Google Ads is one of the most effective ways to drive high-quality targeted traffic to a website, so if that is the case, why do so many businesses fail to make it work for them? Some of the more basic reasons for this can be attributed to factors like insufficient budget or trying to operate within a highly saturated market.

There are other reasons which can cause a campaign to fail that are more attributable to the specific elements of how Google Ads work. We are going to look at three of the most important because if you get one or more of these wrong, your Google Ads campaign is almost certain to fail.

Poorly Designed Landing Page

This is certainly one of the most common reasons for a Google Ads campaign to fail. Despite good keyword research, excellently written ads, and clever bidding, if, when the traffic these generate are sent to a landing page that won’t convert, your efforts, and your ad budget, are simply wasted.

We’d have to write a dozen pages to properly explain what it takes to make a good landing page, but some of the basics include relevant content, a clear call to action, attractive images, and trust signals. If web design isn’t your thing then outsource to a website development company that not only can redesign your landing page, but they can also make it convert too.

Your Ad has A Poor ‘Quality Score’

One of the determining factors as to how high your Google Ads are placed is Quality Score. For your reference, the other is how much you bid. Quality Score is a value that Google assigns to your ad based on a few key elements. These elements include the relevance of your keywords, the quality of the ad copy, and the user experience when they click through to your landing page.

Hopefully, you will have already realised that Quality Score is extremely important to the success of your Google Ads campaign as it relies on elements both on Google (your ad), and your website (landing page). While your bid amounts may be down to your budget, and in a sense fixed, the factors that can impact your quality score can all be worked upon and improved.

More refined keyword research will improve their relevance, better ad copy will increase your click-through rate, and a better designed landing page will increase conversions. Google can see all of three of these happening which leads to them increasing your Quality Score, and the ranking of your ads.

Your Ads Are Irrelevant

What you are about to read, we must have written a thousand times or more, but we will do it again. One of Google’s number one priorities for those who use their search engine is to provide them with results that are as relevant as possible to what they were searching for. This applies as much to the paid search results via Google Ads, as it does to their organic rankings.

With this in mind, Google want every Google Ad that appears to be as closely aligned to the search term used, so the ad headline and ad copy should be highly relevant to the keywords it is targeting. If it doesn’t you will struggle to get clicks, and when Google identifies this, your ads will not be displayed anywhere near as highly or as often as you’d like.

Alternatively, if you are paying for impressions rather than clicks, you will literally be throwing money away because, when your ad appears, no one is clicking it due to it being irrelevant.

If your Google Ad campaign is failing, due to the reasons we have highlighted, or for reasons you are unsure of, one of the ways to solve this is to get a professional digital marketing professional to help. They can assess your Google Ads campaign, make the necessary improvements, and in doing so, turn a failing campaign, into a profitable one.