Ads Not Converting? How to Diagnose and Fix Failing Accounts

Struggling with Google Ads that just won’t convert? 

In this episode of Google Ads Unleashed, host Jeremy breaks down exactly how to diagnose a failing account and pinpoint where things are going wrong. From search terms and CTR to CPCs, add-to-cart rates, checkout issues, and even shipping, he shows you how to spot the weak link in your funnel and fix it. 

This episode takes you step-by-step through real examples so you can troubleshoot your campaigns with confidence.

Get your free 30 minute strategy session with Jeremy here: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/

Scale your store with 1:1 coaching: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/1-2-1-coaching

Transcript

Hello and welcome back to Google Ads unleashed. Guys. Hope everyone is doing fabulously this fine Monday. And today I want to talk about something that I think I've covered a few times, but there's no number of times I can't kind of cover this enough, and that is how to spot what is wrong when an ad account is failing. So last Monday, I was on a training call, okay, do this every Monday. I've got like a little group coaching going on on Monday evenings, and there's a long time person on there who is clearly very bright, but they are what I would call a person I don't know, the Evergreen theorist who tries to media buy himself out of the problem, right? I see this too often. There are people who run ads and then they say, oh, you know what? The ads aren't working. It's I'm clearly doing something wrong. There must be a magic bullet. I must be doing something wrong. And the reality is, is that this is simply not the case, right? There's so much more than just the ad account, and arguably, Google is becoming easier and easier, right? So more often than not, it is actually what happens beyond the click that might be the problem, and maybe there is something wrong on platform right? Another example, a client of ours was running an identical setup in Jeremy and Austria, and the Austrian ads weren't working. And this was actually the more where it became clearer than ever we had an absolutely identical setup for Austria. We had to, because it's a separate website to Germany, absolutely identical, and naturally Germany would perform the better because it has more volume, right, so more data to play with. But what had happened was that Austria simply wasn't performing well, and we couldn't explain why. And it turned out, is clearly an onside issue that was driving that difference in performance. Okay, so what I'm trying to get to is to understand, I want you to strategically learn and understand where to look, to see to spot growth opportunities, and to also understand where an ad account is going wrong. Let's dive right in. So I always like to think of the funnel right, the classic advertising for everyone knows the funnel right, sort of awareness, consideration, conversion, blah, blah, blah. But in theory, every single person, whether it's in that linear progression or not, that's, of course, up for debate, will always go through the following steps when they buy or come via Google ad, first of all, they search for something, right the search term, and what they search is triggering your ad, whether it's shopping ads, whether it's a search ad, regardless, right? That is the first step of this progression of the funnel. The second step is that they click on your ad, right? So they interact with the ad. So that is, of course, the next Otherwise, they wouldn't get onto the onto the website that click costs something. That's your cost per click, right? So how much do you spend of gaining this person onto your website? So CPC, so that's kind of the next step in the funnel. So search, interaction with AD, cost of AD. Then the next step, traditionally with E commerce, is Add to Cart rate. So people usually land on a product or collection page and then head to the product that they want to buy and add something to the cart. How high is that? Then they go to the of course, to the basket or checkout, right? So that's your checkout reach rate, and they end up buying. That is the natural progression. Someone purchasing something. They think of they got a need or whatever. They search for something, what they want, they interact with an ad. It costs something. Then they add to cart, they go to the checkout and buy. It's really as simple as that, and I feel a lot of people are completely over complicating it, because in order to run successful ads, or in order to scale, all of these have to be aligned people are. There has to be people searching for your stuff right? There has to be the right search terms that you're attracting. You have to have good ads that people interact with. You have to have reasonable click costs. You have to have an attractive office so people want to add it to the cart. You want to have a good sort of user experience so people reach the checkout and want it. It, then you have to have a good checkout for people to for instance, reasonable shipping prices for people to actually convert. And the issue that I find very often is people are stuck with scaling when one of these issues are not ideal, okay, what do I mean by that? For instance, if you have really high click costs, well, then your conversion rate has to kind of compensate for the high click costs, right? So if something is working kind of but not really actually going that great or not scalable, it's because there's always one issue in that chain of events that another thing has to compensate for. There's not enough search volume. Well you cannot then you have to stand out more, and you can't scale right? Because that already sort of nips everything in the bud. If you have terrible interactions with with your ad right, then you need to write better ads. Even if you're reaching the right audience, then you have to be better than your competitors. In order to scale. If you have a high CPC, then you need to fix your website or your offer, or you need to lower your bids, or something like you have to compensate with something if one of the other measures don't work, right? Of course, another part that plays in this is AOV, right and your margins, which is, of course, then sort of after, after the fact, but we're talking about things that can actually fix in our marketing, right? You can't fix an AOV with marketing. You can, of course, do nudges and to change your pricing, etc, but de facto, that's, well, it's price market, and it is marketing to a certain degree, but let's throw that in the mixer as well. Why not? If you have a poor AOV needs to be compensated by a good conversion rate or by low click costs, right? If you have everything is okay and great, but you have terrible margins that then you need, ideally, low click costs as well. So there's always something that needs to compensate for it, right? And when you think of it this way, it makes it really easy to identify everything that's wrong step by step. And I would encourage you, when your ads are failing to have a look at all of those things consecutively. So let's have a look at search terms first. So if your ads are failing out of nowhere, or if you're stuck, check first, are you targeting the right search terms? Little example, one of our clients three weeks ago had to restart their ad account because the old ad account, unfortunately couldn't be verified. Google was just being really weird and not didn't accept his verification documents, so we had to move to a new ad account. He had changed, like his business structure, something like that, and Google wouldn't have any of it, and it wasn't working after the transition. That's quite common, by the way, but the first thing I looked is, are we targeting the wrong stuff? Right? We weren't before. Who sells a certain product, there's one search term for it. There's no weird way people search for it. But are we targeting the wrong search terms that can already indicate that, if that is the case, that there's something wrong with account settings. So then you know what you need to look into your account settings. Maybe is are not working properly. Your conversion tracking maybe is, isn't accurate. So you like generating interest in Google for nonsense conversions. Let's say, for instance, you count in encounter page views as conversions. Well, then Google will encourage, of course, the search terms that generate the most page views are not exactly purchases, right? And then, with that, you're targeting the wrong stuff. So that is how you can already diagnose if there's something really wrong at the beginning in the settings and the targeting of your campaigns and your ad account that encompasses campaign settings, conversion tracking and first party data, right? You can also check in this stage if there's simply not enough search volume, right? So if your ads are failing, and you don't know why, and you realize that no one is searching the right sort of searches, you are in trouble.
Okay, then the next step that I always look at is my interaction with ads. So typically this, I know this is totally generalization, right? But typically with sort of shopping ads, I would argue anything below a 1% click the rate, there's something seriously wrong with the ads or the competitors are too strong. So with search, I usually put a step. Ends on the match type, of course, as well between five and 10% it should be. If it's below that, there's something wrong with the ads. Okay? So that is where you then have a look into, for instance, are there new competitors who've come in, right? If they have, is their ad better? Is their offer stronger? Etc, etc. So you just have a look at the quality of of your ads in E commerce, typically it also means the quality of your product feed, right? And there's six things you can look at. So for instance, if the click through rate is low, so you target the right search terms, but you click through rates low, well then you have a look in the auction and have a look. Why is no one clicking on mine out of those 567, 10 search results that come in the shopping ads? Well, maybe it's because all of the products look the same exact for instance, this client was a reseller of a certain product, and as it turns out, every competitor used the exact same picture that they were provided from the manufacturer? Well, of course, no one's going to click on your shit, right? Because every fucking picture looks the same. So of course, the clicks were just like randomly going on something, without it even being a competition, right? So that's a good indicator your product title is. The next thing that you can look at, you know, is, is the product title? For instance, does it mention things that you might want to have stand out? So typically, I wouldn't like over engineer product titles. I've done plenty of episodes on that. Just describe the product target the right search terms with it right also another reason why your search terms might not be the right ones. But for instance, what you'll have to understand what sort of pressures someone faces and what might be interesting to them. Little example, a couple of years ago, we had a client who sold a camera for pets, you know, something like a like a ring camera, but for at home, so you could watch you as a pet cam, right? So you could watch your pet. Now, all of those pet cams have one sort of thing in common, or many of them, is that it comes with a software subscription, which people hate. They don't want to pay another five quid a month for a shitty subscription when they want just a pet cam with an app that works. So we put that in the product title, and boom, it increased click through rate. So we because they sold a pet cam that didn't come with a subscription, so that huge increase, increased click through rates, lowered CPCs, fixed the competition issue, although they weren't necessarily of, you know, the best product, because the best ones, of course, are, you know, like the Furbo or something like that, right? In terms of the pet cam world. So, yeah, product title can be a differentiating factor, right? The next thing is price. If you're twice as expensive as everyone else, then of course, you need to fix that, right? You need to be better. That's just a matter of fact. And if you're AOV etc, doesn't sort of warrant that, or your margins, well, then you're in a really tough spot, right? Because someone has a has just better unit economics than you. So how you can out market that? Or very difficult out market that, like I said, everything else has to be better in order to compensate for that fact, and that's really hard, right, especially in mature markets. Then the next thing was social proof, like another example, one of our clients that the same one where we reshuffled the ad account, for some reason, had a few poor reviews because of a PayPal blocked their the payment gateway in May and so on. As a result, he got, like, a few chargebacks, etc, which weren't great, causing poor product reviews. Suddenly, he's in a sea of four or five different competitors, where he has four out of five stars, and other competitors are five out of five stars. Well, you need to fucking fix that, right? Because you're standing out as the worst option or the worst option. So that's gonna that's not gonna help. And then sometimes people just don't use the CSS, right? So that decreases their bidding power, that decreases their competitiveness, and they're not shown in the auction as much. But these are the things you need to look at, right? So if everything else is great, if your search terms are great, your CPCs are looking pretty decent, if your Add to Cart rate is good, if your checkout reach rate is good, if your conversion rate generally is good, but your ads have a no point 3% click through rate, there's something fucking wrong with your ad, right? Go and fix that. So that's how diagnose that. Then I look at CPC. If the CPC is much too high for let's say, for instance, the conversion rate. Let's say they need a conversion rate of they have have one at 1% and that's fine for that industry. And they need a CPA of 30 pound, then they can only afford 30. Hence a click. Now, if the CPC suddenly is at one pound, well, then you can have a look at their bidding strategy. But again, you can't scale that way, right? So typically a high CPC indicates point action with ads one but something is wrong fundamentally with the site. Go and check your site is it is the Page Speed bad is the offer bad to people fuck off after 10 seconds and bounce check how people interact with your site. That is what's causing high CPCs, right? Of course, your bid strategy as well and all that jazz, very important. But a good, working, fast site that keeps people on the site is the absolute number one sure fire way of lowering your CPCs, right? So even if people convert, okay, etc, etc, a high CPC will kill you, right? In the long term, I have nothing against high CPCs in general, right? Because it also indicates you buying more quality and better traffic and bid and better for those kinds of people who you want on your site. Nothing wrong with that, but consistently that as a standout factor. It being too high will kill your performance and you cannot scale. Or it also explains why your ads have stopped working right. It could also be caused by a new competitor, if ads suddenly don't work, or the performance goes down, and you look at the last 90 days and see CPCs are three folded in that time. Although I've not really changed my bidding strategy, there's something up with the site on new competitors come in. Then the next thing that I then look at, let's say all of this is great, but then I look at the add to cart rate, and the add to cart rate for that industry is way below where it should be. That is usually an indicator that there's something wrong. Add to Cart rates typically is super high in like fashion, because people add, like, a lot to the basket and then don't necessarily buy, they're just like, window shopping. But typically you would want that to be anywhere between kind of seven to 15% for like normally priced products, is, of course, a lot lower with stuff like beds or really high average order value stuff, right? So typically, the high average order value the lower the direct response conversion rate and interaction with the offer. But if you're in a normally priced sort of environment, right? Let's say you sell something for between 50 and 100 pounds. You would want that add to cart rate to be anywhere between, let's say six, 7% up to 15% right? There's no negotiation here. If that is too low already, then you typically have an offer or product problem, your or product page problem, so or one of the three things, actually have a product problem, an offer problem or product page problem, right? So it could be an accurate tracking, of course, but let's just like not, not look at that. Let's say everything else is great and your Add to Cart rates too low. Maybe your product is shit compared to competitors. Maybe you think your product is better than it actually is in reality, right? This is just something you need to take a reality check on the second option could be your offer is not good enough. Look at competitors. What are they doing? Do they have a better offer? Do they bundle up? Do they give a discount? It could also be temporary, right? They've got a sale on you. Don't well, your performance goes down. We've had this a lot of times with one of our clients who runs the same product on Amazon, when their Amazon agency runs a sale and suddenly the same product is cheap on fucking Amazon. Well, of course, people are going to buy there, and your performance is going to go down. That's not good, right?
But also it could just be caused by competitors when they run a sale, and you're going to struggle, right, especially if price is important. And the last thing is that UX might be shit, right? Maybe your web, your page, is simply not convincing. It doesn't address all the pain points. It doesn't address sort of the questions that people have when they want to purchase for that always recommend using something like mouse flow, Lucky Orange, Hotjar, clarity. Make sure you have a look. How do people interact with your page? Have do some audience research. Have a look at what tip it. There's even prompts on chat, GPT, right, which you can find out quite easily, what kind of pain points of questions people have before purchasing. And ask yourself, does your product page answer this? We very often install like a little pop up on with hot jar with our clients product pages. And ask people, What would stop you from buying today, and you will be very surprised what sometimes comes out there. Little example, we had a client whose performance was going down and down and down over the last year, right? Turns out, well, obviously, a reseller of big of products, and it turns out clearly that they hadn't like updated the industry prices in a while. So one of the core. All feedbacks that we kept getting was, yes, the price is too high. The price is too high. Price, price, price. We went through all products, worked out the benchmarks of the pricing of the products, which ones are both benchmark, reduce the price for everything to below industry benchmark, and sometimes below RRP. Guess what? All the feedback about pricing disappeared. Okay, suddenly, conversion rates Add to Cart. Rates are better. Boom. People are loving the products again, and performance naturally went up. I didn't do fucking anything with the ad account right. Left it the same. Performance gone up naturally, and that's just by fixing the price compared to the competition. But also they could be just UX issues, right? Maybe you could realize that on all Android phones, the add to cart buttons not working, or something like that, right? Or maybe that's, that's, that's, well, it is an example that could explain poor Add to Cart rate, but maybe it's the button is like, way below the fold, and no one is adding to cart, or you don't have a floating button on mobiles, etc, etc, so that's what I would check. Then if the add to cart rate is fine, let's say everything's fine up until this rate. But your Add to Cart rate, let's say, is 10% and then your checkout reach rate is only five, 5% there's something fucking wrong with that process. So for instance, we've had one client where this happened, and we realized that on there's an upsell in the cart that is actually covering the main product in the cart page, and that has caused people to actually not even reach the checkout, right? So you need to check those kinds of things. Typically, I would say the drop off rate from Add to Cart, rate, to checkout rate, conversion rate in an ideal world, should be about a third. So third, third, third. If your Add to Cart rates about 10% you should end up with a conversion rate between five and 6% right? Sorry for about 4% so check out reach rate about six and then purchase rate above conversion rate above 4% right? So something's in the car that is preventing people maybe it's even messaging in the cart or on the way to the checkout that is stopping people from doing it. For instance, your free shipping thresholds to hire are chosen wrongly, right? Like there's, there's lots of nudges on the site that could prevent from someone going in. And then lastly, your checkout conversion rate. Let's say everything is fine. So then we also add this example with a client. In fact, the one I mentioned before with Austria, where it turned out that everything was identical. Bar the shipping costs in Austria, right? Add to Cartwright performance exactly the same ads we're tired of, the right stuff. The interaction rate was okay. There was, of course, a few different competitors in Austria, the CPCs were relatively similar plus minus 10% Add to Cart rate relatively similar plus minus checkout reach rate similar plus minus 10% then suddenly conversion rate in the checkout was maybe a third of that in Germany, and it's shipping Simple as that, the shipping prices were too expensive. So we're currently looking into whether it might make sense for the whole business to actually drop their shipping prices to that in Germany, sometimes this may not be possible, and that's something you then have to live with or do something about. But in this case, that was that, and that's how we ordered absolutely every single thing. People over complicated, right? So if you find something obviously standing out in this funnel, search term interaction with your ads, CPC, add to cart, rate, begin checkout rate, conversion rate, average, order value and margins. If there's something wrong in that chain of events, then you know where to look for and if that feels like a little bit like you, just reach out to us, Jeremy at younger digital dot marketing, or Jeremy and Google ads on LinkedIn, you'll find me easily there. If you This is helpful, to give you, like, a bit of a nudge into the right direction, and please hit the subscribe button and give me, like, a nice review. I would really help out the podcast, and it would really help out this work that I do. Get in touch. I'd love to hear from you if you have any questions. So yeah, thank you very much for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.