Should I Stop Using Google AdWords?

Many businesses contemplate stopping their Adwords campaigns because they are seeing little or no results. They’ve been running ads for weeks or even months with the hope that somehow things will turnaround, but to no avail.

 

And they hold out a little longer with the promise that with a little more optimisation, ROI will improve.

 

The reality is that many advertisers are experiencing this right now. And if you’re one of them, then it’s likely you’re thinking of stopping your campaign because it hasn’t worked.

 

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Here are some reasons why it may not have worked for you and some solutions to fix things:

 

Your budget is too low
If you’ve set a low budget for your PPC campaigns, then you’ll have stalled the performance of your ads. A low budget has many disadvantages including:

 

⁃ preventing profitable keywords from triggering your ads. Some of the most profitable keywords are also the most competitive, and with a low budget you will not appear for them.
⁃ Not appearing when people are most likely to purchase or complete a conversion.
⁃ Ranking lower in the Ad auction which means you lose out on many quality clicks and conversions

 

So, a low budget is one of the main reasons why campaigns fail. And if you’re not prepared to increase it, then it’s probably best to stop your ads from running until you have a sufficient budget.

 

Campaigns are not optimised
If your campaigns are not fully optimised, they’ll underperform. And that’s likely to make you think they cannot work.

 

AdWords is a competitive platform and many advertisers are looking to outbid you and gain more sales. So, the advertiser that puts time into managing their campaigns will benefit from better conversions and profitability.

 

This means taking the time to dig deeper into metrics like Click Through Rate (CTR), bounce rate, conversions etc. Looking at your reports you can see which assets are working and which aren’t and then you can optimise accordingly.

 

Your Ad Rank is too low
Ranking lower consistently is one reason your ads will underperform. Use bid options like “Target Outranking Share” and “Top of the first results page” to outbid your competitors.

 

If you’re ranking low, your competitors will get all the best Search traffic and your site will get only searches for people looking for information. The best keywords are competitive and expensive in most cases, so you should bid higher and improve your Quality Scores to be able to appear for them.

 

You haven’t optimised your Ads for success
It’s not enough that your ads are getting impressions and clicks. You should consider your macro metrics like conversions and conversion rates. And to optimise for these successfully, look at your AdWords and Analytics reports to see which searches, and not just keywords are doing well for you.

 

Then use bid modifiers to increase their positions and add some as keywords and bid higher for them. For lower performing searches, keywords, ads and locations, again use bid modifiers to reduce exposure.

 

Test different ads to see what people respond to. The ideal is to have 3-5 Ads per Ad group for testing purposes, and then look at the CTR to see which ads people are clicking on.

 

You can do this testing manually, but the ideal would be to allow the AdWords machine learning system choose the best ads to run based on performance.

 

Your average CPC is too high
If your average Cost Per Click is too high, you’ll spend more than is necessary to get quality traffic. You’ll usually have a high CPC if your ads are high in the listings. And in some cases being a little lower won’t affect the click volume and will reduce your cost per conversion.