7 Reasons Your AdWords Campaigns are Not Profitable

Google AdWords is the most popular search-advertising platform. It lets you advertise your website and business on Google and its partners’ search engines. These days, almost every business relies on digital marketing and uses AdWords to bring in more business from Google Search.

The problem is, few are happy with their return on investment and many users complain their AdWords campaigns are not profitable.

In this post, I am going to highlight the common reasons why you are not getting the kind of profit you are expecting from AdWords.

1. Not Having a Proper Plan before Launching
One of the main reasons why AdWords campaigns fail is because there is a lack of planning. First of all, you have to define your campaign goals like selling your products, getting online leads, or increasing your brand awareness.

After defining your goals, put together a budget plan and ask yourself how much you are willing to spend in a day or month. How many clicks would you like to get? How many conversions do you want? Come up with an ideal acceptable cost per click and cost per conversion and then move ahead with setting up your campaigns.

2. Not Targeting the Right Keywords
Another reason for a failed PPC campaign is failure to target the right keywords. You have to do keyword research the proper way and choose the keywords you are going to target very carefully. Don’t just add any keywords that AdWords suggested into your campaign.

Before you choose a keyword, look at its average searches and suggested bid. If you have a small budget, do not go with high CPC keywords, as they will cause you to run out of budget quickly. The best thing to ask yourself is how useful a certain keyword actually is for your business.

For example, here are three keywords related to car insurance:
• Car Insurance
• Compare Car Insurance
• Car Insurance Quote

If you are a car insurance company, all 3 keywords would look relevant to you. But think about which one will bring in the most conversions.

The third keyword seems to be a good keyword that can bring in conversions. The first one is too general. Although the second one looks good, the user who performs this search might just be doing a simple comparison between different companies and has not yet decided on purchasing. This means there is less of a chance of conversion.

3. Your Ads are Not Well-Written
Your ads play a very important role on your campaign performance. A well-written ad can help you get more clicks and conversions, but a bad ad can simply kill your campaign performance.

Don’t just write down a generic ad and use it for all your keywords and adgroups. You have to make sure that your ads look relevant to the user and gives answers based on the keywords that the users searched for.

For example, when I searched for Google Advertising, I found these two highly irrelevant ads.
The headline of the first ad highlighted below is unbelievable. Have you ever seen an ad before that says “Ad”?

This is something that I would call a bad ad. The last ad highlighted below is also totally irrelevant because the user who searches for Google Advertising is not really looking for SEO solutions.

You can get some tips from this Google guide.It highlights some great tips on how to write a successful ad.

4. Not Having an Optimized Landing Page
Another big mistake a new advertiser can make is not investing on developing a proper landing page that has power to bring in conversions. They think that bringing traffic into their home page or other related pages is enough but in reality, PPC doesn’t work that way.

Landing pages are not considered as part of your website pages. They are designed to convert users from your specific marketing campaigns.

You can see good landing page examples at http://thelandingpagecourse.com/landing-page-design-examples-critiques/.
One example of a bad landing page is http://doctorhairtransplant.com/.Doesn’t that look like a 90’s website?

You also have to make sure that your website is responsive and can be properly viewed from different devices. These days, people use different devices such as computers, tablets or mobile phones to access the internet. If they can’t view your website on their device properly, then they would simply leave it.

5. Low Quality Score
Quality Score is a very important factor in PPC. It helps you reduce your cost per click and tells you how effective your campaign is. If you have low quality score of around 1 or 2 for a lot of keywords, then your ads will show up less. There is also a chance that you will be charged double compared to others who are advertising for the same keywords but have good quality scores.

Quality Score is influenced by the quality of your ad and the landing pages for the keywords you use. Click-through rates also play an important role. The higher the click-through-rate is, the more relevant the ad is to the users. Ultimately, this results in a higher quality score.

The way you group your keywords into different ad groups is also important because the relevance of each keyword to its adgroup matters.

Let me explain the right way to Group keywords

Keywords: Car Accident Lawyer, Car Accident Attorney, Car Accident Lawsuit, Bus Accident Attorney, Motorcycle Accident Lawsuit, Motorcycle Accident Attorney, Bus Accident Lawyer

Now one bad way to group them would be creating a single ad group and then adding them all into it. On the other hand, a good way to group them is as in the example below:
Ad Group 1: Car Accident Lawyer, Car Accident Attorney, Car Accident Lawsuit

Ad Group 2: Bus Accident Attorney, Bus Accident Lawyer

Ad Group 3: Motorcycle Accident Lawsuit, Motorcycle Accident Attorney
Group them into 3 different ad groups based on their theme and then write relevant ads for each adgroup. That’s the best way to improve the quality score of your keywords.

6. Not bidding Enough to be in the Top Positions or the First Page:
Another reason why your PPC campaigns are not bringing in profits is because you are not bidding enough to be on the first page or on the top positions. A lot of people fail to do this because they are trying to save money.

But AdWords is not a free advertising tool and you have to pay to get results. Although you control how much you are willing to pay, you also have to consider the competition.

For example, if the average cost per click for a very competitive keyword to be on first page is between $10 and $15, then you cannot set a $5 bid for your keyword. You have to bid more to get results.
AdWords can be expensive, but believe me; you can get better ROI compared to other marketing channels if you spend wisely.

7. Not Giving Your Campaigns Enough Time to Perform:
This is the biggest mistake that new advertisers make. No matter what business you are in, you cannot expect overnight success. It is better to give your campaigns enough time to perform. Don’t give up too quickly. Some people run their campaigns for a couple of days or a week and then they say, “Oh, it costs too much. Let’s put it on pause.”

If you are targeting the right keywords and have great ads and landing pages, then there is nothing to worry about. Just wait. Sometimes, things take time to perform. I have worked on accounts that had no conversions their first month, but after that, the campaign started performing. At the start, the cost per conversion was high. But we were able to slowly bring it down after a couple of months.

I hope you enjoyed reading this post. Feel free to ask any questions you may have by leaving a comment below.

This post is written by David Chapman, Director of Sales and Marketing at Webrageous Studios, a PPC Management Firm based out of Reno, Nevada. His expertise in PPC comes from managing PPC accounts with monthly budgets in the range of $30,000 – $100,000 with a focus on mobile marketing.

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