4 Biggest Reasons Why Most Google AdWords Campaigns Fail

We all know the amazing potential of Google AdWords.

Search engine optimisation and ranking your web pages on the top three Google positions is almost always a long process.

Until you get there for the keywords that are most important for your business, it is an excellent idea to use Google AdWords and buy those top search engine positions.

For as long as you have a good funnel and product set-up in place, Google AdWords is likely to be profitable for you.

However, despite all its amazingness, several Google AdWords campaign still fail.

Why?

Disruptive Advertising recently audited over 2,000 AdWords accounts and highlighted four biggest reasons why most Google AdWords campaigns fail.

In this blog post, we list those four reasons and share some tips what you can do to avoid the same fate.

Reason #1: Incomplete Conversion Tracking

The biggest reason that Disruptive Advertising revealed after their audit was incomplete conversion tracking.

According to the report, 57.7% of Google AdWords campaigns do not have any sort of conversion tracking. Furthermore, nearly half have poor and half-baked conversion tracking setups — which, eventually, do not accurately record conversions.

The biggest reason why so many Google AdWords campaigns fail is because businesses and digital marketers have no way to track how many actual conversions they are getting in the first place.

Reason #2: Poor Conversion Rates

The second biggest reason so many Google AdWords campaigns fail, is because of poor conversion rates. According to Distruptive’s report, the median conversion rate across all the 2,000 AdWords accounts was just 2.18%.

This can be attributed to several reasons:

• Poor selection of keywords
• Ineffective ad copies
• Not enough A/B testing
• Poor landing page design

Apart from all these common reasons, poor conversion rates can be also attributed to, again, incomplete conversion tracking.

If you have no way of knowing exactly how many conversions you are getting — and whether or not your sales funnel is leaking — you will always have a poor conversion rate.

This point is also proven by the fact that although the media conversion rate — as mentioned earlier — was just 2.18%, the average conversion rate for accounts with accurate tracking setups was at least 20%.

That’s a massive difference!

Reason #3: Ad Spend Inefficiency

The third biggest reason why most AdWords campaign fail is because some accounts spend too much amount on search terms that are not converting.

This can be once again attributed to a poor conversion tracking system.

If you do not know exactly which keywords are contributing to your sales and conversions, you can’t weed out the keywords and search terms that are not performing well.

Thankfully, this is one of those issues that can be easily resolved once you install an effective conversion tracking system. Google AdWords tells you the search terms that people are using to find your ads. You can then create more such ads and closely monitor the conversion rates each of those ad groups and specific ads get.

Reason #4: Wasted Ad Spend

This is hardly surprising, isn’t it?

According to Disruptive Advertising, approximately 61% of ad spend was completely wasted.

It’s understandable. When you do not know which keywords, ads groups, and ads are bringing in the conversions, you have no effective way to optimise your campaigns and reduce ad spend wastage.

As a result, you will spend quite a bit of money on wasted ads that could be easily avoided.

If you could identify the keywords that are not directly contributing to conversions, leads, and sales, you can stop spending ads budget on those keywords.

Gradually, you keep filtering more and more keywords. In the end, you are only left with high-performing keywords and ads that are racking up conversions at the lowest possible cost.

What’s the Solution?

As you can see, most of these issues relate to inefficient conversion tracking.

If you install a multi-channel attribution model that is data-driven, you will be able to manage and optimise your Google AdWords campaigns much more efficiently.

On the other hand, without a proper attribution system, you will continue wasting ad spend and investing money on ads that are not giving you anything in return.

Research how to set this up in Google Analytics and starting improving your AdWords campaign today!