How to Avoid Poorly Performing Google Ads PPC Campaigns?

While a well-operated Ads account can drive a great deal of traffic to your online business, just one mistake can ruin everything. If a Google account is not managed well, it can soon become an expensive marketing initiative.

Here’s a quick guide to educate you about the most common mistakes that result in poorly performing PPC campaigns:

Unfocused Target Audience

Not targeting the right audience would probably be the first mistake that not only amateur advertisers commit. When setting up campaigns, avoid exceeding your PPC budget and make sure you consider your audience’s purchasing habits.

1. When using Radius Targeting, make sure you carefully select the areas.
2. Display your ads in the geographic location of your target audience.
3. Don’t drain your budget by targeting the wrong age or gender group.
4. Notice which device-type targeting gets you more conversions.
5. Using irrelevant keywords will attract wrong leads and drain your budget.

Duplicating Campaigns

Some advertisers create a duplicate of their existing campaign in the hope of making it a smart campaign. What they forget is innovative campaigns require historical data to perform better. If you don’t have any previous data, don’t expect your campaign to behave the same as before. Duplicating also causes the campaigns to fight against each other in the Ad Auction

Lack of Budget Knowledge

You can avoid budget mishaps by keeping the following guidelines in mind:

1. Do not choose an open budget when setting up display campaigns.
2. Double-check for any decimal in your budget.
3. For a precise monthly budget analysis, multiply the daily budget by 30.4.

Splitting the Budget

Splitting your budget rightly when using Google Ads is highly important. If you’re organising multiple campaigns from a single account, don’t split the budget across all of them, as it will be stretched too thin. The result will be all campaigns spending the same amount of funding.

It is not a good idea because if one campaign contains more popular keywords, the bid should be lower to run throughout the day.

Not Segmenting Keywords

When using keywords, it is essential to categorise them into separate ad groups. Otherwise, your quality score will decrease along with the chance of delivering relevant ads. You can organise the keywords based on Your Business Silos eg. Product collection, Brand names, Demographics & more.

No Branded Campaign

When developing your campaigns, make sure to create one that includes your brand keywords. If you don’t jump on the opportunity, your competitors will, making their ad popup for searchers before yours. Another crucial benefit to create brand campaigns is since it uses your brand name the CTR is high and CPC is low because your brand name gets the best relevance to your business, which improves the overall quality score of your ad account

One Ad Variation for Each Ad Group

Creating multiple variations of each ad boosts your chances of success. Have at least three ad copies to allow split-testing, weeding out low-performing variations, and supporting high-performing aspects. It will let you create a better version of each ad.

Not Adding Negative Keywords & Negative Lists

Negative keywords play a vital role in blocking your ad from displaying in irrelevant searches. If you don’t add such keywords, you are likely to drain money on advertising. So, add a long list of negative keywords before taking the campaign LIVE and updated them daily/weekly based on your ads search query report.

Not Optimising for Conversions

Setting up your campaign to deliver on your conversion goals is a vital part of PPC. With a specific goal in mind, you can optimise your campaign to maximum conversions.

The advice is to tailor your ad copy, landing pages, and calls-to-action so that they all work together to optimise for a specific conversion goal.

Not Linking Ads to a Relevant Landing Page

As an ad plays a crucial role in your customers’ journey, ensure that you provide them with a seamless, cohesive experience until they reach the landing page. Take your time to ensure that your landing page content relates to your ads, keywords, and audience interests.

If not done right, people will bounce off it quickly.

Ignoring Keyword Match Types

If you focus on a broad match type, it will drive a lot of traffic to your website. But since it may also attract irrelevant clicks from uninterested users, use a combination of match types (exact match & phrase match) to balance keyword relevance and audience reach.

Combining Search & Display Campaign

Combining search and display network settings impacts your ability to measure and optimise network performance. You need to manually separate the two campaigns as they get selected by default.

Blindly Using Ads Recommendations

Not every Google suggestion is guaranteed to work towards your conversion rates. So, think thoroughly before accepting a recommendation; otherwise, it will only drain your budget.

Not Using Ad Scheduling

One of the biggest Google Ads mistakes made by the advertisers is ignoring ad scheduling. It helps you let your ad run throughout the day whenever you want, making your budget last longer and giving you better results.

Analyse your Google Ads reports to understand what time of the day or day of the week gets you the most amount of conversion, go back and optimise the schedules based on that and confidently raise bids during those times

Not Using Search Term Reports

Search Terms report allows you to get an insight into the audience search behaviours. It also helps you find relevant search terms that you can add to your campaign and keywords list. Search term reports as discussed above also helps you weed out non-relevant keywords by adding them to negative keywords lists.

Not Using the Right Bid Strategy

You should experiment with different bidding strategies such as Manual and Automated Bidding as they generate positive results. Google ML is powerful once it gathers the data to make the correct decision, until then, its recommended to use Manual Bidding

Not Using Ad Extensions

Ad extensions allow the customers to take quick actions. If your business service allows for customer interaction, make sure the extensions show only when a representative is available. It also gets you more real estate on Google’s Search Results Page

Not Using Combined Audience

The Combined Audience option narrows your audience targeting to a more minor, more focused subject. It helps you save the budget and generate a much better ROI.

Not Knowing Your CLV

CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) lets you know how much future revenue you can gain from each customer. It also includes additional upsells, referrals, and purchases. If you don’t know your CLV, you’re only wasting your time and money on PPC advertising.

Not Having a Targeted CTA

After reading your ad, a well-written CTA (Call-To-Action) can drive a significant response from thousands of prospects. While your ad is a solution, CTA is the hook that keeps them engaged.

So, make sure your ads have a clear, strong CTA that compels the prospects to take action!

Creating Generic Shopping Campaigns

Do not add all products in one shopping campaign with a blanket CPC, separate campaigns, and ad groups. The best way to do this is to follow your category structure or silos on the website.

Conclusion

Making mistakes in PPC is a part of the learning process. So make sure you learn from them with consistent testing, monitoring, and analysis approach to build up your knowledge base. SIMBAA is well-experienced in managing and Scaling Google Ads over 15 years, Our proprietary Google Ads Framework gets consistent & reliable Ads ROI, Want to speak to a Google Ads Specialist in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide or Gosford (Central Coast), Book a Free Strategy Session today.

As a result, PPC is widely used to increase the traffic on your website. In this article, we will share some of the best tips that will help you improve the performance of the underperforming PPC campaigns.

Improvement In The Quality Score

Quality is one of the most important things when it comes to Google Ads. In terms of Google, quality score is nothing but an estimated quality of ads, keywords and landing pages. When the keywords, landing pages and ads are relevant, it would give a good search experience. When you give a good search experience, you will be rewarded by Google for improved quality scores.

Here are some of the factors on which quality score depends:

• Ad relevance
• Click-through rate
• Landing page relevance

Also, if you wish to improve CTR, make sure to implement the following in your content:

• Use negative keywords
• Use ad extensions
• Enhance your bids
• Make use of site link extension
• Use right keywords and match types

Always Use Negative Keywords.

Negative keywords are very useful to avoid budget leakage from PPC. These keywords also help in preventing your ads from getting triggered by non-relevant search queries. When non-related searches trigger your ads, they are pushed to a lower position. Therefore the CTR falls. Thus, to make sure that non-relevant searches don’t trigger your ads, always use negative keywords.

Ensure Relevance Between Search Terms And Ads

You might have noticed that some ads perform well while some don’t. In this case, boost the performance of the campaigns that aren’t performing well. To do this, all you have to do is to that ad group and then check the keywords.

Find the details option there; now go to search terms and then click on all. You should make sure that your keywords and ads are relevant to each other. This will improve relevance as well as quality score.

Here are some tips to improve ad relevance:

• Your ads and keywords should be relevant
• Use negative keywords
• Make single keyword ad groups (SKAGs)

Enhance your landing page experience

The landing page acts as a very strong indicator of the PPC campaign’s performance. To enhance your landing page, create eye-catching headlines which will attract users. However, make sure that your headline is to the point.

It should be clear to the reader what the content is about from the headline itself. The headlines of your content should be clear, concise and short.

Here are some tips to improve landing page relevance:

• Use attractive videos and images
• Your landing page should be easy to use
• Your landing page should be device compatible and responsive

Optimise Your landing page for Fast loading

One of the most important points to consider for enhancing your landing page experience is speed. Or we can say the loading time of your webpage. Your page’s speed is one of the most important factors which helps you to improve engagements.

A page load time of 3 seconds is considered the best practice. People tend to leave the landing page if it doesn’t load within that time frame. Speed is a ranking factor and therefore should be paid attention to.

Optimize for Mobile Devices
Google pays attention to the mobile-first approach, which means, you will have to optimise your web pages for mobile devices. If a landing page is not optimised for mobile devices, you will miss out on a significant amount of traffic. Mobile-friendly web pages have high-quality scores and also make up for more than half of the search results. Also, when you design your website for mobile, you will have clear and simple navigation that will help users find what they are looking for.

Final thoughts

You should never think of deleting your PPC campaigns just because they are underperforming. Don’t forget that there is always a scope for improvement. It would help if you worked continuously to improve your PPC campaigns. If you’re stuck with mediocre results with Google Ads reach out to our PPC Experts in Sydney and claim your free Google Ads Audit + Recommendation.

Our Clients have generated $17 per $1 spend on Google, these numbers vary based on industries. We build and manage high converting Google Ads Campaigns with our proprietory Google Ads Growth Framework.