Last week I reviewed a Google Ads campaign for a cleaning company in Melbourne.
They’d been running ads themselves for a few months and they were ranking well from an SEO perspective, but the leads weren’t coming in.
The phone wasn’t ringing and they were starting to wonder if Google Ads even worked.
They reached out for a review so we could take a proper look under the hood.
And within a few minutes, I could see what the problems were.
Here are the the 3 mistakes that were burning their Google Ads budget:
1. Broad match keywords everywhere
Every campaign was using broad match keywords. Their ads were showing for competitor names and completely irrelevant searches.
Great for Google, not so great for your bank account…
How to fix: use exact match keywords, phrase match and maintain a negative keyword list so you’re maximising every click.
2. Sending all ad traffic to the homepage
Their homepage looked fine, but it wasn’t built to convert. SEO pages and PPC pages have different jobs. When you send paid traffic to a general web page, you lose people quickly.
How to fix: create a dedicated landing page that’s optimised for conversions for each ad and ad group.
3. Only one ad per ad group
With a single ad, Google has nothing to optimise. No testing. No improvement.
Just one message trying to do all the heavy lifting.
How to fix: create at least two ads per ad group so Google’s machines can test the different ads to optimise for clicks and conversions.
These three mistakes alone can drain thousands of dollars.
It is also why so many businesses end up saying “Google Ads doesn’t work for us”. In fact, 45 percent of businesses fail with Google Ads in the first 90 days.
The good news is that these issues are easy to find and easy to fix.
Here’s how to spot the same issues in your Google Ads campaigns:
- Look at your keywords. Are you using broad match?
- Review your search terms. Are you paying for irrelevant clicks?
- Check your landing pages. Are your ads going to SEO pages or proper PPC landing pages?
- Open your ad groups. Do you have at least two ads in each?
If any of these raise a red flag, you already know why your results are flat.
If you’re spending more than $1,000 per month on Google ads and you’re not getting the results you’re expecting, don’t keep guessing.
Book a free Google Ads review with me and I’ll walk you through exactly what’s working, what’s holding you back, and what to change to get real results.
Book a Google Ads review call here: http://sgd.com.au/call/
