Paid Ads Not Performing Its Time to Rethink Your Strategy

If your paid ads aren’t getting the results you want, you might as well set your money on fire.

That might sound harsh, but it’s true. Continuing to pay for clicks that aren’t going anywhere – or spending time creating ads that nobody’s clicking on – is a waste of time and money.

Your audience is waiting – but they’ll find someone else if they can’t find you.

Not sure how to turn those paid ads into the lead generators you want them to be? Never fear, we’re here to help. We’re about tell you how to revamp your strategy and start turning clicks into profits.

Strategy? What’s That?

Are you mistaking tactics for strategy? A lot of people do – so let’s start by defining strategy.

A strategy is the road you take to achieve a goal. It’s not specific. It’s broad and always has its eyes on the prize.

For example, if you want to increase your sales by 50% with PPC advertising, that’s a strategy. Choosing new keywords to target? That’s a tactic – one step of many that you use to achieve your goal.

You must know what you want to accomplish with your PPC campaigns before you get started… because knowing helps you map out the road ahead of you.

Moving the Goalposts

Before you get excited and start reworking your ads, take a step back. You may have defined a goal – but is it achievable?

Increasing your sales by a certain percent – or generating a chosen number of leads – might be very achievable. Or it might not. If your current campaign is generating ten leads a week, you might not be able to get to a thousand a week in one campaign.

Be realistic. Evaluate your current position and pick a goal that you can reach. It might be a challenge, but it must be within the realm of possibility to be useful.

Find the Gaps

You’re already running PPC ads… that aren’t working… but do you know why they aren’t? That’s the next step – and proceeding beyond this point without identifying those gaps is a mistake.

Maybe your ads aren’t worded persuasively enough. Maybe you’re targeting the wrong keywords – or you haven’t researched your competition – or you’re not retargeting properly.

Whatever they are, those gaps exist. You can’t revamp your strategy if you don’t acknowledge them.

For many companies and entrepreneurs, that means going back to the drawing board:

• Re-doing (or doing for the first time) keyword research
• Identifying competitors (and the keywords they use)
• Evaluating the wording and images in your ads
• Looking at the rest of your sales funnel and testing it for weaknesses
• Reworking your retargeting strategy

That’s a lot – but it’s going to be time well spent. You can’t hope to get better results from your PPC campaigns if you’re not willing to get a little dirty in the process.

Now, let’s look at three things you can do to ramp up the clicks you get from your campaigns – and the profits your business earns.

Tip #1: Double Up on Your Keywords

This first tip is one you can you use if you already have a high SERP placement, and it can help you to dominate the search results if you do it properly.

Let’s say you have a page – or a piece of content – that’s already ranked near the top on Google. That’s great – but you can double down and grab even more PPC traffic for yourself. Here’s how.

• Make note of the pages or content with the highest SERP rankings – and the keywords they’re ranking for
• Create compelling PPC ads that use the same keywords

Now, your page will appear near the top of the SERP – as it always did. However, you’ll also have the advantage of having your ad appear at the top of the page too.

That’s a one-two punch that can make your company and content stand out and give you a distinct advantage over your competitors.

Tip #2: Branch Out and Run Gmail Ads

 Gmail ads might not be in your marketing mix right now – but they should be. Why? Check out this statistic:

Gmail has 1 billion active monthly users as of 2016!

That number’s no joke – and attention must be paid.

Gmail ads are affordable and quick to set up – and there are a couple of great ways you can target your competitors’ customers. For example:

1. You can target keywords used in emails – and that means you can focus on keywords used by your competitors. Google is ending the practice of mining emails for keywords at the end of the year, but for the next few months you can take advantage of their current targeting methods.
2. Another tactic to try is adding your competitors’ URLs to your targeted keywords. This is a sneaky way to reach their customers. However, you do need to keep in mind that Gmail will treat the URL you add as a keyword.

Gmail ads allow you to reach a huge audience in return for a relatively low expenditure – and that will ensure that every click counts.