My paid advertising isn’t working…
Hey small business owners – we see you! And we hear this A LOT.
Paid advertising can be a powerful tool to grow your business, but when it doesn’t deliver the results you expect, we get that it can be frustrating and confusing.
So where to from here? Let’s explore why this might happen and what you can do to turn things around.
1. Understand Your Audience and Setup
One of the most common issues with underperforming ads is targeting the wrong audience.
Here’s a few things you need to do with any ad you launch:
- Review your campaign’s demographics, interests, and behaviours – you know your customer best. Too many detailed audiences just adds unnecessary confusion. Keep it to 1-3 interest matches at a max!
- Are you reaching the people who are most likely to engage with your product or service?
- Tools like Facebook Audience Insights or Google Ads Audience Manager are a great place to start.
- Check your conversion pixels. We see so many organisations not using this, which causes a break in the machine learning process
- For Google, we commonly see people using broader keywords without ensuring they are constantly adding negative keywords to ensure the search terms people are searching and clicking on are relevant.
2. Check Your Ad Creative
Is there an offer or an exciting call to action that is going to make your customer STOP and read more? Does the first sentence HOOK your audience.
If you were a customer, would you stop and click through your ad (don’t lie to yourself)? Poor visuals or bland copy in your ad can result in low engagement. Use high-quality images or videos and test different messaging to see what resonates. Split testing (A/B testing) is a great way to determine which creative elements work best.
3. Check Your Landing Page Experience
The website experience you provide a user is so important. Even the best ad won’t perform if the landing page isn’t optimised or isn’t giving clear direction with what you want the user to do. A few things to ask yourself – is the page mobile-friendly, does it load quickly, and does it take you to what your ad is talking about? Make sure it’s also easy to navigate so the people you’re trying to reach aren’t leaving the page too soon.
4. Set Realistic Expectations
It’s important to remember that paid advertising often takes time to gain results that you want. Campaigns need a few weeks to gather data and allow algorithms to optimise for better performance. Patience is key during this learning phase.
Our rule of thumb? Give your ad 2 weeks (on Meta) and 4 weeks (on Google) to complete its learning phase before you jump in and make any adjustments.
5. Review Your Budget and Bidding Strategy
Underfunded campaigns may struggle to gain traction. Check if your budget is adequate – Meta and Google are pretty good at sharing this data. Similarly, evaluate your bidding strategy – are you prioritising conversions, impressions, or clicks? Aligning your budget with the desired outcome is critical. And in our experience, campaigns that aren’t optimised for conversions or leads are a waste of time.
6. Analyse Campaign Metrics
This is probably our favourite point to make with our clients – reporting! Dive into key metrics like click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, and cost per clicks (CPC). These numbers tell a story about how well your campaign is doing and if there’s room for improvement.
For example, a low CTR might mean your ad creative needs work because there’s not too many people clicking through your link, while a high CPC could indicate overly competitive keywords.
On Meta, we like to see our CTR greater than 1% with a CPC of $2 or less. On Google, we want our CTR greater than 3% the CPC? Well, that depends on the vertical.
Our advice? When your paid advertising feels ineffective, don’t panic.
Take a step back, analyse your data, and refine your approach.
Results will take time – they won’t happen overnight – but by making informed tweaks you’ll hopefully begin to see some pretty cool gains.
