Are you spending money on Google ads and not getting any results? Your campaign isn’t working for some reason but luckily you’ve found this post!
Here are three red flags that your campaigns are failing and what to fix first.
Clicks but not conversions
So, if you’re getting a high click-through rate (CTR) on your ads, say higher than 4% at scale, meaning you have 50 to 100 clicks @ 4% CTR, but you’re getting no sales, that’s a landing page issue.
We know that people are interested in the ad, but when they get more info, you aren’t providing anything valuable on the website for them to convert (download a guide, book a call, etc.)
Put simply your landing page or your website does not fit with what people are actually looking for when they type in and see your ad. I’ll use my favourite analogy for this, if your ad talks about a cheese burger, show people all your cheese burgers on the page.
Don’t show hotdogs, chicken burgers, sushi, focus everything on cheese burgers.
So how to fix it? You need to look at what people are typing in (check the search terms report in Google Ads) and then where you’re taking them and make sure that all aligns.
If they are typing in Life Insurance, send them to your life insurance page. If you don’t have one, make one.
If they are clicking on your refinance ad, send them to a refinance page, with rates, different bank options, etc.
If you don’t have a refinance page, make one.
You have to make pages that are relevant, you can’t get away with generic pages or just using your home page.
Landing page problems
Point number two why your google ads campaign isn’t working, if you’re at zero conversions or even low conversions, then you know people can convert – you just want more.
Here you need to find out what people are doing on this landing page and why more of them aren’t taking those next steps.
A great free tool to do this is called Hot Jar.
With Hotjar you install a bit of code on your website, and it’ll annonomously record what people do on your website so you can review and fix any problems.
You can’t see any details they type in (i.e. credit card details, although this isn’t super relevant for financial advisers!)
You can get around 30 free recordings every day, more than enough to review and see what’s going on
Pulling up the online dashboard, you can go back and watch what people are actually doing on your site. See where they click around and where they may be falling over in the process of converting.
You may find that they’re clicking on a button and it’s not working.
You may see that they’re actually visiting other pages on the website which aren’t as optimised for conversions.
So, the takeaways from that are you can bring content onto the page you’re sending them to. You may even disable the menu or remove the ways that they can get to other parts of your website so that they can stay focused on where you’ve sent them and hopefully convert there.
Ad campaigns not spending
Number three, if your campaigns are not working, i.e. they’re not even spending anything, you’ve got some ad account issues to sort out.
Check your keyword match types or even your keywords that you’re using, people may not even be typing them into Google!
Check to see that you’re bidding enough. If you don’t have a high enough bid, then you can’t even show for it.
For example, if you have set a $1 cost per click limit, but actually the minimum’s $5, nothing’s going to happen there.
I’m sorry to tell you, the days of getting $1 clicks that are quality leads are long gone. I’ve seen clicks getting more expensive each year the last 5 years or so. This puts a much greater emphasis on points number 1 and 2 in this post to insure you get good results from your marketing.
Another thing to keep in mind is the geographic area that you’re targeting.
If you’re in a town or city of 5,000 people, 10,000 people, people there may not be typing in what you’re actually wanting to show your ads for, or a combination of the three things here.
So if your google ads campaign isn’t working, it doesn’t mean you should give up.
Just because your campaigns aren’t working with the way they’re set up now, doesn’t mean we can’t unstuck them.
So go through these three tips, have a look in your account or send it to your marketing person and let’s see if we can jiggle that campaign free.
