Let us run through a few ways to save underperforming Google Ads Campaigns.

Keyword research 

If your Google Ads campaign is underperforming, glimpse through the keywords and focus on keyword research. It is mandatory for the ad content to be perfect and hence employ Google Adwords planner, which is free. Pen down all the keywords that are appropriate to the service.

By using Keyword planner, you gain another massive list of keywords and details such as frequency of keywords searched and competitors’ focus on keywords. Narrow down the list and eradicate unrelated keywords. Thus, keyword research has the power to uplift underperforming Google Ads.

Search Queries

Looking at what search having been performed by users will give you a clear indication of what queries are leading to your website with the search campaign, most of the time Search Queries are missed by major agencies which increase the cost & lower your Google Ads Quality Score

Add no relevant queries to Negative keywords, that way Google won’t show your ads for those queries again.

Split Ads Between Devices

Think about it logically, users will buy products on mobile which are no-brainers, low-medium range in terms of price, that doesn’t require much research (eg. phone accessories), while products that require research (eg furniture) have a bigger buying Cycle, researches are always much better on a computer than a phone.

Splitting a campaign gives you control over bidding options and help control cost & make the campaign profitable.

You don’t need to always split the campaign, as a general rule, look at the products you’re selling and decide based on that.

Attribution Modeling

Attribution is your greatest friend while analysing your campaign results, Google uses Last Click Attribution to assign a conversion to your campaign, meaning, if the ad was the last click that made the conversion (sale or lead) Google will assign that conversion to that campaign, In reality, it’s not that simple, there is a high chance that someone making the conversion has gone through series of hops (journey) before finding your ad.

You need to look at data holistically to figure out if the campaign is really not performing, most of the time, that campaign could be catching user attention at the early end of the buyers’ journey and sending traffic to the website, but another ad is clicked before making a purchase.

Location targeting

Entrepreneurs planning for services within a limited geographic location should plan for Google Ads for the targeted area only. By failing to do so, businesses need to pay for clicks where services are not possible.

Hence to escalate the performance of underperforming Google Ads, Planning is a primary criterion. The result of targeting comes to light only after the launch of a campaign; hence keeping an eye on the Ad words dashboard can prevent underperformance.

Focus on the appropriate audience 

To save your campaign from underperformance, ensure to focus on the audience interested and benefitted from the Ads campaign. The right audience is the ones making the campaign more engaged. Follow basic demographics such as location, age, and gender to make your campaign successful.

Exact match targeting / New Phase Match

Exact match targeting happens when visitors type the exact search words, and as a result, the Ads appear. Such an idea gives a grasp over the Ad and averts spending on inappropriate phrases. Keep track of the keyword performance and then move towards a broader setting that’s beneficial. Such ideas save Google Ad from underperformance.

New Phase Match incorporated by Google back in February 2021, replaced the Broad match modifiers, they help you capture a lot more traffic you may miss by just using Exact Match

Master Remarketing & RSLA

The best and beneficial tactic to be followed in any campaign is remarketing. It is essential to bid higher & pop up the Ads to visitors interested in the business. By following remarketing, people are likely to collaborate with you for business. Remarketing assists in engaging previous visitors.

Linking Ads to pages that show similar keywords

Save the underperforming Google Ads by redirecting the visitors to pages that discuss similar topics as the keyword. Such a method reaps you with a better quality score. As Ads are less associated with landing pages, the rate of visitors is also less.

Google Ad words are one of the finest and best platforms for marketing. The management and building of campaigns are carried out impeccably by following specific tactics. For underperforming Google Ads campaigns, taking initiatives and implementing the above works seamlessly.

Bursting out with pride as Bing and Google certified Experts, SIMBAA is a leading online advertising expert in Sydney & Central Coast NSW and takes complete control of the Google Ads campaign to deliver exceptional results.

Book a Free Strategy Call with a Google Ads Expert in Sydney / Central Coast NSW

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.

These costs are competitive and within reach of small businesses. With that in mind, here are nine concrete steps your brand can take to save leaky ad costs.

Target Your Audience

Advertisers should be as specific as possible with their criteria when specifying audiences. By narrowing down your target audience, you can drastically reduce competition from other brands serving ads with a similar audience. Remember that you are in a bidding war with hundreds of different brands – only bid for the people you really want to reach. ”

Marketers increase their chances by promoting content that will resonate closely with targeted audiences. This means you can customize your ads to appeal to people of a specific population, geography, and interest group, giving you the best chance of getting a click and creating traction.

Your inventory can fall short as the advertising costs are pretty high when you find the audience that many other advertisers want. Your advertising costs will be considerably lower if you target segments where fewer advertisers compete for advertising space.

Burn Out Pixel

Have you ever made an online purchase only to be bombarded by advertising for the same business or product? If this is the case, the business has obviously failed to identify you as an existing client. Companies are simply serving to irritate consumers by continuing to show advertising to the converted customers and wasting money at the same time.

Make sure you don’t make the same mistake. Fortunately, there’s a quick remedy: use a burn pixel. This bit of code, when added to your post-transaction page, will untag any users who have completed a purchase, guaranteeing that they are no longer served advertisements BOF campaigns.

Instead of showing customers what they’ve previously purchased, you may use fresh advertisements to upsell, cross-sell, or even give referral discounts. Basically, get rid of the old campaign and get them to join a new one.

Frequency Capping

While advertising you should not overexpose yourself, which is why frequency capping is always recommended. Prospects don’t want to see your advertising wherever they go after only one or two visits to your website.

Overexposure leads to a drop in campaign performance fast. Customers may completely disregard your ads, a phenomenon is known as banner blindness, or they may begin to associate your brand with creepy stalker-like behaviour.

A frequency limitation will limit the number of times a tagged person sees your advertising, which will prevent potential customers from feeling bored or overwhelmed. We recommend using 17-20 advertisements per user each week on average, however, you may discuss this with your retargeting provider to see what works best for your strategy.

Utilizing Bid Caps

The more precise your audience targeting, the more expensive the results tend to be, as most of the platforms provide a tool to reach your most valuable audience and also charge more for your own benefit. Most of the platforms set bidding rules and limits, especially for app installs, based on the lifetime value of each prospect.

Check For Audience Overlap

You need to make sure whether the audiences have significant overlap and, if so, then choose the most relevant audience for your marketing goals. “If there’s any overlap, try to exclude these audiences to avoid bidding against yourself

This is important because as in case there is a high overlap rate, you are practically bidding against yourself in the bidding auction to serve ads to the same group of people. Not only do you advertise to the same person more than once, but you also have to pay more to serve ads to that person due to internal competition,

Gather Intelligence

This means you can include a few lines of code on your website to track conversions and access data about your customers.

It can not only track who your customers are, and daily page visitors are, but also collect data like: What are they interested in? Where do they live? What age group their children are in? What is their income range? What have they bought recently? What is their average purchase price? Will they go on any vacation soon?

Not only can you retarget people who visited your website, but you can even target actions they’ve taken, such as people who added to their cart but never completed their purchase.

Bring Variety And Creativity

Different types of ad sets allow you to run multiple ads concurrently with the same budget, Even if you know your audience inside and out, the little nuances in your chosen images, context and words can make a big difference in overtime results.

You’ll be able to spot trends in ad performance by including different combinations of text and images in your Ad. Take the best parts of the top-performing ads and discard the worst. This data-driven ad design is the best way to get the most out of your ad budget.

Retargeting Statements

It would help if you used a custom retargeting algorithm that can directly sort your website visitors into low, medium, and high engagement groups. That audience grows to any ad network. You will be able to drive sales at a low cost per conversion by retargeting your ads.

Targeting Your Fan

You should make sure that all of the followers of your brand are accessible, and the best way to do that is to create a separate audience group for your followers.

People who follow your brands are the easiest to convert, various channels and platforms help you create a list and allow you to find people similar to these audiences, this, by far, is the biggest advertising secret that you can use to your advantage to scale your business and earn you sales while you sleep.

Refreshing Advertising Images

One of the most common issues is that many brands don’t refresh their advertising image. In case an ad starts working for a brand, they usually stop tracking its frequency, which can lead to ad fatigue or a point where the audience is already too familiar with the ad. This might adversely affect your ad performance.

To avoid this, advertisers should report ad-level conversion metrics daily. And, after running a few ads, you’ll get a feel for your impressions and persons, so you know where the ads will be overused, and you can include that metric in your reports and pause ads before reaching the point of fatigue.

Using Video In Your Advertisements

One trick to lowering the cost of advertising on any platform is to use video wherever you can. On average, video accounts for 10% of the cost of a single image or carousel ad. According to statistics, you might average anywhere from $0.15 to $0.50 per click on video campaigns, with simple CPC image ads of $2.00 or more, for the same placement.

Video advertisements garner more sales purely because the barrier to entry in creating these is high and interactive content seems to perform well compared to static graphics

When you use video ads, there are additional metrics available to you which can segment your customers further based on the watch time.

Final Thoughts

It’s essential to use ads effectively in order to maximize your traffic and gain customers. Make sure to follow these steps to make the most out of your ad budget and increase your overall profit.

Our Experience with Paid Ads on Google, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, TikTok, Spotify and more has enabled us to scale businesses exponentially.

If you’re looking for a Growth Marketing Partner in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Gosford or Parramatta our Local Experts can get more bang for your buck, Feel Free To Reach Out.

Or if you’re looking for a Google / Facebook Ads Expert to get a fresh perspective on your current strategy, get a Free Paid Ads Audit + Strategy Session today!