3 Things That Will Kill Your Google Ads Campaign

A well run high performing Google ads campaign can become a major sales or lead generator for your business. It can deliver leads and sales with low cost per acquisition and high ROAS (return on ad spend),  and make up a hugely important part of any digital marketing strategy by capturing all those high intent customers who might be ready to buy customers who are actively searching on Google for your exact products and services. 

For many businesses they are the foundation of a growth strategy - BUT it’s equally easy to waste a whole ton of cash on campaigns that are just not delivering anything for your business and potentially creating a frustrating experience for customers who won’t come back.

Here are 3 things that can kill the efficiency of your campaigns by targeting the wrong things, struggling to get conversions and wasting a whole bunch of cash on keywords that will never convert.

And what you can do to make sure your campaigns are optimised for success!!  

1. The wrong goals or no goals

What benchmarks are you using to measure the success of your Google ads campaign?

The most important thing about setting up a search campaign is how you will measure its success and how you can justify your advertising spend. Conversion tracking is the industry standard of how well a Search campaign is progressing. Conversions can come in many forms so there needs to be some valuable action when choosing what conversion you wish to track. 

Common conversions we recommend you track include, 

• E-Commerce Revenue (conversion value if you have an E-Commerce website), 
• Email Link Clicks (potential customers clicking on the email link on your website), 
• Phone Link clicks and 
• Form Submissions (potential customers who send emails directly from your website) to name a few. 

The tools you will need to get this up  and running are Google Tag manager and Google Analytics. 

Here is a helpful video on how to track conversions. 

2. Spending too much on non converting keywords 

If your campaign has been running for some time now and you have seen how well the campaign has been converting it might be time to thin the herd. 

Non converting keywords could be costing you budget that could be used by top performing keywords. Don’t be afraid to pause keywords that don’t get you results!  

Consider the following:

What time frame are you using to measure the success of your keywords? 

It’s better to evaluate the success of a keyword over a longer period of time. 

Use metrics on Google Ads to determine if the keywords are worth keeping. 

• Are you getting conversions from them? 
• Is the CTR high? 
• What does the average CPC look like in relation to those factors? Something that could help with this is using the ‘Search Terms’ feature in the ‘Keywords’ section of Google Ads. The Search Term report is a list of words a potential customer would have used to trigger your ad. This could give some great insight of what keywords to potentially add and which need to be removed. 

3. Do you have the right Bidding Strategy enabled on your campaign? 

Google has a number of bidding strategies you can choose from- it’s important to pick the right one based on your campaign’s objective. 

If you want a particular campaign to focus mainly on ads appearing on the top of a Google search?   Target Impression Share’ could help with this. 

Want more users to your website? Maximise Clicks can help increase activity. 

Google also has a number of Smart bidding strategies- automated strategies which use Google's machine learning to target users who are likely to convert to click on your ad. These types of  Smart bidding strategies ideally need conversions already recorded on the campaign for the Machine learning algorithm to learn from. 

Once your campaigns have matured, having an automated smart bidding strategy enabled takes the guesswork out of optimisations and delivers a predictable level of conversions without too much manual intervention that could cost you in the long run. 

Are you ready to have an expert review your campaigns and help you improve ROAS or # of leads? Reach out to info@splashdigital.co.nz and we'll talk you through how we can help.