what’s popular in a particular field and build your PPC campaign around those concepts.

Lack of Tracking

Using paid ads isn’t a one-and-done deal. You have to monitor your progress with consistency to make sure your paid ads get you the result you need and want.

As mentioned, one of the key procedures is to monitor which keywords work and then focus your budget on those phrases. Without doing this, you’re shooting in the dark. Sometimes you might hit and earn but most of the time, you can expect nothing.

The lack of tracking means you don’t see what works and what doesn’t. You can’t see which keywords work, which ads perform better, and which ones see traffic but don’t lead to conversions.

Solution: Monitor, Monitor, Monitor

There are many monitoring tools, like the built-in tools from AdWords and Google Analytics. All of these will showcase click rates, conversion rates, the strength of each ad, consumer engagement, and more.

Make it a point to check all these on a regular basis. The most important things to monitor include:

• The conversion rate of landing pages
• The conversion rate of each paid ads
• Engagement rates
• Click rates

Do you display paid ads beyond Google SERP? Do you pay for ads on other blog sites or social media platforms like Facebook?

You better monitor their performance as well because each one will relate different results compared to the ones from Google SERP. They’ll also show you where your paid ads get more traction and what kind of ads click with consumers more than others.

As a bonus tip, you should use paid ads on Facebook. While the average conversion rate for most paid ads is below 3%, Facebook ads see a 9.21% conversion rate average across all industries. That’s how successful your PPC campaign can be if you use Facebook to your advantage.

Weak Landing Pages

Your landing page means the world to your consumers. It’s essential to create the perfect landing page that will guarantee conversions. Otherwise, you paid an ad to get more clicks, not profits.

One of the most common mistakes businesses make is using paid ads that leads to unrelated landing pages.

If your ad boasts your business sells automatic vacuum cleaners, the ad better lead to a page selling that vacuum cleaner. If it doesn’t, you just lied to your customer and this breaks trust. It also notifies Google that you’re cheating which could lead to severe penalties down the line.

Does your landing page ask for the right information, like their email address? Does it allow them to make a purchase on the same page or contact you right away? There has to be a strong Call-to-Action on your landing page, otherwise, it’s a waste of an expensive ad.

Solution: Landing Pages with a Successful Formula

The average landing page has 11 forms for visitors to fill. Decreasing this to only 4 form fields can increase conversion rates by a significant margin because you’re reducing the work the person has to do.

Decreasing form fields is only the beginning.

You can improve your landing pages by removing a navigation option. This helps because it prevents visitors from moving away from the page to look for something else. Their options are to either push forward, netting you a conversion, or bounce back out.

If you sell products and your goal is to use paid ads to get more sales, make sure your landing page has the option to add the item to a shopping cart. It reduces the effort the visitor has to do to make a full purchase.

Lack of Regular Optimization

As mentioned, you can’t make ads and then leave them be. You have to go back and monitor their performance on a regular basis. However, you shouldn’t only eliminate the ones that don’t perform.

You also have to improve the ones that find success.

Many small businesses waste money on their PPC campaign because they don’t optimize their ads. They may have ads that work but they get left in the dust and this means they don’t work as well as they should.

Regular optimization may sound like a lot of work but if you do it right, your ads will see regular traffic and conversions, if you know how to do it.

Solution: Update Paid Ads Regularly

Found the ads that work for you? Monitor them and see if their performance increases or decreases each week. Those that increase are doing something right so look for the common denominator between them.

Those that decrease show lack of optimization. They might need a shift in schedule, shift in geomarketing focus, or a shift in the keywords they focus on. You might have to shift which platforms you show these ads or optimize their visual design, headlines, and meta descriptions to achieve better results.

Focusing Too Much on Leads and Clicks

Leads generation and more traffic are important but there is one factor most people forget about: leads and traffic don’t necessarily mean higher profit. Conversion rates lead to more profits, even if your conversion goals aren’t sales figures, such as aiming to get more subscriptions or calls.

Most businesses see their PPC campaign fail because they focus too much on CPL (Cost-per-Lead).

Consider this: if your ad sees a thousand clicks per day but only a dozen of those visitors bought something from the landing page, is that still a success? Imagine if your ads only see half the number of clicks but more than 50% of those clicks lead to sales. That’s a successful campaign.

How do you achieve this?

Solution: Focus on Profitability

You might look at your PPC campaign the wrong way. Don’t look at each ad and then study its conversion rate and cost-per-conversion. An ad with high cost-per-conversion might seem like a poor performer but that’s when you have to look at its ROI.

Look at that ad’s cost-per-sale and its total revenue. This will determine your total ROI for that ad campaign. While those ads might look bad in terms of conversion, they’re the ones that get you the most profits.

To achieve this, you’ll have to use CRM tools that track sales-through data. You can rely on tools like InfusionSoft or Salesforce to get this done right.

You may discover that the ads you deem successful are the ones costing you the most money for little to no profits. The ones that cost the most for conversions could be the ones that bring back the highest income.

Ugly Ad Copy

Want to know why your ads fail? It might be because they’re downright ugly. They may not show customers what they want or convince them that they need something you offer.

You also want to avoid sounding like everybody else. When every competitor sounds alike, it’s difficult for customers to determine which one is telling the truth. Do they trust your ad or the others more?

If your ad copy doesn’t sell the product or service well, if it doesn’t convey your goals, and if it doesn’t give visitors an action they can perform, then you won’t see your ads getting you anywhere. They’re bound to fail if they don’t compress all your goals in a few characters.

Solution: Experiment and Test

There’s no quick and easy solution to make a good ad copy. You’ll have to experiment and then conduct multiple A/B split testing to see which works and which ones don’t.

You can follow simple guidelines to make sure your ad copy contains everything successful ads do. Here’s a quick cheat sheet you can follow to make the best ad copies:

• Identify your goals
• Make a clear Call-to-Action
• Competitor research
• Determine a Unique Selling Point (USP)
• Include data to encourage conversions
• Conduct systematic A/B split testing

Doing this over and over can help you create the best ad copies that will lead to more conversions and higher sales numbers.

Build the Best Paid Ads Campaign Right Now

Did you find any of these mistakes prevalent in your PPC campaign? Do you think you can fix these problems before your expenses reach insurmountable heights?

It’s not easy and it’s not going to be cheap or quick.

However, with our help, we can guarantee you will find success with your paid ads. You can contact us now and we’ll even conduct a free digital marketing review to see how your business is doing.

From there we can form a strategy and dive deep into what your business and site have to do to succeed.