Pitfalls in Google Ads Lead Generation – A Long and Hazardous List!
Google Ads may be the best way to reach new prospects for your business in the moment they are searching for the products or services you offer. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to use.
There are countless ways to screw up your targeting, waste ad spend, miss opportunity, and watch your account fall off a cliff.
This post summarizes some of the highest impact Google Ads lead generation pitfalls that do the most harm. Which of these are hurting your business? What can you do today to get things back on track?
Pitfalls in Prospect Targeting
Reaching your ideal prospects is what it’s all about. These pitfalls doom your efforts before they’ve even begun.
Failing to track conversions correctly
If you are not accurately tracking important website visitor actions as “Conversions”, then how can you hope to optimize lead generation campaigns or measure their success? This is job #1 before spending any money on ads.
Failing to track “qualified leads”
For most businesses, some leads will be far more qualified than others. Do you know which are which, and can you see them in your Google Ads data? Learn why it is vital for most businesses to track qualified leads in Google Ads.
Using campaign types that don’t fit your business objectives
If your goal is high-quality lead generation, then Search campaigns are still your go-to vehicle. Remarketing campaigns usually help, too. But Display and PerformanceMax campaigns spray ads broadly while giving too little control, often yielding low-quality and spam leads.
Failing to use ad group themes correctly
It’s tricky with Google’s lax keyword matching, but it is essential to group keywords by theme in your Search campaigns. Without this structure, you cannot tailor ad copy to search queries or bring prospects to the most appropriate landing page for their interests.
Failing to use negative keywords correctly
Using robust lists of negative keywords at the account, campaign and ad group levels is essential. Without them, you can’t eliminate much of the wasted ad spend or properly funnel user queries to the most relevant campaigns and ad groups.
Showing ads for nonrelevant search queries
Sort your Search Terms report by cost and impressions to see just how much effort and money your campaigns are wasting on low-relevance or non-relevant search queries. Without taking steps to identify and eliminate such queries, you will continue to waste your ad dollars.
Showing ads in poor-performing locations
If certain countries, states, cities or zip codes are significantly underperforming, why are you still targeting them? Doing so takes away budget from better targeting and brings down your overall account performance.
Showing ads on poor-performing devices
When serious people do serious searches for high-cost services or products, they usually still use desktop or laptop computers. Check your own data to confirm. If you don’t have money to spend on early prospect research, then why are you showing ads on mobile?
Showing ads at poor-performing times of the day or week
Do you answer phones only during business hours? Can you respond quickly to forms only during business hours? Do your serious prospects search for help mainly during business hours? If so, then why are you advertising 24/7?
Showing ads to poor-performing demographics and audiences
Google Ads doesn’t give you nearly the same insights into users’ personal characterists that are available on social media platforms, but it gives some. Does it really make sense to spend money showing your ads to all ages, all income levels, or all types of audiences?
Pitfalls in Budget & Bid Management
Every advertiser has budget limits and ROI needs. If budgets and bids are not carefully managed in harmony, then you will waste money, or miss opportunity, or both.
Using the wrong type of bidding
Depending on the conversions you are tracking, the data you have about them, and your conversion volume, only one Google Ads bidding option will be your best choice. Others could be catastrophic. Learn which Google Ads bid strategy is right for your situation.
Losing too many impressions due to budget
This means either missed opportunity or poor efficiency. You need to raise your budgets in order to maximize opportunity. Or you need to intelligently restrict your targeting so that you use your limited budget to show ads to your best prospects, improving your conversion performance.
Losing too many impressions due to ad rank
Sometimes you need to achieve tight CPA or ROI targets within your competitive space, and that means you can’t bid aggressively. But losing ad impressions due to ad rank means you’re not getting your ads in front of your best prospects.
Too low of a budget for your desired targeting
Insufficient budget can cause leads to come in too slowly for your business. It also means that it could take a long time to accumulate enough data to learn what is and isn’t working within the account. How much time do you have to wait to learn?
Too high of a budget for your desired targeting
On the flip side, being too aggressive with spending can push an account past the point of diminishing returns. After that point, each incremental conversion is far more costly than earlier ones and in excess of your objectives. You gain volume but lose profitability.
Pitfalls in Ad Messaging
Ads are of course the heart of “Google Ads”. If yours aren’t presenting your business offer in the clearest and most compelling fashion, then what hope do you have of generating good leads?
Ad messaging that doesn’t resonate powerfully with your target prospects
What is it that your prospects need to believe in order to click your ad and become a good lead? Are your ads and landing pages (see below) helping to develop these beliefs? If not, how can you expect to get quality leads?
Ad messaging that doesn’t differentiate your offering
Google Ads searchers are comparison shopping. Are you proud of how your ads look alongside your competitors’ ads? Will your ideal prospects understand what makes your offer special, and therefore why they should click your ad and not others?
Ad messaging that doesn’t give a compelling reason to click
Maybe your ad is interesting to your ideal prospects. But did you forget to give them a reason to click it? Did you tell them clearly what action they should take and how it will directly and tangibly benefit them? If not, they will move on to an ad that does.
Failing to tailor ads per ad group
See the earlier pitfall of “failing to use ad group themes correctly”. To maximize conversions you must tailor each ad to resonate specifically with each type of prospect. Else you end up preaching your wonderful message to the wrong choir.
Pitfalls in Account Management
The tasks you perform on a daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly basis are what lead to your account’s success or failure.
Failing to set clear objectives and KPIs
Vague ideas about lowering CPCs or driving more website traffic will not bring lead generation success. Every account must have clear conversion-based objectives together with meaningful KPIs so that performance can be both measured and improved over time. Do you know yours?
Failing to consider statistical significance
It’s easy and dangerous to read too much into small data sets. Do you want long-term performance growth with more leads and better leads? You must properly analyze data in order to make high-confidence account optimizations.
Making account changes too frequently
It’s easy to fall into the “busy work” trap of feeling that you must be doing something in the account all the time. But you need to allow sufficient time to run tests and aggregate statistically significant data. Else you fail to improve performance or worse, harm it.
Making account changes too infrequently or inconsistently
Do you follow an appropriate schedule for reviewing search queries and updating keywords? For refining targeting by geography, device, ad schedule, demographic and audience? For responding to competive changes? For reviewing ongoing experiments? For analyzing long-term trends (6-month, 12-month) where you have more data available for segmentation? If not, then you are missing out on regular, invaluable long-term account optimizations.
Auto-applying Google’s recommendations
Not surprisingly, most Google Ads “recommendations” will increase your ad impressions, clicks and spend. But your business objectives are about qualified leads, revenue and profit. Implementing Google’s recommendations with little or no thought will often hurt those goals.
Failing to plan & run proper experiments
Many types of account changes (bidding, ads, audiences…) require proper A/B split testing, and the patience to wait for statistically significant results, in order to determine whether a change is helpful or harmful. Are you doing this right?
Failing to confirm the impact of changes
Changes don’t always have the expected results, and of course mistakes can be made. Failure to confirm good results from account changes is a recipe for unwelcome surprises, such as skyrocketing ad spend or plummeting conversions.
Failing to properly leverage automation and AI
Google Ads is too complex to do everything manually. There are key places where leveraging automation and AI is extremely valuable and places where it can be disastrous. Learn when, and when NOT, to use AI for Google Ads lead generation.
Failing to stay on top of your competitors
Your savvy competitors are constantly modifying their ad campaigns to try to improve their own performance. This affects your ad performance. Are you responding appropriately to big competitive moves, adjusting your bidding and ad messaging when needed?
Pitfalls in Landing Pages
The experience you give Google Ads visitors when they arrive to your website is half the battle. Poor landing pages mean poor conversion rates and poor leads for your sales team.
Landing pages that don’t align with ads
Do your landing pages follow up on the promises of your ads? If not, visitors will be at best confused and at worst offended that you’ve wasted their time. Either way, you will lose them as they click away in search of more helpful websites.
Landing pages that are old-style “squeeze” pages
A squeeze page lacks navigation and other info usually available on web pages. Google promises to bring it users to websites that are transparent and easy to navigate. Your advertising can be penalized if your landing pages don’t meet these standards.
Landing pages that don’t make the next step and benefits clear
The effort and expense of getting good prosects to your website is wasted if your landing page doesn’t turn enough of them into leads. To do this the landing page must provide a clear next step and highly compelling reasons for a prospect to take it.
Forms that don’t help discern “qualified leads”
A form should include questions that help you qualify prospects. Even better, it should assist you in assigning prospect value for use in your CRM and Google Ads campaigns. Failing to do this is a big missed opportunity to improve lead quality.
Summary
Your business lead generation is too important to make damaging mistakes like these. Use this post as a checklist to find and fix critical errors that are holding back your Google Ads success.
Need help? See if Prometheus PPC might be right for your business.
Got other critical pitfalls not on our list? Leave them in the comments below!
