Why Your PPC Marketing Strategy Isn’t Working 

 Last Updated May 16, 2023

By Zaid Ammari

Pay-per-click, also known as search engine marketing or paid search, has the power to help your business thrive. Relevant, well-targeted, and successful PPC campaigns through Google ads and appearing on search engines can help you gain brand awareness, generate traffic, and convert leads into paying customers — but only when it’s done right. 

If you’re not reaching your potential market share, it’s likely because you’re making easily preventable mistakes in your PPC campaign. This could eat up your pay-per-click budget and jeopardize the success of your PPC campaign. 

You may be using the right keywords, ad groups, settings, and content in your PPC advertising and search ads, but if you aren’t getting quality scores or decent click-through rates, you’ve yet to enjoy the full potential of PPC. Here are seven possible reasons behind your wasted PPC ad spend:

7 Possible Reasons Your PPC Marketing Strategy Isn’t Working

1. Your Budget Is Too Small

New to pay-per-click? You should know that you only get what you put in. If you set a too small budget, it won’t allow you to reach your audience.

But that’s not all. 

With a limited budget, you won’t be able to check the viability of your google ads before it gets shut down by Google. Unfortunately, this means you won’t be able to see whether your keywords, ad copy, and landing pages have done anything to help grow your business which can affect the performance of your campaign and lead to wasted effort.

So, increase your budget and use the right keywords to generate a healthy ROI.

2. You’re Using Your Homepage As Your Landing Page

Your call-to-actions should direct your users to specific landing pages, not your homepage. 

Many businesses use their home pages as landing pages, and that’s a huge mistake. This is because the homepage does not have information about the products and services that the prospect came for. This causes them to lose interest in your business. 

To avoid losing your prospects’ attention, use a relevant landing page that’s specifically linked to search intent. If you don’t have one, create a new landing page for every ad group. It will improve your conversion rate and will also give you higher rankings.  

Keyword planning

Source: Pexels

3. You’re Using the Wrong Keywords

You can use all the keywords that are relevant in your industry, but only a small number of them (12%) will lead to conversion rates and generate ROI. The 88% non-performing or less-performing keywords? They’ll make you lose 61% of your ad marketing budget and lower your quality score. To avoid that: 

  • Stop bidding on broad match or phrase match keywords. You’ll wind up competing with big brands that have established customers.

  • Eliminate budget-sucking keywords that don’t bring in traffic or lead to conversions. Stick to exact-match keywords for the most effective results. 

  • Use negative keywords to exclude specific words or phrases from your ad to avoid racking unwanted impressions and increase the likelihood of conversion. 

Choosing the correct match type will influence your click-through rates and increase conversion rates. For the strategy to work, avoid low-performing keywords, double your spending on high-value keywords, and put the 80/20 rule to good use. It will create a better user experience, improve your quality score, and ultimately increase your market share. 

4. Your Ad Copy Isn’t Compelling Enough 

The average attention span of humans is 8 seconds

Do you know what that means? 

You have a really short window to persuade your prospects to click on your ad. To get their attention, you’ll have to demonstrate that you can provide value in your copy. 

Our tip? Don’t oversell yourself. Grab your audience’s attention with engaging and compelling ad copy that presents them with a solution to their pain points. Use keywords and an appropriate CTA to convince them to click on the ad. 

Create different versions of the material and conduct A/B testing. It will help you determine which version has better impressions and a higher chance of increasing ROI. 

5. You Haven’t Optimized Your Ad Account

Did you know that you have to optimize your ad account to be more profitable? 

Most people don’t realize this, but pay-per-click campaigns are not a one-and-done deal. You must refer to metrics, conduct tests to evaluate data spending, use high-performance keywords, add negative keywords and tweak your ad settings and ad group structure. This can spell the difference between good and awesome conversion rates.

An organized account structure will allow you to gain more control over your bidding and redistribute your budget. This can help you get better click-through rates, increase product visibility, ad rank, and quality scores, and avoid wasted PPC ads spend.

Website review

Source: Pixabay

6. Your PPC Stopped Converting

Does your ad have an amazing click-through rate? That helps bring traffic to your business, but only if it leads to conversions.

If it doesn’t, then it’s not doing the work it’s supposed to.

This could be due to a number of reasons, such as:

  • Your website is hard to navigate. 

  • Your website loads slowly. 

  • You have not optimized your landing pages

  • Your ad copy is not compelling. 

  • You’re not using the right keywords. 

  • Your contact information — such as phone number or email address — isn’t updated. 

  • Your website isn’t mobile-responsive. 

  • You’ve changed your website but failed to update your Google Click ID (GClid)

To ensure these small mistakes don’t hinder your ad campaign, review your website and use the right URLs for landing pages. It will improve the customer experience and help you maximize conversions. 

7. You’re Not Using Ad Extensions

Is your ad failing to generate the number of impressions you want? Instead of paying more for ads, optimize them with extensions. 

Ad extensions can make you stand out on Google search engine results pages (SERPs) by putting the spotlight on your ad. They can expand your advert with extra information about your product or service, such as website links and contact details, improving visibility. They help the client get what they’re looking for and increase click-through rates and conversions — without paying a single cent more. 

Wrapping Up

Now that you’re familiar with the problems plaguing your PPC strategy, you can look at solutions to improve them. They’ll help you cost-effectively reach your audience, provide instant traffic, drive warm leads, help your SEO strategy, and generate better ROI. 

Zaid Ammari Headshot

About the author 

Zaid is a leading expert on data driven digital marketing; focusing on analytics and actionable insights from data. Founder of PPC Masterminds - he helps businesses build & run profitable data driven digital campaigns.

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