Running Google Ads? Avoid These 5 Costly Errors Like the Plague

Many businesses come to us looking for help with their Google Ads campaigns, many of them say “We tried it but it didn’t work”, “we spent thousands and barely got any leads”, “the clicks were expensive and no one converted” and a myriad of other similar such responses that we hear from business owners, frustrated with poor results.

And yet some businesses are delivering a fantastic number of leads and super high-quality traffic.

Here at Altitude Internet, we’ve seen it all over the years and the reality is that most Google Ads campaigns fail because they are not set up properly.

They’re either rushed, they are poorly targeted or they lack a clear and defined strategy.

In this brief article, we will look at the five biggest reasons that Google Ads campaigns fail and what we can do to help.

The first major reason is there is no clear goal or strategy in place.

If your main objective from the Google Ads campaign is to generate more traffic you are already going down the wrong route.

Here at Altitude Internet, we believe the success of Google Ads starts with laser-focused clarity.

Do you want leads, do you want phone calls, or are you looking to simply generate better brand awareness?

Every ad campaign should have a single clear trackable goal and everything should align to that, for example, the keywords, the ad copy and the landing page experience.

Yes, the landing page experience is crucial too to the success of your Google ads campaign.

The second biggest reason that Google ad campaigns fail is broad match keywords.

For example, let’s imagine you are bidding on the keyword plumber when in fact you only want to generate leads from people looking for an emergency plumber in your local area.

For example, if you bid on the broad match term of plumber, unless you have the right negative keywords in place, Google would display your ad for anything broadly related to the word plumber, this could include people looking for pipes, plumbing apprentice jobs, how much plumbers earn, or even their local plumbing merchant.

Whereas if you bid on the phrase match of the keyword “emergency plumber (town name)” you will have already reduced a huge amount of potential click wastage and most of the traffic should be from people much more likely to convert.

You should consider using long-tail keywords, as the more specific your keywords, the better your click quality will be and the more likely it will result in a conversion.

The third biggest reason for failure is terrible ending pages.

Imagine clicking a Google ad and landing on a homepage that is slow, cluttered, confusing and doesn’t even mention the service that you have searched for.

This will likely reduce the chances of success and could mean your competitor will get the click and a conversion.

We see this all of the time and recommend you build dedicated landing pages for each ad group or campaign, ensuring that they load superfast, are mobile optimised have clear messaging and people understand the intended action, eg to call you, complete a form or whatever your conversion based approach favours.

Reason number four is that you’re not tracking conversions.

As they say, you can’t improve what you’re not measuring and if you don’t know which keywords convert, how can you possibly optimise the campaign?

Setting up conversion Tracking using Google Tag Manager and Helping to track telephone calls form submissions (and whatever matters most of your business) will help to ensure you can optimise the campaign around the keywords that are actually generating conversions.

Reason Number 5 is people think they can set up the campaign and then forget about it.

We call this “set-and-forget syndrome”.

But quite simply you cannot set it and forget it if you want the campaign to perform well.

Google Ads campaigns need constant and ongoing up optimisation, oversight and management, adding negative keywords, poor performing keywords should be paused, split testing ad copy should be undertaken and re-allocation of budget to top-performing campaigns.

You should either schedule time each week or leave it to a specialist agency like us to actively manage and refine your campaigns.

This is the best way to stop you just burning through cash.

Smart bidding and performance Max campaigns can work wonders, but only if your campaign is structured properly and in our view is best only for certain industries.

If Google does not have enough conversion data it will optimise in all the wrong places and you could end up spending a fortune showing your ads to people who never had the huge level of intent that you were looking for.

Summarising, a campaign should include high-intent location based target keywords, drive traffic to conversion focused landing pages with fast load times, and have clear tracking and attribution in place to help you track your ROI, with weekly campaign reviews and monthly performance reports.

You should utilise smart bidding only when you have sufficient data to support it and make sure you have a negative keyword list that grows over time to eliminate wasted click Pen.

Google Ads is not the problem, and structured properly Google Ads can work wonders for your business.

If you have experimented with Google Ads before and it didn’t work don’t write Google Ads off, instead consider how to better optimise, manage and run the campaign.

If you would like to know more about how we can help your business generate better returns from Google Ads click here to schedule a call with our team.

We have deep experience in helping businesses in many different sectors, we can help to reduce click wastage and generate the high-quality intent-based traffic that Google is known for.

Over the last decade, the team here have supported businesses in almost every industry you can imagine to generate the best returns possible from Google Ads, from architects, builders, plumbers, roofers, landscape gardeners, Solicitors, e-commerce stores, cosmetic surgeons, and (Literally every industry you can imagine),

Our PPC team are experts who are fully certified in all of the latest Google operating processes and procedures and can help to ensure that any new Google Ads account is set up with all of the best practices implemented from the get-go!

Our team has put together many case studies over the years.

In case study number 14, we have been working with a regional chain of hearing clinics that contacted us during 2020 and wanted to bespoke plans to help generate more appointments and bookings for their physical hearing clinics.

At the time they had a chain of six clinics primarily in Essex in East London, they have since expanded their business and now have a chain of 13 clinics in neighbouring counties also.

Their Google Ads campaign is now generating a significant level of conversions for their various clinic locations and their online bookings.

They’ve scaled the spend significantly over time as a result of the strong ROI that we were able to prove and they’ve been able to aid their expansion as a result of existing clinics running at high capacity.

In this particular case, it has been a delight working with an ambitious business owner to help grow their business and improve their online visibility whilst showing a strong ROI.

They operate in a highly competitive sector and competing for page one results is no easy task.

In addition to Google Ads, we have also worked with them on their search engine optimisation (SEO) generating over 200 keywords in the organic search results on page one of Google – this can be a great way to maximise your Google visibility and lead generation, eg running SEO in conjunction with google ads.

Interested in learning more about paid ads from Google?

You can find out more about SEO just here and you can read hundreds of genuine customer reviews about Altitude Internet going back over a decade just here

Google Ads can be a great way to boost your traffic, leads and enquiries and working with a professional agency like us can save you time, effort and energy and maximise your chances of success.