In an age where organic competition is tougher than ever, most people are moving past older strategies that focused solely on search engines for traffic. With the invention of social media, brands have found an ever-increasing pool of audience-members through which to connect, promote content and interact in meaningful ways. Unfortunately, social media is also seeing an increasing amount of competition coupled with in many cases a nerfing of effective organic reach. In short, paid advertising campaigns are increasingly becoming necessary in order to gain exposure. AdWords is a very valuable platform through which to do this, but it is easy to make mistakes. If you are using AdWords and your campaigns are falling short, then continue reading to find out about some common reasons why that may be the case.

Unqualified Leads Through Inappropriate Keywords

Perhaps the biggest reason why AdWords campaigns fail when using broad match is due to an improper pairing of keywords with content. Whether you just aren’t receiving enough clicks or whether they are unqualified leads, pinging to Google AdWords select keywords that do not match the content is a recipe for disaster. One way to determine how those unqualified leads are occurring is to use the search term report to see a list of all keywords that were searched before someone clicked. It is here that you’ll find a variety of keywords that may or may not match your content. Once you’ve isolated the keywords that are inappropriate, add them to your campaign as negative keywords to prevent your ads from being shown in these search results in the future.

Poor Timing

Many brands and niches appeal to audiences with specific characteristics and habits. Among these include the times and days in which they are most likely to search for information, products and services. For instance, brands that handle business to business needs would want ideally to target their ads during day-time office hours, while an indoor playground might prefer to target audiences on the weekends. Understanding how different times and days of the week can be relevant to ad performance is a key necessity for maximizing AdWords’ utility. In order to gain additional insight, inspect the analytics for organic traffic to your website and social media profiles – which hours of the day are people most active? This information can be duplicated to increase overall ad performance on Google.

Misleading Content

It can be tempting to subtly fluff or over-promote content via ad copy on AdWords and through other ad platforms, but there is a simple descriptor for this kind of behaviour: misleading. While engaging in such tactics might initially help increase the number of clicks that your ads are receiving, the end result will be one in which your campaigns accumulate vast numbers of unqualified leads. This results in wasted money, as you’ll be pinging to Google one thing and delivering to the audience another thing once they arrive on your site. Always be honest about what you’re delivering – even if it means fewer clicks, it will result in less waste and better-targeted audiences.