Reasons Why Your PPC Campaigns Might Fail?

Digital marketing and communication requires your article, website, product or service to be displayed prominently whenever a user searches for specific keywords.

One way to grab the attention of visitors is to run a pay-per-click (or PPC) ad campaign where you only pay when a user clicks on them.

There are different PPC ad campaigns:

1. Search
2. Display
3. Social media
4. Remarketing
5. Google Shopping
6. Local Service
7. Gmail marketing
8. In-stream

If you continue to pour money in a PPC campaign with little thought and research, then this might be the reason why PPC ads might fail. Most of the clients of digital marketers don’t get the desired results or even get no results.

They don’t see any increase in traffic on the website, landing page or the product listing on an eCommerce platform. It is not because the target audience is ignoring their ads, but most probably because they aren’t seeing them at all!

Every business person must follow the famous saying from Investor billionaire Charlie Munger “just tell me where I am going to die, and I will never go there.”

To resolve these issues, you must first identify them and then sort them one-by-one. This handy list of top reasons for PPC Campaigns to fail will prove to be very helpful.

1. Mistakenly paused campaign

Ads are shown only when the campaign or ad group is active. If someone in your digital marketing team pauses the campaign temporarily for some fine-tuning and later forgets to re-activate it, your ads will show nowhere. It is an innocent but costly mistake.

2. Ads with disapproved text

Google is very strict about the text in your ads and your ads can be disapproved if they do not follow Google’s ad-text policy. You can check approvals and rejections in your Google Ads account. Google also gives a fairly simple reason of why your ad is rejected along with a link to the Google Ads Help Guide.

3. Disapproved keywords

Google Ads has a strict policy against keywords for firearms, narcotic drugs, smoking and vaping, pornography, hard liquor, fireworks, and the likes. Depending on the geography, more elements can be added to the list. If any keywords of your content relates to any one of the rejection-list keywords, then your campaign will not run, and the status of the campaign will be shown as disapproved. Always check Google Ads Keyword Guide for details.

4. Bidding on broad-match keywords

If your product or service is very specific, then choosing broad match keywords will not help you. Though these are suitable for many common products or services,  broad match keywords may not be suitable for you. They also require a larger budget to produce a decent click through rate to your website.

Check this example from Google about different types of keywords:

5. Campaigns without negative keywords

Negative keywords are those set of keywords, where your ad will not appear in the search pages. By adding negative keywords, you can block undesired traffic and wasting of money. Continuous review of the negative keyword list is needed to ensure that your ad campaigns do not have them at campaign or ad group levels.

6. Not analyzing your industry

You are not the only one with a product or service to sell, in your industry. There are many competitors who want to grab the attention before you can. If you do not analyze the strategy and campaigns of your competitors, you might not be able to outdo them. Therefore, spending some time to analyze your competitors is always a good idea.

You can easily do a simple keyword search to identify your main competitors. Their ads will appear with the search results. You can also use third-party tools like Serpstat to discover your closest competitors.

7. Keywords with low search volume

If your campaign uses keywords with an exact match option or some very infrequently used keywords, then your ads won’t be displayed very often. Low search volume for some keywords would be a major reason why your ads don’t get many impressions. You can check the search volume, for the keywords selected, by clicking the Keyword section on your account. Use the Google Ads Keyword Planner to find related keywords with a higher search volume.

8. Poorly designed landing page

If the ad-copy and the landing page don’t make the connection or if the landing page is poorly designed, chances are higher that the visitor quickly closes your page rather than providing their details. The aim of any ad campaign is conversion but not mere footfalls. It may result in a higher click-through rate but a very low conversion rate.

9. Very small daily budget

If your keywords are very competitive and the bids on them are too high, then you may not be able to bid for them at all! For example, if your maximum cost-per-click for a keyword is USD 4, and your daily budget is set at only USD 10, then Google will not show your ads. To set it right, either bid for lower maximum keyword costs or increase your daily budget.

Conclusion

Just by not knowing about these issues, many companies lose millions of money every week in lost sales or mis-spent ad budgets.

Once you check for and fix these fundamental reasons for PPC Campaigns to fail, you are good to go. A good ad campaign must prove to be your cash cow and not a sinking pit, after all.

If you are someone who doesn’t have much knowledge about running paid ads then it is always good to hire a Google Ads agency with expertise to handle paid ads and bring results. You can either outsource the complete work or you can just hire a consultant to guide you in your campaign optimizations.

And in the end, if at all your campaigns do not result in any positive results, have patience. Google’s approval for your ad-text and keywords may take up to five days as their review and approvals queue is very long.

We hope this article will help you in running PPC campaigns that actually bring you results. If you have any query regarding the same, you can share them in the comments.