Why some paid ad campaigns fail, and others succeed!

• October 7, 2019October 23, 2019 • 328 Comments

Why some paid ad campaigns fail, and others succeed!

You might have landed on this blog because you found the topic “Why do paid ads campaigns fail?” very relevant. But first, let me tell you that it is not the paid ad campaigns that fail. Rather, it is the Business Owners and Ad Campaign Managers who do!

Now you must be wondering what I just said! Yes, it is true that as a business owner, people make mistakes of not knowing what they are getting into, because of which their paid ad campaigns end up on the wrong side of the gun. There are many factors that contribute to this, which I am going to discuss below.

WRONG KEYWORD TARGETTING STRATEGY

The Pareto Principle plays out very well in this scenario. It states that 80% of your output is dependent on 20% of your input. The 80/20 rule applies to all marketing campaigns, especially paid ad campaigns.

This effectively means that 80% of your leads will be generated from only 20% of your keywords. The search keywords that don’t lead to conversions, only end up eating your marketing budget earmarked for the marketing campaign.

Moreover, this trend is backed up by researched data. Disruptive Advertising, in their research of over 2000 Google AdWords accounts, found out that only 12% of the target keywords accounted for nearly all the sales. The worst part is that the other 88% of your non-performing keywords eat up 61% of the budget.

Why this happens is majorly due to the fact that most new businesses hope to get higher conversion rates by bidding on a few extra keywords, no matter how irrelevant they might be. This only gets unqualified clicks, thereby decreasing the quality score and depleting your precious money, which could otherwise have been spent on generating more revenue.

How you can fix this?

The solution to counter this is to stop bidding on broad match keywords and instead, go for exact match keywords. Phrase match keywords can also be included, but they should account for no more than 40% of your target keyword list. I am personally advocating the use of phrase match keywords only because exact match keywords have limited search volume.

Also, you will need to remove the keywords which have not brought you any conversions every 2-3 months. This will allow your keyword list to get better with time.

Lastly, you need to increase the spending on your high-value keywords by at least 2x. Put simply, you should double the budget for keywords that are bringing you high conversions by redirecting the budget from low performing keywords.

POOR AD COPY

You get a few seconds in which your potential customer will see your ad and scroll down. These few seconds are the ones going to make the difference between getting a click and getting an impression. Many businesses fail to get genuine clicks from the ads because their ad copy is not optimized for value delivery. Value delivery, in this case, drives customer interaction. If there is no value in your ad, why shall the customer waste his time on clicking your ad and seeing what you have to offer? Instead, your ad headline should match the searcher’s intent and provide the most beneficial solution.

Also, only mention those promises which you intend to keep. For example, if you say that you are offering a completely free copy of an e-book, and later the landing page says that the visitor has to make a purchase to get the free copy, you have already defeated your idea. This will make the visitor run away, and now your ad has the potential to never get a click back from that visitor again.

Remember, while creating an ad copy, you need to understand and provide solutions for your target audience’s pain points.

LANDING PAGE

This is the area where you actually convert the click into a lead. Put simply, a landing page is a web-page specifically designed to educate the customer about the offer you presented in the ad and make the customer take an action on the page. The action can include submitting a form, taking a survey, making a purchase, etc.

The landing page headline needs to align with the ad in an exact sense. This will help the visitors remember why they clicked on your ad in the first place. The landing page is one of the most important parts of your marketing strategy.

As mentioned above, the landing page is a specifically designed page for lead generation. You must not send users to your home page or any other page of your website as a landing page. The landing page needs to have a value proposition for the visitors.

BIDDING LOW FOR AD PLACEMENT

It is true that the higher you bid, the CPC (cost-per-click) will also go up. But you need to understand that CTR (click-through-rate) and ad ranking move proportionally. Your clicks will increase if your ad rank increases.

Now, many business owners talk about slowly increasing the bid amount with time. Though this might seem like a good way to conserve your ad budget for generating genuine clicks, it is quite the contrary in a practical scenario. This is because, if you slowly increase your bid amount, you will end up losing more money on underperforming and irrelevant keywords.

Instead, you should start high with the higher bid amount, generate the data required to analyze your campaign as per your KPIs, and then scale down accordingly. This strategy also accomplishes your goal of establishing higher-visibility instead of driving profits, which is needed in the early stages of a business setup.

INABILITY TO CONTINUOUSLY OPTIMIZE AD CAMPAIGNS

Pay-per-Click or PPC marketing is not a one-time setup type of marketing channel. In fact, no marketing channel works this way. The one thing constant in marketing is continuous optimization. Without it, you just end up wasting your entire marketing budget.

On a personal note, I optimize each marketing campaign on a weekly basis. I follow a very simple yet reliable strategy to run a paid ad campaign – Run the campaigns weekly, with 6 days of live ads. The 7^th day is spent on analyzing and optimizing the ad campaign. This allows me to understand what went well last week, where I need to improve next week, and what updates should be made in the campaign settings to achieve the goals.

Being inactive will directly result in a quality score decrement for your ads.

HAVING A LOW BUDGET

This is one of the biggest problems with most small businesses trying to acquire leads or revenue by running PPC marketing campaigns. While it is understandable that most of the small and medium businesses don’t have a big corpus for marketing spend, but expecting results with a tiny budget is a naïve thought.

I would advise small business owners to have a decent marketing budget at the start of the campaign so that your marketing search strategy can be tested against various metrics. The data gathered from this phase will allow you to calculate the strong and the weak points, and accordingly, you can optimize your ad campaign for high performance afterward. This will save you a lot of money in the long run.

The idea is to bid high, get a high-quality score, get your ad to show in a higher position, and get more ad clicks. Once the high-performing ads are identified, you can then move to the ROI-focuses strategy.

Alternatively, if you still cannot increase your budget, I will share another some strategies to get more leads in a low budget in the next post.s

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Ritvik Agrawal

Founder & Consultant at Digiadlab