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Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns can be a huge opportunity to grow your business. Of course, Google Ads is the reigning platform for PPC. Using Google Ads, you can focus on generating leads, sales, traffic, branding, or promotion. The versatility of these ads is astounding.
On the surface, it all seems so simple. Just bid on specific placements, and if your bid is the winner, your ad will be shown to your desired audience. If you’ve done a good job creating the ad, that person will click on it and hopefully fulfill your conversion goal by taking a certain action afterward.
But in practice, running a PPC campaign can be a nightmare. Plenty of businesses, marketing departments, and entrepreneurs have driven themselves crazy after throwing mountains of cash at underperforming ads. So, let’s help you avoid that fate. In this article, we’ll go over the most common reasons for marketing campaign failures. That way, you can avoid mistakes and better position your campaign for success.
PPC optimization is simply the undertaking of improving your PPC campaigns using best practices, data, and testing. You can apply optimization strategies to various aspects of your campaign, such as your keywords, bids, ad copy, landing pages, at the ad group level, and ad campaign level.
The learning curve for PPC optimization can be immense. Not only do you need to understand basic marketing and copywriting principles, but also the ins and outs of the Google Ads platform itself. It’s easy to become overwhelmed by the decisions offered to you regarding the types of ads, locations, and other aspects of a campaign.
There are some aspects of online marketing that are relatively easy to grasp quickly. And quite often, even if it requires further research, you can gain sufficient knowledge in the topic to get results after a short period of time.
But when it comes to Google Ads, there are so many things to consider. Which landing page strategy is ideal? What network should you use? How much should you bid? And that’s just scratching the surface.
Most people are good at either creative thinking (the arts) or pragmatic thinking (science). However, few people excel at both. It can be done, but it takes a lot of training, knowledge, and experience.
If you are advertising, you need to be able to wrap your mind quickly around concepts like clicks, impressions, and conversions. But then there are the deep layers of data analysis to parse through. That’s where the main challenge is for most people. Many PPC marketers who are good at the copywriting side of the business end up running in circles endlessly when it comes to the complex data.
Now, multiply this complexity by hundreds or thousands of campaigns, and the numbers involved are staggering. If you ever took a course in statistics, then you’re already ahead of 99% of marketers. Still, you’re dealing with another issue: time.
Account statistics don’t just show up instantly. So, you can never know for sure that what you see really is an accurate representation of the data as it currently stands. Information on conversions and clicks can often be delayed by three hours or more. So if you’re using a ‘last click’ attribution model, good luck figuring out when and where the actual last click took place. It could be delayed by 15 hours.
This causes headaches with data that is invalid. So, patience truly is a virtue in paid advertising. You’ll want to check your data at specific points in time and understand what you see, so you don’t end up with marketing campaign failures.
Make no mistake — Google’s primary objective is to make as much money as humanly possible. And their representatives are tasked with executing on that mission. Not on preventing marketing campaign failures for you.
You’d like to think you could trust the credibility and intentions of Google’s support agents, articles, and forum managers. After all, Google Ads are complicated enough as it is. Who would know better than a company rep?
Well, it turns out that these representatives are really good at their jobs. But their job, again, is to make money for Google. Most reps are following strict company scripts and guidelines.
These guidelines essentially boil down to this mantra: “Suggest whatever course of action will result in the advertiser spending more money with us (regardless if it equals a better return on investment for the advertiser).”
We know, it’s shocking that the company that sells everyone’s data as quickly and in as high a quantity as possible would do something like this.
Regardless, you need to keep your goals in mind when taking any advice from Google’s representatives. Throw out any suggestions that equate to “spend more money, blindly.”
If it isn’t clear by now, Google is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. If you’re advertising on their platform, you’re going to be playing by their rules. Learning these rules can be a little confusing at first.
But don’t worry. Once you learn the rules, you’ll soon find out that there’s a lot of room for interpretation surrounding them. In other words, you never really get to know the actual rules. But it makes sense if you think about it. If Google made its ranking and placement algorithms open to the public, marketers would exploit them to the point of making Google unusable.
So understanding that, let’s look at what Google uses to determine your bid and placement: Quality Score.
Quality Score depends on three factors:
I. Clickthrough rate (CTR)
The CTR of an ad is calculated by taking the number of ad clicks and dividing it by the number of times the ad was seen. So, if ten people see your ad and one person clicks on it, you would have a CTR of 10%.
The CTR is the only objective metric by which Google calculates Quality Score.
The other two aspects are far more subjective and include various factors. The degree to which Google weights these various factors is still a mystery. Your best bet is to do the best you can to interpret what Google means using your knowledge of marketing and user experience best practices.
Without further ado, let’s take a look at the next aspect of Quality Score that is essential in preventing marketing campaign failures:
II. Relevance
Relevance refers to how much the content on your landing page matches up with your advertisement. This is essentially a calculation of keywords, and other tricks that Google knows, and marketers need to learn.
III. Landing Page Experience
Making a better user experience is a good idea in general. But it is also important for keeping your bid amount down. Things like ease of navigation, page speed, and relevance are factored into this portion of the Quality Score.
It can be tempting to look at the data and think you know what you’re seeing. But it turns out that you need to select which metrics you are focused on carefully. Otherwise, you run the risk of getting into trouble by chasing the wrong data.
As an example, you might be trying to grow your business with Google Ads. Well, if you are looking at clicks, you might see a huge increase. But beware of celebrating too early. A lot of clicks does not always translate to sales. In fact, clicks are a misleading metric to use when tracking campaign success.
Use the right data. For instance, are those clicks converting to sales or leads? What was your original campaign goal? It’s crucial to keep this in mind. Not having enough clarity on your outcome will result in vanity metrics that only distract you in the short term from reaching your goals faster and more profitably.
By its very nature, the auction setup of Google Ads and other PPC platforms is very challenging. It is something that you have to constantly be up to date on, checking to make sure your bis aren’t too high or too low.
In fact, even a competitor with a lower bid can outrank you for placement. This occurs if their Quality Score is higher than yours. On the other hand, there can also be price wars. This can result in marketing campaign failures.
Be hesitant to simply raise your bid because the price is going up, just to stay competitive. Analyze your returns and see if your advertising is bringing in enough revenue to justify that particular campaign. Few marketers pause and reflect on this question. So if you do, you’ll stand out from the rest.
In any industry, you want to know as much as you can about your competitors. Doing this research allows you to learn from their successes and failures to adjust your strategy, as you can test if something that works for a competitor will also work when you apply it to your campaign.
However, Google Ads doesn’t offer a way to track your competitors in any meaningful way. You are essentially in the dark, without the key knowledge that could help you get a competitive advantage.
This further increases the learning curve. That means you might be in the game for months or years before you start to get an intuitive idea of what will work or won’t work. But at that point, you’ve spent thousands of dollars or more.
A lot of marketers fall into the trap of pausing their campaigns. Think of it this way. You are slaving away, trying to optimize your PPC ads. However, you just aren’t getting the results you wanted. What are you going to do in response?
Well, if you’re like most people, you will probably get frustrated. After all, you’re losing all that money every day, week, and month that you keep the ads running. So the natural response is to pause your ads in the short term to protect your budget. You might never even touch that campaign again.
Many advertisers simply pause or abandon their campaigns. Instead, you should keep your ads running. You can see different data depending on the time of week or day. If you don’t even have a campaign running, then how will you see this valuable data? The reality is you won’t. And that’s why this is one of the most important traps to avoid.
Google is really smart. So it makes sense that they would name their automated, low-touch campaign set up something like “Smart Campaigns.” It sounds like a brilliant idea to turn that setting on at first glance.
And don’t get us wrong — they really are smart campaigns. It’s a great way to set your ads on autopilot and spend as much money as possible without optimizing your campaigns.
However, this is just a smart move by Google — it’s not that smart for you.
If you fall into the trap of letting Google take control of your ads, you’re going to have a bad time. Most people think that a data company would know how to make profitable data-driven decisions on ads. But there’s more to advertising than numbers.
One of the hardest parts about dealing with PPC campaigns is that you never really know when you’re looking at the right data set. Should you optimize clicks? Should you optimize for visits, leads, brand exposure? It’s a never-ending cycle of questions.
So naturally, when you’re analyzing your campaigns, you’re bound to get more than a little confused. No one in their right mind could handle all of that input and know exactly what to optimize right off the bat. But don’t worry, you are not alone. Most marketers feel the same way.
Select a few different aspects of your campaign to focus on, and after that, test them against each other. For instance, you might try a different call to action on your ad.
You can still run your existing campaign, but later on, try testing your landing page without tweaking your ad. As long as you only test a few elements at a time, you won’t feel overwhelmed. Furthermore, you’ll start to chip away at your optimization process.
Before getting into the max CPC bid optimization, you have to look at three levels of influence: Maximum Bid, Ad Rank, and Competition.
The maximum is going to show you the last values that you had. Now, there is not a historical record of that information. So, you can’t compare it to other data and see when the max CPC was lower. And you can’t see the results from that as a consequence.
Without any kind of trend analysis, you have to take it upon yourself to track trends. Otherwise, it’s going to be a major headache to track any historical data due to Google’s tight-lipped approach.
The amount of data you can access is crucial to forming a quality campaign. And yet, our friends at Google continue to remove data that is available to marketers and advertisers. It started with the organic search side of things. This approach made sense, as you weren’t paying to advertise on Google if you were just using their free keyword tool. However, as time went on, this got worse.
The current state of Google Ads is one where data is more scarce than ever. Even if you pay tremendous amounts of money to Google, you still won’t be able to see certain keywords that were searched for to trigger your ads. So as an advertiser, what do you do?
In order to counteract this decrease in available data, you need to be creative. Come up with internal tracking systems in your marketing. Also, look at third-party tools. There was a time when Google was sufficient to get all the information you needed on your ads.
Now that they’ve proven where their intentions truly lie, any PPC manager worth their salt should have a suite of professional tools. Preferably, they’re outside of Google’s ecosystem to get a more accurate picture of how much ROI they’re getting with the money they’re spending.
As we just mentioned, tools are certainly valuable. However, it turns out that they still are not sufficient. After all, if you give someone a hammer and ask them to build a house, most of the time, they wouldn’t be able to do it.
It’s not enough to have the tool. You also need to know how to use it. In terms of marketing tools, that means knowing the right questions to ask and the right things to look for in your campaign.
Make sure that you have already designated your most important metrics before touching any tool. One exception is if the tool is used for brainstorming new ideas. Still, you should already have a solid idea of your strategy. It should be so simple that it could be encapsulated on a post-it note. If not, you’ve got more work to do before touching any software.
This shortcoming is the final reason for marketing campaign failures. More data is not necessarily a good thing. At best, it’s useless. At worst, it’s dangerous in the wrong hands. And that’s another issue with PPC ads. You have a lot of data to look at, yet, platforms don’t give you the insights you need in terms of what actions you should take after data analysis. That knowledge only comes from experience and testing.
So now you have a better understanding of the most common problems facing marketers when running PPC campaigns. It can be tempting to jump in and start running ads to see the results. But make sure you understand the challenges above. That way, you can create a smart PPC strategy by learning from past marketing campaign failures.
The end result will be better conversion rates on your ads and lower costs. That’s something every business can benefit from, whether you’re looking for leads, sales, branding, or anything else.
Build your awareness of common advertising pitfalls with our blog, 20 Google Ads Mistakes Might Raise Your Wasted Spend in 2020.
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