PPC marketing can be one of the most effective ways in which you can grow your business, when it works well PPC can help encourage sales, drive traffic and increase brand awareness. However, when your PPC campaigns aren’t working as well as expected it can become a much more frustrating affair.
On the surface, creating an AdWords or PPC campaign should be simple, you create your ads, set your bids, link up your landing page and you’re good to go, right?
Unfortunately for many businesses and organisations the process doesn’t always work out as easily, whether it’s basic, easily fixable mistakes or something much more serious, PPC campaigns don’t always work, in this article we’ll look at some of the most common reasons your PPC campaigns aren’t working and what can be done to improve things!
No Billing
One incredibly simple, but often overlooked reason, why ads might not be showing or working as effectively, is because billing details haven’t been filled in properly, if not at all. While it should be obvious through the AdWords interface whether billing is incorrect, you can also check manually through the billing section of AdWords, which allows you to check whether the details are correct and amend them as needed.
Paused Campaigns
If your billing is set up correctly but your ads still aren’t showing it’s completely possible that your campaigns are paused, that they haven’t started showing yet or even that an end date has been set meaning the campaign may have ended. By manually checking through your campaigns to ensure that everything is enabled, as well as double checking that your ads are scheduled to run, you can easily get your ads showing again.
Limited Budget
If your daily budget is limited it means that your ads may not be showing properly as Google attempts to spread your budget across the day in order to improve performance. While this means your ads will still show, they won’t show as often, leading the less than impressive results. You can solve this by either increasing your daily budget when possible or scheduling your ads to show when they are likely to be more effective, which can save your budget.
Ignoring Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are an effective way you can stop wasting your budget and yet there are many who aren’t fully utilising the feature. Negative keywords let know show your ads for only the most relevant searches and search terms, meaning that if you want to be found for “children’s bikes” you can add “men’s bikes” or “adult bikes” to your negative keywords list, meaning your ads aren’t shown to a term that isn’t relevant, helping save clicks and decreasing your bounce rate.
Bidding Too Low
Bidding below the first-page bid means you’re bidding below the minimum amount needed to achieve a place on the first page of search results. While it doesn’t mean your ads aren’t showing somewhere on page two, it means they won’t be able to achieve the same results if they were shown on page one. This can be solved by increasing your bids to the estimated first-page bid for that keyword to see if it results in an increase in impressions and awareness of your brand.
Narrow Targeting
With PPC advertising businesses have the opportunity to target areas as huge as a country or as small as a postcode which can be perfect for some businesses, however, if you’re targeting a smaller audience or location it’s possible you’re targeting too small a cross-section to generate searches, impressions and clicks. By expanding your targeting to include more options or locations and A/B testing these campaigns you could improve the results of your campaign.
Poor Ad Copy
Good ad copy is vital when it comes to creating effective PPC campaigns if you’ve got your targeting correct, bid on relevant keywords and created killer landing pages don’t let your ads down by building ads with poor text! It’s hard to get noticed out there amongst the competition so you need unique, professional ad copy that helps your business and your products grab attention when your audience find your ad.
So there you have it, the most common reasons your PPC campaigns aren’t working as effectively as you’d like. Fortunately for those in the know, these issues can be easily fixed, meaning your business can be back generating results and improving your ROI in no time.
For more help and advice about your PPC campaigns why not contact our team of experts today? We’ll get you back on track!
