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Are your ads struggling to gain traction online?
When you invest your time and money in paid advertising but don’t see any results it can be quite frustrating. Some people can even be deterred from spending more when they aren’t seeing decent traffic in the early days.
But you shouldn’t give up too quickly – there are ways to improve low traffic Google Ads campaigns.
Quite often, the problem lies with “low-search volume keywords”, which are typically new branded terms or specific long-tail keywords that simply don’t have a lot of search volume at present. It can take some time before the search volume increases, which means your ads won’t get triggered.
So, how can we improve low-performing keywords like this?
If your campaign traffic is barely a trickle, you need to take action. It won’t fix itself! Here are some tips to open the floodgates on your Google Ads.
Sometimes, to improve your traffic, you have to take measures of reducing traffic first. That may sound counter-productive, but stay with me…
When your ads are triggered by certain search queries that are similar, but not entirely relevant to your offer, you end up attracting unqualified users that will most likely never convert. As a result, your ads end up with lots of clicks, but relatively few conversions, and soon enough, your quality score suffers.
To boost quality score, and overall ad performance, your ads need to be relevant to viewers. By identifying these unrelated search terms and adding them to your campaign as negative keywords, you effectively filter out unqualified traffic.
Your ads will stop showing for those terms, but over time, your ads will attract more targeted, qualified traffic that is more likely to convert.
You can take the precise search query someone is using to search with, and then automatically insert it into your ad. This keyword insertion technique can boost your clickthrough-rate (CTR), but it isn’t guaranteed.
In fact, you must be aware that it is a risky ploy that can actually harm your key metrics. You should strive to create ads that actually answer a user’s search query, rather than attract clicks that won’t convert.
Perhaps even your top keywords have a low search volume. In this case, it may be time to seek out synonymous terms that have a high search volume.
Try out Google Ads Keyword Planner, as well as the Google “Related Searches” feature. Between these two, you can determine the questions that your target audience are asking, and discover the terms they use when they are searching for solutions.
A common culprit in low-search volume campaigns is the use of exact match type keywords. You may simply have too many specific keywords, which are relying on exact matches to display your ads.
By opening up your scope a little with broad match types, you can get your ads in front of more eyeballs, as it will be triggered for a lot more closely-related search queries.
In the keyword tab of Google Ads, you can find the Search Term Report. Drill through search terms there to assess whether you need to adjust the match types on your campaign for more efficient use of your budget.
There are some search terms that are best suited to seasonal products and offers. As such, they will peak at predictable times during the year, like Christmas or Black Friday. Conversely, they may underperform in the off-season, which has a negative impact on your traffic.
Nobody wants to buy wooly Christmas hats in July, so you should refine your keyword list outside of peak seasons. Also, it’s best to keep seasonal ads together in unique ad groups.
If a product has just released some new feature, any keywords related to that feature will usually have a low-search volume. Over time, as more content is created about the new upgrade, awareness will spread, and more people will be searching to learn about it.
By keeping a close eye on trending keywords, you can determine if they are attracting irrelevant clicks. More importantly, you’ll be able to see when the impressions surge, and then you can add it to your campaign to attract qualified traffic.
When you find yourself dealing with a bunch of low-search volume keywords, it can be easy to lie back and disregard them completely. But you should make a concerted effort to increase their visibility, starting with your bidding strategy in the auctions.
With a more aggressive approach, you can fend off the competition so your keywords earn a favorable ad position when you need it most.
Having a few keywords with low search volume isn’t the end of the world. However, just like gremlins, they can cause chaos when they multiply. If you accrue a large amount of these ailing search terms, it will dent your quality score, and that’s bad news for the bottom line on any campaign.
Good advertisers should always keep their quality score in mind, staying vigilant to find ways of improving it. Look to keep the number of poor-performing keywords to a minimum, and replace them with new ones that show more promise.
An alternative to eradicating your keywords is to pause them. Such a strategy is good if you have some generic terms that are just going through a quiet spell, such as seasonal keywords. This will null their effect on your quality score, and make your account more manageable in the short-term.
With our extensive reports library, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising doesn’t have to be so challenging or frustrating. PPCexpo has a wide range of reporting tools and patented techniques that can help modern marketers learn more from their data, which in turn leads to healthier Google Ads campaigns.
Even the most experienced PPC managers can encounter slow periods on Google Ads. A once thriving campaign may slow to a trickle, whether it’s the off-season or market shifts that change the fortunes of your keywords.
It’s vital that you stay proactive, looking for opportunities to maximize your traffic with new keywords, match types, negative keywords, and trending terms.
With a vigilant approach and watchful eye, you can improve low-performing keywords to create successful PPC campaigns that attract more traffic, and hopefully, more sales.
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